Lanie Tankard

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir  

by Ander Monson

 Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, April 2010 (208 pp., paperback)

Ander Monson jump starts your brain’s synapses with different connections in his new nonmemoir, Vanishing Point. He observes society. He muses. He sprinkles in a few personal experiences. And he does his edgy best to ignore the self in a genre that is nothing but.  He forces the reader to consider memoir in a creative new light.

Monson has also written a book of essays, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, and a book of stories, Other Electricities, which appear on his website: http://otherelectricities.com/.

In Vanishing Point, Monson has pulled together eighteen essays. Because some were previously published as stand-alone pieces, the volume bears a certain lack of coherence throughout, a few glitches in segue. Even so, this postmodern book kept me mostly riveted during the entirety of a nonstop evening flight from San Jose to Austin. And besides, isn’t that actually how we think, with one thought springing off another all the time — veering askew of the main idea with which we began and funneling our paths through labyrinthine conduits to a meetup in the nethermost region of our minds?

Because Monson perused close to one hundred memoirs to analyze the field, I thought the 100 Memoirs website would be an appropriate venue for reviewing the result. His list of eighty-three at the end of Vanishing Point includes some excellent reads.

He asks valid questions: Are we being obliterated by information? He compares journalism (verifiable truth) and memoir, discusses individualism and collectivism, looks at memory prevention drugs like Versed in surgery, examines the reliability of eyewitness testimony, delves into fact checking for family history, considers the rerouting of synapses in false memories, and compares fiction and nonfiction. He visits respected sources, although full citations do not appear in the book. The protagonist in this masterful chronicle is memory.

The author offers many strong points to consider, such as: “When technique becomes popular fashion, it becomes overused. Its special qualities fall away. All that remains is fad.”

Monson says that he is trying to find the courage NOT to tell his story. And yet, he also parses events in his own life — moving, death, jury duty, eating. Instead of merely stating that he is moving, he thinks about what leaving a city means. He compares floppy disks and the tenure of a book to our life spans: “Thinking about the memoir, or our lives at all, is thinking about death, about technology, about how obsolete we all are soon to become….”

Does Monson’s book succeed in defying classification? He appears to me to have written a memoir despite his best efforts to avoid doing so. Is Vanishing Point possibly a memoir about memoir? The author certainly evinces a strong resistance to the category. The subtitle is “Not a Memoir,” yet at several points in the book Monson refers to it as “this memoir.” Hmmm, perhaps memoir just sneaks up on you when you least expect it?

At the same time, the author has psychoanalyzed the field in a highly engaging philosophical treatise. He weighs the frame narrative in terms of presenting the truth, and ponders framing the future in terms of the past. He casts memoir as map. He comments that “with GPS, the whole idea of being lost is now entirely quaint.” Monson mulls over memoir as palimpsest, wonders whether the self is a wiki, steps outside of himself to observe the ubiquitous use of free wireless at places such as Panera Bread: “Earbuds are in, so we are partly in our inner space.” At times, he reminded me of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. http://bit.ly/5aEmK9

What is a page? Monson decides to find out. He plays with layout and margins.  He trims the sides off letters. He repeats the word me across an entire page, saying “I am putting the me back in memoir for you.” He examines “all that protects us from white space.” He seeks meaning everywhere, wanting to “leave some Borges behind the wall…something visionary and meaningful.” He digresses on self-Googling. He wonders whether communicating with old friends via social media is forcing us into being our old selves again. He believes that the rise of memoir coincided with the rise of role-playing games, and casts memoirists as gamers — role playing, battling conditions, and triumphing. He has some thoughtful turns of phrase: “your fellow Internetters” and “tiny fingerlings” for small potatoes.

And yet he tries so hard not to write memoir that occasionally (to use one of his own statements) he “makes me want to hit him with a rolled up REM/Losing My Religion poster.”

I recommend Vanishing Point to any open-minded reader interested in memoir as a broad playing field. Monson posits, “It’s likely that we are not as individual as we would like to think” and offers solid food for thought on that idea.

            Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas.

Was he young? Not really (55).

Was he an experienced biker? Not really–prior to this trip he just rode in the evenings for an hour or so.

Was he crazy? Well, maybe. But at least he lived to tell some great stories about amazing characters he met on the road and about the inner journey that changed him. I highly recommend that you read his story here.

Keith Taylor directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference and a whole lot of other things, chiefly, the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. He’s a giant among the writers of this state and beyond, offering his writerly wisdom and love of nature freely and fully.

