100 Memoirs

For me, this ad was the best part of the Super Bowl! What did you think?

Want to hear people from all over the country call in their life stories in six words? It’s a pretty good way to spend 17 minutes! Just click here.

Edward Short’s review of Mary Karr’s Lit (which I also reviewed here), contains a few paragraphs very relevant to all memoir writers. I invite you to read the complete review here. Short’s insights are brilliant.

Here are the four most relevant paragraphs to our concerns as we seek to understand the power of memoir to go beyond the telling of the events of a single life:

Can you tell a great story in 450 characters- just about three Tweets?

If you entered the six-word memoir contest a few weeks ago, you should be in good shape to try this new contest from GoAhead Tours. They will give away 20 trips to lucky (and skillful!) players, so why not give it a try?

Contest ends February 5–that’s this Friday!  Don’t delay.

My friend Lanie Tankard discovered today that one of the stories she had published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series has now been digitized by Google.  I recommend that you open this link and read “Rite of Passage,” her description of parting with her daughter on the one hand and mother on the other.

And, for all of you who want to publish short memoir pieces, you might check out this link where the new topics for Chicken Soup anthologies are outlined.

Sorry that I just learned about this contest today. But if you have a memoir manuscript ready to go, it won’t matter.  All you have to do is follow the guidelines at this Guide to Literary Agents website.

Good luck!

If you want to spring out of bed tomorrow morning, saying, “Good!” I suggest you read this book the night before. And if you want a role model for how to age with zest and enthusiasm, even to the extent of looking forward to death as the last great adventure, Huston Smith is your man.

I loved this book. Because it covers the entire life of 90-year-old Smith, the label on the cover is autobiography rather than memoir. But that distinction is one that I am more than willing to overlook as I add it to the collection of 100 memoirs we are building here. As I see it, most autobiographies are memoirs even though not all memoirs are autobiographies. (If you want more precise definitions, you might appreciate this previous post.)

The Huston Smith story focuses on love. First, Smith is a beloved child of missionary parents in China whose memories of China and of life as a missionary kid are overwhelmingly positive. They also set the pattern for his lifelong curiousity about new cultures and new lands as well as the desire to practice whatever he studied.  As a child, he began the day with prayer and Bible reading–in Chinese. At age 86, he followed this morning ritual:

“And it is as a body, a mind, and a spirit that I begin each day. First upon waking I do physical exercise for my body. I favor India’s hatha yoga, a sequence of asanas, or postures, that culiminate in the headstand. . . .For my mind I slowly read a few pages from the Bible or a bible (the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Qur’an, the Sufi poems of Rumi, and so on). Now more mentally alert, I come to the spirit. For the spirit, I pray. I pray for those I know who are in trouble of one sort or another. Having prayed for others, I now pray for myself, which involves introspection–am I happy, sad, or anxious?–so I know what to pray for. Then I emtpy my mind of all thoughts and dwell in the luminous consciousness that underlies thinking. I conclude by repeating three times the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy for mercy: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The love of travel, religion, and culture began in childhood and sustained him all his life. He memorized Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer” at age 14 and then made that poem the theme of his life. Here are words he selected from the poem in the prologue of his memoir:

Something hidden, go and find it;

Go and look behind the ranges.

Something lost behind the ranges;

Lost and waiting for you–go!

He also fell in love with Kendra Weiman, daughter of his major professor at the University of Chicago. She is the muse, the partner, the major actor in his life, and one feels her presence on every page of the book. In fact, she gives him the title for his book and a poem on which to base it, a gift she may have given to more than one book in his long list of publications. Here’s the Robert Penn Warren poem from which the memoir’s title comes:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

No matter what other subject Smith takes up in this story almost a century long, the subtext is delight. Does that mean that he denies or represses the shadows in his life?  No. In fact, this book may contain the best short marriage memoir ever written. In a chapter called “Family: The Operetta,” Smith describes four phases of his marriage. The third stage was the hardest. Here’s his honesty and pain in the raw: “only one time have I been both scared and afraid. It was the night that Kendra said, ‘You know, I am thinking of leaving you.’ I did know, but in order to keep going, I had had to suppress it. I sobbed myself to sleep that night.  It is painful, even now, to admit Kenra had reasons for leaving. I am a workaholic. I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over–eating, what a waste of time–that can be better spent getting down to work. And then, too, when I was unhappy at MIT, I traveled extensively, lecturing at other colleges. There are worse kinds of infidelities than the sexual. . . Fortunately, she did not leave; I attempted to make amends and began of all difficult challenges perhaps the most difficult–to actually change.”

The straightforward, humble, grateful voice of Huston Smith rings out from every page of this memoir. Go with him to every world religion–not through the mind only, but also with heart and body. He guides you like a docent through a gallery of pictures, not only of himself and his family at every stage of life but also of his mentors and guides.