For many years I worked at Shaman Drum Bookshop, a small independent store half a block north of the central campus of the University of Michigan. We described our market niche as “academic and scholarly books in the humanities.” Many of our customers were professors and graduate students, but the store was also supported by a large segment of Ann Arbor’s overeducated population. We prided ourselves on the obscurity of the titles we carried and were startled, even a bit disgruntled, when we found that a book we stocked had made it onto someone’s bestsellers’ list.

In addition to the usual methods of acquiring books for our shop, we were always looking for ways to find a few more titles for a little less money. Several times a year we purchased review copies sent to the academic journals that had their homes in small offices and basements scattered around the university. Usually those books were so obscure that the editors had decided no one would ever choose to review them. We were able to get them for pennies on the dollar. Periodically we’d go through the boxes of these review copies and pick out books to add to our inventory, to sell as used books, or to sell as drastically reduced books on our bargain tables, the ones that stayed outside all year long through all kinds of weather. Out there we had to put books that we didn’t mind destroying after the tables had been forgotten during tornado season or after the bindings had frozen and thawed any number of times during a Michigan winter, books we didn’t mind losing to the shoplifters strolling past.

Most of the time we didn’t sell very many of these bargain books, just a few each day. We didn’t make very much money on them, just enough, perhaps, to keep us in toilet paper and ballpoint pens. But once a year our city sponsors something it calls the Art Fair, and hundreds of thousands of people come to town looking for cultural bargains. Then we could sell anything, as long as it was priced low enough. I imagined our bargain books—about farming practices in twelfth-century Syria or listing the Latin names for the insects of Missouri—drifting off to decorate the bookshelves of Midwestern villages and suburbs, gathering the particular kind of dust that collects only on books, until someone, probably an heir, put them out for a yard sale twenty or thirty years later, wondering why Dad or Mom ever bought such dull things.

In July, 1996, a couple of days before the beginning of the Art Fair, my friend Karl Pohrt, who owns the book shop, was going through the boxes of books with me so that we could find the ones we wanted to sell out on the street. Karl finds it difficult to admit that he may have purchased, however cheaply, a book about a subject so arcane that absolutely no one on earth would ever read it willingly. In this one case, I was usually the hard-nosed one, insisting that if we put the book out for three or four dollars, we might have a chance of selling it. If we kept it on the shelf inside, it might stay there for fifteen years, clogging up precious space that could be used by something just a bit more profitable. It was an argument we had for several years. Karl was right often enough to make me question my judgment.

But on that July day, Karl, usually so generous to unknown academic titles, came across a book whose specificity made even him laugh out loud.

“Here,” he said. “There’s probably no one in three states who’d read this. Except you, maybe.”

He handed me the book. Pioneer Policing in Southern Alberta: Deane of the Mounties, 1888-1914, edited by William M. Baker, Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge, andpublished by the Historical Society of Alberta in 1993. The book was a series of police reports writtenby or submitted to R. Burton Deane, a superintendent of the Royal Northwest Mounted Policeduring the period when the western prairies of Canada received their first European settlers andthen became the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

I thought my friend Karl might actually be wrong: not even I could be interested in this. I planned to mark it at four dollars for the Art Fair tables.

Upstairs I was building the piles of cheap books we hoped to sell outside. The weather was living up to its clichés: hot and muggy. I was sweating and uncomfortable. It’s the time of year I feel most like a foreigner in Michigan, most like someone from the provinces of western Canada. Before I priced Pioneer Policing in Southern Alberta and threw it on the pile, I thought I should look up my home town, Didsbury, in the index.

There was one reference to it, on page 177. The place name was easy to find. It was the last word on the page: “. . . we went there to Kansas 15 miles s.w. of Didsbury.” This meant nothing to me. I’d never heard of a town or region close to where I grew up that was called Kansas. And I had no context for the quote. The entry began just a couple of short paragraphs above. William Baker, the editor, had labeled it:

A True and Faithful Wife

Constable K. G. Murison, Crime Report (submitted to Deane): Suicide of Mrs. Mary Findlay of Kansas, 23 October 1907.

I thought this was an interesting coincidence. My great-grandmother, alive around then—I didn’t remember the date or condition of her death—was named Mary Finlay, without the d. But I had never heard of Kansas. And, even though there were many family stories about the pioneering generation, there was certainly no story about a suicide.

Like many Westerners I am proud of my pioneering grandparents. I know that the myths we built about their undaunted courage are at best half-truths, but I also know that there is still some truth in them. The stories of their survival and success are the stories that have been preserved. After all, I am here, living a bookish life none of my grandparents could have imagined. My cousins and second cousins, my aunts and uncles—business owners, plumbers, politicians, police officers, engineers, teachers, preachers, even a few farmers—are still in Alberta, prospering, for the most part, although we have our share of the usual woes.

But I kept reading the police report despite my lack of personal connection to it. A suicide, after all, is usually intriguing.

On the 14th inst I was notified that a Mrs. Findlay had been found in the yard of her house. I notified Dr. Little & then we went there to Kansas 15 miles s.w. of Didsbury.

Constable Murison would almost certainly have gone on horseback. Dr. Little may have ridden in a buggy, although the roads out there in 1907 would have been nothing but mud paths. The weather had probably turned cold already, although I doubt that the ground would have been completely frozen yet. The wind coming down from the mountains fifty miles to the west would have been bitter.

It is easy for me to imagine that landscape. It is the one that formed my sense of how the world should be. For the first eleven years of my life I lived at the very northwest corner of the North American high plains, very close to the place where the dry grasslands intersect with the Rocky Mountains to the west and the subarctic forest to the north. That slightly rolling, sparsely forested land, often intersected by small creeks and the coulees they carve, with a band of mountains, perpetually snow covered, rising to the west, has a rich black soil that people of my grandparents’ generation had discovered could grow a type of hardy wheat in vast quantities. Range cattle grew fat there, despite the weather. Beneath that land was one of the world’s largest supplies of fossil fuels, although most of my family sold off their farms before oil was discovered.

Since Alberta was settled so recently, mostly after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, the stories of European immigration to Canada and the struggles of homesteading in the West have always seemed much closer to my life than the comparatively older stories I hear about the American West. Although not possessed by the bug of genealogical research, I have ended up with a fair number of documents and photographs, primarily because I expressed more interest in these old stories than most of the relatives of my generation.

I have a photograph of the Finlay family taken in a studio called Abernethy, at 29 High Street in Belfast around 1897, several years before they emigrated. They are all cleanly scrubbed and are wearing clothes they would have worn only to church. Even their shoes are clean. The younger children had not yet been born, and Great-Aunt Mary—who had her mother’s name just as the firstborn son, William, carried the father’s—was still alive, probably about eighteen in the photo. Over the years I had looked at her more than anyone else, trying to imagine her death from tuberculosis just a couple of years later. She looks wide-eyed in the picture, a bit stunned, but she is beautiful. She is the only one smiling. She resembles the pictures of my mother when my mother was young. There is something in her and in the other children pictured—Aunts Sadie (whose given name was Sarah) and Lizzie; Uncles Will, Charles, and James; my grandfather, John, as an eight year old—that resembles my own child. Some of their characteristics are immediately recognizable: the jaw line, the shape of the eyebrows, the way the lips are pushed together seriously.

Great-grandmother Mary is holding a baby, Charles, and is wearing a long black dress. Her hair is pulled back severely, making her look angry. Because of her straight-backed unsmiling presence, I had called her the Wicked Witch of the West.

Great-grandfather William dominates the photograph, squinting into the camera, his big beard looking uncombed and a bit wild, his large, obviously calloused, right hand resting dangerously on the armrest of the photographer’s chair. All of our stories indicated that the family was poor, but in this photograph they look quite prosperous.

I turned the page of Pioneer Policing and started down 178:

Mr. William Findlay said as follows:

William is a common enough name, and I thought there could have been several Williams in 1907 out in that rural district, even though the population density then was something less than one person per square mile. And my great-grandfather’s place in the world was a common place. His family’s story was like most of the homesteaders’ stories.

The Finlays were the last of my ancestors to arrive in Alberta. After a series of bad debts overwhelmed their small vegetable farm in northern Ireland, they immigrated to Canada in 1904. Even that late they were still able to get 160 acres simply by building a home on it and clearing one field within three years. Like many of the English and Irish immigrants, filled with hope but also carrying their memories of the pastoral landscapes of the old world, they named their farm. Because they built their house close to a natural spring on the side of a slight rise falling off to the east, they called their place Springhill Farm. Perhaps the name disappeared when they sold the farm. More likely it disappeared during the Depression, when the mortgage officers remembered debts simply by the names of the farms. The beleaguered farmers dropped the names in the hope that they would be forgotten or unfindable. Some were, but the romance of the names never returned.

The Springhill Farm homestead was in an area I had always known as Westcott, a small farming center some fourteen miles west and a bit south of Didsbury. William and Mary Finlay came with nine surviving children. One child had died in infancy, and their oldest child, my Great-aunt Mary, had died of tuberculosis in Ireland several years before the family left.