What a hero. What a journey. Even in a nursing home, he reaches out–to share his tales of wonder.

Do you think it matters what age you are when you write a memoir? Do you have a bias for joy or for sorrow in writing?

Philippe Petit has blown me away. And so has this film about his life, focused on the day in August,1974, when he walked on a cable stretched between the South Tower and North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I loved the music, graphics, and juxtapositions in this film. Petit is such a clown-like, dancer-like, Kokopelli-like character. The artistic decisions of Man on Wire emphasize contrasts and seem to play against each other–fairy tale on the one hand, extreme reality on the other. You can watch this film as an engineer, an athlete, an artist, or a philosopher. Amazingly, it will thrill you from any of these perspectives. It also manages to blend all of these into a complete, complex, whole.

The interviews with the friends and girlfriend at the end show us the evanescence of both beauty and love–but they also demonstrate that a great work of art is immortal. You may think of Fellini, Charlie Chaplin, even Jesus.

The poignancy of this film comes not only from a skillful rendering of an artistic triumph but also from the presence of absence. No one mentions 9-11, but it is everywhere, especially at the beginning, when we see film from the early 1970’s when workers in hardhats are digging the foundations and laying the first layers of the towers and then again when one picture frames Petit on his wire between the towers and a plane passing by that looks as though it could fly into the tower on the left.

The film was based on Petit’s own memoir, To Reach the Clouds, which I have not read. I think the film was so good I have no need to read the memoir.

I may, however, read the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, on the recommendation of someone whose literary judgment I trust. I know that Philippe Petit’s story is central to this novel also.

Have you read either of these, seen the film? What are your thoughts?

If you are looking for the 100 best memoirs,  you are coming to the right place. We are making progress building not only one list but many! Several of the posts in this blog include lists, and here is another blogger’s list with annotations. You surely will find something to your taste in this list of seventy memoirs! http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/annotated-list-memoirs/

Jerry Waxler’s blog, Memory Writer’s Network, linked above, is one to add to your Google Reader or blog roll. His posts are always carefully written and insightful.

The six-word memoir contest ended at 5 p.m. today. There were 28 entries, three of which were posted on Facebook  and added into the comments section of the original post by me. Click here if you want to see all 28.

I have selected the entry of Chin Pheng Oh “Watching her grow, I see myself” as the grand-prize winner of the contest. She tugged at my mother’s heart. Parents learn so much about themselves from their children. Chin explains one reason for this–as adults we are able to stand outside and observe closely our child instead of staying inside as a child sees himself or herself.

I found five entries worthy of prizes also! In the same vein as the prize winner above, Lanie Tankard wrote, “I am still that little girl.” Lanie names a universal truth for all memoir writers. Our childhoods never disappear completely. All that we are and will become was there from the beginning. The statement suggests we sometimes need to be reminded to be kind to ourselves.

Donna, you hit me with the statement, “I’d like to do it again.” Your statement has a kind of delicious ambiguity. It could be a regret for not having done what you wanted to do in the first place. It could also be the result of so much joy of living that, like the kid who has just dived off the board and resurfaced, you want to go a second time.

Sally Rogers appealed to my 60-plus years sensibility with “Nearly all is said and done.”  Again, the interpretation is bitter/sweet. Life is passing fast. This could be spoken with gratitude and anticipation, with resignation, and with bitter regret.  It could also be about novelty rather than the passage of time–another way of saying with Solomon that there is nothing new under the sun.

Adam Tice, on the other hand, offered “There’s always something more to say.” Another lovely statement redolent of multiple meaning. Could be the memoir of a talkative person. Could be a philosophical statement about the impossiblity of endings. Could be just getting in the last word.

Finally, Grandpa1 amused me with “Still looking for my pivotal event.” I’ll admit that the statement would not have attracted me as much if it had come from teenager1. From a grandpa, however, it made me chuckle. I can interpret it as a spoof on developmental theory. I can interpret it as genuine yearning for transformation even at the last stages of life. And, above all, I see it as active yearning rather than passive acceptance. Go grandpa!

I loved all the entries, of course. And I thank everyone who commented. If you disagree with my judgments, let me know–or start your own contest.

Prizes

Chin wins her choice of books from the six on my shelf that I am giving away. I have added to the Judith Jones book five others.  I know four of the winners, but Donna and Grandpa1, you are new to me.  To all six of you–if you write to shirley.showalter@gmail.com, we can discuss the books and how to get them to you.

I’ll leave you with Paul Simon’s phrase that happens also to be a six-word memoir: “Still crazy after all these years.” You can substitute any other adjective for crazy and make your own statement.

Let me know if you enjoyed the contest whether you entered or not. Shall I do this again sometime?