Because their second son, my grandfather, John Finlay, died of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-two in 1921, four months before his only child, my mother, was born, certain stories were preserved. My grandmother created an image of her husband for my mother. She selected and described the life of the Irish immigrant farmer until she turned him into a prairie saint. She wrote a book describing his life that she gave to my mother on her thirteenth birthday, on September 5th, 1934. It is bound in leather with my mother’s name, Joyce M. Finlay, embossed in gold letters on the front. The title is Your Daddy. After my mother’s death, that book, filled with cracking photographs, poems, and the story—as my grandmother hoped it would be remembered—became part of my library.

In this book about my grandfather, the early life on the prairie is given some of its harshness. My grandmother quickly describes how the first house the family built had burned down during their first winter on the prairie. The family lost three hundred dollars, all of their savings, and everything they owned but a couple of books. Those old primers from northern Irish schools, charred and water-stained, have been a part of my library for many years. I’ve read with pleasure Aunt Margery’s Maxims, published by Hodder and Stoughton at 27, Paternoster Row, London, in 1897. The bookplate on the inside cover, from the Rosetta National School, reads:

Presented to Master John Finlay for very superior Answering in the Third Class at the Annual Results Examination, June 1898.

Issac Harvey, Principal

The book’s cover and the edges of the pages are blackened by the fire that destroyed everything else. When I hold that book, I can quite literally smell the fire in that isolated prairie farmhouse during the fall of 1904.

Although there are hints of trouble in my grandmother’s book, I had never seen them. I was glad to own it, but I was overwhelmed by the tedium of her attempt to accent the rosy endurance of this immigrant family she had married into. My grandmother’s truth was the one that forgot or erased pain and remembered only joy. She begins her description of the family in Ireland, around a fireside in what most of us would now consider a crofter’s shack: “Blessed and interesting is that fireside with its detail of home life into which has been carefully woven care, discipline, schooling and religious training of a family of rollicking boys and girls.” I found this sentimentality at best amusing and at worst boring. What is perhaps more unusual is that, like my mother before me, I believed it.

If we had wanted to know information that presented a different side of the family life, we wouldn’t have had to look very far. We owned another photograph of the Finlay family, this one taken in Alberta in 1905 or 1906. We seldom looked at it. Like the earlier one, it’s a posed and planned family photo, but this time it is not a studio portrait. Here the family sits outside, with a white clapboard wall behind them. The siding matches the siding of the tiny Baptist Church a couple of miles from the farm that is also preserved in a photograph. Unlike the Irish photo, there is no record of the photographer, but it seems likely that an itinerant photographer passed through on a Sunday morning. The picture taking would have been an event, and all the members of the family, this time including the three youngest girls, are obviously dressed in what passed for their finery.

But the look and feel of this later picture is entirely different. Not only do they all look weathered, the way we would expect them to look after working in the wind and under the prairie sun for months on end, but they look leaner. Hungry. William, so daunting in the photo eight or nine years earlier, now looks tired, scruffy, and perhaps a little crazy. He is a man much diminished from the earlier picture. Mary too has changed. Even though she is smiling, her face is sagging. Haggard. Her eyes seem manic and a little frightening. Only the older sons, including my grandfather, and the two oldest daughters look slightly comfortable. The family in this photograph is unmistakably poor. And the picture is unsettling.

In his report Constable Murison puts the statement of Mr. William Findlay in quotation marks. Although he makes the farmer sound a bit like a provincial bureaucrat, I began to imagine the voice, reserved and thick with brogue:

Mary Findlay, deceased, is my wife. She is 45 years old & Irish. We have been in this country three years. My wife never spoke to me with regard to taking her life, but she was terribly worried about the hard luck we have had in this country. We have been burned out, hailed out, & frozen out during our 3 years’ residence here.

Like most farming families we had heard the stories about crop failure. The burned books, the only things to survive the fire, were now comfortably preserved in a closet in my Ann Arbor home. I was becoming less convinced about the idea of coincidence.

I last saw deceased on the night of the 13th when I went to bed. She had been sleeping with the children for the last two weeks so I did not know whether she was in bed or not. I woke up about 2 a.m. & saw a light burning in the kitchen & I called to my wife to put it out but there was no answer, so I got up & looked around but could not see her.

I wondered what the light was. A kerosene lamp? A candle? Homemade or store-bought? And I was impressed by the syntax of that last sentence, everything running together in a kind of desperate hurry, the syntax of grief and, maybe, just maybe, the syntax of self-justification.

In the police report he continues speaking:

After a while I went & called my neighbour Mr. Alex Robertson & we looked together but without result. Next morning we found her dead lying just where you see her now.

At this point I no longer had many doubts. Alex Robertson was a name I knew. The chances of coincidence had disappeared. Alex and his son were family friends, and my family had kept in touch with them well into my own childhood. I think I was even taken to their farm when I was very young.

Constable Murison now quotes Alex Robertson:

I came over to Mr. Findlay’s about 3 o’clock a.m. on the morning of the 14th inst. & helped look for Mrs. Findlay but could not find her. We found her where you see her now. No one has touched her since.

Now the questions started, the ones that could never be answered except in imagination. Who would have ridden the mile or so over to the Robertson farm? John, my grandfather? He would have been eighteen then. He would certainly have been helping his father. Did they find Mary’s body when the sun came up? Was it a shadow in the grass that slowly became ominous as the light lifted? Did they cover her body? The younger children were very young, and wouldn’t my grandfather have tried to protect them?

Constable Murison, the Mountie, continues in his own words:

We found her body lying about 2 yds from the water closet & in the closet I found a bottle of carbonic acid nearly empty.

My father, born in 1920 and an Alberta farm boy until he was released from essential duty at the end of World War II, remembers the carbolic acid they used to doctor the animals. They would dilute it heavily, just a splash or two in a pail of water. It still stung his hands when he patted it on saddle sores or the scratches along the legs of horses. They used it on the stumps left after they clipped the cattle’s horns.

I also found a letter in deceased room bidding her children good-bye which I enclose.

Here, just given the layout of prose on the page, I knew what I would soon read. But I didn’t jump ahead. I had to read everything.

Dr. Little performed a post mortem & found that she had been poisoned by carbonic acid & stated that as deceased had stated in her letter, bid good-bye, & also that she would never be seen alive again, there was no doubt that she died by her own hand & therefore no inquest would be necessary.

The body was handed over to her husband. Deceased leaves 9 children, 4 of whom are under 12 years old . . .

I stopped for a moment at the ellipsis at the end of the report. Was it part of the original or had something been cut by the editor? Was it the kind of information—names, perhaps—that would be of interest only to the family? One sentence followed.

The following is a copy of the letter referred to in above report:

I wasn’t sure if this was a direction from the editor or if it had been written by the constable. It seemed to me by then that both of them had a sense of the dramatic that I could trust. I knew I was about to read my great-grandmother’s suicide note, and that no one in the family had known about it for two generations. I read it in one rush.

Sunday night, Oct. 13th, 1907

My dear dear children.

This is likely the last words you will hear of me or from me. I have not much to say only that my life has been blighted with trouble and disappointment. I have been a true and faithful wife. Your father told me this morning to leave the place because I will not sleep with him. I love my children. God only knows how I love you all. I don’t want any more children, but my heart yearns for each of your prosperity and eternal salvation. You all know that your sister Mary has gone to Heaven and [I] want you each one [to] meet her there. Jesus Christ is the way to God. I know I will lose my reward but I know in whom I have believed. If you ever get married study the matter well and never be advised by anyone unless you love the person. To you Sarah & Lizzie, Willie & John I leave to have a mother’s care for the younger children. May God bless & provide for them & you all is the prayer of your own mother. Good bye till we meet again.

Although I immediately told Karl and some of my coworkers in the book shop what I had found in this book we had all been willing to chuckle about a few minutes earlier, part of me still couldn’t believe the story. I thought that something of this must have survived in the family history. Although I know enough about them to understand why they chose to hide this story, I couldn’t believe the people in my grandparents’ generation could be so successful at it. I went home to look in the book my grandmother had written for my mother. In the first chapter I found these sentences, so unremarkable in their sweetness that I had never noticed them before:

This refined and beautiful Mother gave herself to her family most untiringly. After many heartaches and losses by fire, and the hardships of pioneering in a new land, she died on October 13, 1907. This sweet, brown-eyed, rose-tinted Mother just wore out.

Three weeks before I found Professor Baker’s book, I had been back to Alberta for the funeral of a paternal uncle. I had driven by the Westcott road. It heads off toward the mountains from old Highway 2 about fifty miles north of Calgary. It moves up one of the slowly rolling rises in the land, then disappears over the crest. I thought of my Irish ancestors struggling at their Springhill Farm a few miles down that road. I thought how odd it was that no one but me and perhaps one or two of my mother’s cousins had thought of that place name for half a century or more. I didn’t take the diversion to see the old place. I wasn’t sure I could find it.

Lanie’s review appears at Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler’s wonderful and helpful WomensMemoir blog, which is listed in my blog roll (and is where I contributed a review of Rhoda Janzen’s use of humor in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress).

A question to readers: do you like referrals like these? I am aiming for a mix of types of blog posts: my own reviews, some mini-memoir from my own life, referrals to other reviews, referrals to memoir-related news stories, course syllabi and workshop sharing, writing and marketing tips, top-ten lists of memoir suggestions, and guest blogs doing any of the above. Is this too much variety? Is there anything on this list you want more of? When I asked this question about a year ago, some people said they enjoyed the personal mini-memoirs the most. Others like the book reviews. Others the variety. Would love to have your thoughts.

Q.  Annie Dillard thinks that any relative or friend who becomes part of a memoir you plan to publish should have the right to see and respond to what you write before it gets published. She says it isn’t fair to them not to have this right, since they don’t have access to a publisher for their own stories. If that criterion were used for writers whose families are estranged/dysfunctional, they might never publish. It seems that authors with relatively happy childhoods might be very different from those who are exposing great secrets or painful childhoods. Your thoughts?

A. Yes, it seems true that the challenges faced by a writer who has a more or less intact, healthy family will be different from someone whose family is difficult, combative, critical, or otherwise “dysfunctional.” However, that’s the kind of family most people write about! Perhaps memoirists who are from problematic backgrounds are drawn to writing memoir as a way of sorting out the past. Of course, no family is perfect, and more than likely various eccentricities pop up even in the most loving of families, which could create situations for the memoir writer to handle if the book is published. I think it’s an unspoken, or more likely understood, ethic that if you put real people in your book, especially if the names are the same or they are identifiable, they should be notified. Even if all the portraits are positive, as memoirists, we are exposing a real person to the eyes of the world. The convention is to have people read the sections they appear in, if you are on speaking terms. If not, change names and identifying characteristics, even if that means changing names for the character, the streets, town and anything that exposes them. If published, the legal branch of the publishing company can vet the manuscript as well, but since so many memoirs are self published, I think it’s important for people to keep these ethics in mind.

 Q. Some writers who tell horrendous tales (Mary Karr in all three of her memoirs, Jeanette Walls in A Glass Castle), bring the conversation with their mothers into the story itself. “Tell the truth,” said Jeanette Walls’ mother, if I recall correctly. That comment has probably given a lot of fearful writers hope that they too will be forgiven for telling the truth as they experienced it. Also, readers relax when they know the story has been vetted.

A. I think we’d all love the blessing of our mothers as we expose the family heart and its quirks, but for many that is not going to happen. And yes, I think it’s a memoir writers dream that once we have expressed our inner selves that everyone else who misunderstood or abused us will come around to see things from our point of view. If you are lucky, that might happen, but I don’t think memoirists should write a memoir counting on these outcomes. All you can do is to write your truth, digging deep inside to find the essence of your story, and then behave with compassion and good listening as best you can when others in the family react. I’ve heard wonderful stories and not so great ones about the outcome of writing a memoir and its impact on “real” people who were characters in the story.

Q. Rhoda Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, was worried about the home reception of her memoir.  According to a podcast interview with her on Writers on Writing, her publisher advised her to show advance copy to two people, which she did. Those two were supportive, but several others, treated less sympathetically, have not been happy with their portrayals. If you don’t show the manuscript to all actors in your drama, but you do show it to some, how do you deal with the fallout?

A. This brings us back to question number one—how to handle the memoir with family. I don’t know the exact details of Rhoda’s decisions about showing her book to her family, so I can’t comment on her. Clearly, each writer needs to decide how to be ethical with the fallout from publishing a memoir, and can’t afford to be in denial or some fantasy world about it. Let’s face it—the very problematic people that you were writing about are still the same people they were. Maybe you have been changed and transformed by the memoir, but things still putter along in the rest of the world as they always have. Deep change is possible, when a person wants it and works on it in themselves, and sometimes our words can effect change in others. This is what we might hope, but we need to remind ourselves of the realities of the human personality and be prepared for whatever might arise after the book is out.

 Q. What has been your own journey with this issue? Has your understanding of memoir as healing journey for the writer and readers expanded to include healing for the antagonists in the story itself? Do you know of any such healing stories following the publication of a memoir?

A. For myself, I believed that some members in my extended Iowa family were positively affected by my portrait of them and their families, partly because I chose to leave out such details as sexual molestation and other family secrets. The theme of my book Don’t Call Me Mother was about three generations of mothers who abandoned their daughters, so I didn’t include details of sexual abuse into the mother theme. The Iowa family had reacted strongly when I confronted a family member about past abuses a few years earlier, and the goal of the book was not to expose that family’s dark secrets, but to offer a portrait of the Iowa family as supportive and loving to me, giving me a sense of family that I’d never had.

However, in the end, I was ousted from the circle because I had shined light into the issues of abuse and had written about the family, though positively. Yes, I changed names and identifying labels as well. I think they couldn’t handle the idea that I’d written a memoir about any of them. I discovered that every one of them knew of that particular person’s molesting tendencies, and that when they were young, some of the girls had been protected and told to stay away from him. Others of us were not protected. In the end, the memoir and who I am resulted in estrangement, which was a huge loss, as it was the last remnants of family that I had. But if there had been some kind of love and empathy there, we all could have come to terms. Alas, that was not the case.

I know a woman who developed much deeper connection to several sisters and her mother because of her memoir, and who came in contact with beloved old friends and other family members. Her book was composed primarily of amusing stories about the family, with a few harsher truths woven in. Another of my students received wonderful accolades from her siblings when she published her memoir. They all learned new things about each other they’d never known, and shared more stories and intimate details of living in an orphanage and what that was like for all of them. Her memoir, worked on for several years and many drafts, brought them together even more.

Q. Forgiveness seems to be a big theme in a healing memoir. Forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others. Do you agree? What can a writer do to increase the likelihood of both kinds of forgiveness through the telling of her or his story?

A. Ahh, forgiveness, my favorite topic! One of the most challenging emotional issues is forgiveness—of others who have wronged us and especially, I think for ourselves. I own five books on forgiveness, and think and talk about the subject a great deal with clients and writing students. Some people think that forgiving means forgetting, but it does not. Forgiveness can’t be forced, nor does it work to try to “fly over” the issue or problem and just pretend you have forgiven, because the body/mind knows its own truths and it can’t be fooled. Exploring our truths and story allows us to find perspectives we never had before. I teach all my students to write in scene—putting themselves back in time, inhabiting the body and point of view of who they were then as a way of repairing the past. We become witnesses to ourselves and to others in this process—like an observing ego able to see with perspective. We also slow down and unravel who other people were/are to us through writing in scene, and as we write about them, we may discover traits, feelings, and reactions anew. Each person has a story and a unique point of view. Though memoirists are accused of being “navel-gazing” and narcissistic, I think that being contemplative and reflective about life and relationships is a spiritual endeavor, bringing us closer to the possibility of redemption. We need to open up the dark stories, even if we don’t publish them, and write through the pain to get to the other side. All of the mystics and teachers through the ages share this wisdom, and I’ve seen it to be true. How people do that, and what they discover are part of the mystery of the journey.

Q. How to deal with the family member or friend who was left out of your story and feels offended not to be playing a starring role?

 A. Again, this is another family issue that requires skills from the writer that has more to do with communication, empathy, and good listening than any general comment I can make. Each person has his or her own path with family. If someone is offended, just listen, empathize, and blame the publisher for what is left out! If you are self-publishing, it’s more on your own shoulders, but in the end, as you finish your memoir, all the ghosts both living and dead will swirl around and haunt you, so it’s good to practice to consider how you will handle their accusations. In the end, it’s your story, not theirs, and you have to claim it.

The day has come for both the guest blog by Linda Joy Myers and the first day of our giveaway contest. Below is the guest post that addresses the question of how to deal with our fears of offending family members from Dr. Myers, a therapist, writer, and teacher. I invite you to offer your own comment at the end, which will automatically enter you in the giveaway. On Friday, March 26, 2010, at noon I will draw a name from all the commenters on this post and on the interview with Linda Joy posted here tomorrow. You could win your own copy of The Power of Memoir. So comment early and often–like a voter in Chicago.

How to Write Your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.

 Every time I offer a memoir writing workshop, people raise their hands to ask questions and share their worries about writing a memoir. “What about revealing the family secrets?” The young man shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t write my story at all.”

A middle-aged woman added, “When I told my family I was writing a memoir, everyone got silent. Now, I feel ostracized because they’re so worried about what I might say. Some of them know it won’t be pretty. Maybe I should just stop. I don’t want everyone to get mad at me.”

One woman shared that her family ordered her not to write her stories until everyone was dead! This caused quite a stir and even more questions.

The fear that leads to silencing ourselves is a powerful force, one that needs to be monitored if you want to write your stories. At every memoir workshop I hear worries about what family and friends will say when they’re published. They feel loyal not only to the living, but to the dead.

I ask, “Have you started writing yet?”

“No.” Or they might say that they’ve made a few notes, or they have box loads of journals they’re afraid to look at.

My response, “If you haven’t written a draft of your memoir yet, there’s nothing to worry about. If you haven’t told anyone you’re writing a memoir, don’t tell them now. Just keep writing and keep your stories private for a while.”

Sighs of relief and smiles relieve the tension around this fraught topic when I remind them that no one will know about their memoir if they don’t confess they’re writing one. Many people, particularly women I’ve noticed, feel a strong obligation to silence themselves in order to protect those who appear in the memoir. They spend years worrying about it while the story they want or need to write simmers and haunts them. They are silenced by the guilt-inducing voices of family, whether real or imagined.

Revealing other people’s lives can even be a problem if you decide to fictionalize, as the main “characters,” if they’re based on real people thinly disguised, are going to be easily recognizable to friends and family.

It is important for memoirists to take into account the fact that we’re offering up other people’s lives in our work. But we are not offering these secret stories to the public for a long, long time. First, we have to write, we have to claim our story. Many writers get ahead of themselves, and imagine all the terrible troubles of being published when they don’t know yet what the story is. Until you write it down and commit it to paper, you don’t have a story. The story that we imagine does not necessarily match up with what ends up on the page.

I advise that you write your first draft in complete privacy, only showing it to your therapist or your writing group. Ask for confidentiality in your writing group. If you live in a small town, take online classes. If you write about family and friends in your local writing group, everyone already knows all the characters, and can’t offer objective feedback. They might give skewed feedback, based on their own biases and loyalties. But having a supportive writing group is very helpful in setting deadlines and making sure you come prepared with a new story. The group witnesses you and your stories, offering compassionate feedback, which is a valuable part of the process.

Another factor is the ever present inner critic. It can channel the old family rules: “Don’t air the dirty laundry. How dare you talk about the abuse of your dead uncle—he can’t defend himself. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

These critiques can be more subtle though, showing this way: “This is boring, no one cares  about the details of your life.” Another famous one: “Who do you think you are (to dare write anything.)”

Notice the discouraging inner voices in your mind and write down what they are saying. Are they familiar phrases you grew up hearing? Label them as inner critic static, get the phrases out of your head and in your journal. Close the journal and go back to writing your memoir stories.

Give yourself permission to write in secret, in the “safe sacred space” of creativity. In this space, no one knows what you are writing. Keep this space for yourself to protect yourself and your early creative seeds.

Research about writing shows that writing creates a new perspective and changes the brain. It helps you to review, reflect, and sort out old, toxic memories. Sometimes you can literally feel the chains of the past that once bound you lifting away.

Take care of yourself and your seedling stories, protecting them from the taunts and darts of others, and revealing them only when you’re confident of your story and your truths. If you do this, then showing up for family holidays won’t be a problem. While you’re there, scribble notes as people share the family stories. You’ll get even more information if you gather around the photo album and ask questions about what others remember. Draw upon the family to help you piece together holes in your narrative and answer questions about your great-grandmother. Be curious, but mum about why you are asking so many questions!

Be patient too. I’m always assuring my students that writing a memoir takes courage, perseverance, and the willingness to explore what is not known. Writing a memoir is a long journey into the unknown as you travel the road of memory. Start your story today!

Thanks, Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett, for the invitation.  While you are on their site, check out all the resources, courses, blogroll, and merchandise.  If you are interested in taking a memoir course, check out this opportunity.

 Uncle Joe from Brooklyn

By Lanie Tankard

“I do know of these

that therefore only are reputed wise

for saying nothing.”

 —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

 Uncle Joe was always smiling. I smiled, too, every time I saw him. He was so goofy looking that he brought out the glee in me. His ears sprang almost straight sideways from his head. His expression never seemed to change — that “glass half full” penetrating gaze was hurled out upon the world as if from his very core. A person felt almost naked as he looked at you.

I was just a little kid when he came to live with us in Cleveland. He seemed ageless to me then. When I think back upon that time now though, I can see that his demeanor probably bespoke a man in his 40s. Short of stature, hair of brown, he had no visible means of support, no wife or offspring, and no discernible activities of which to speak — except sitting on our front porch practically every day.

His was a life devoid of attachments. Uncle Joe had his quirks, and perhaps that was what had kept him a loner. His welcoming appearance was rendered odd when combined with his taciturn manner of interacting with people. And he never seemed to need much of the basics: water, food, or sleep. For all intents and purposes, he was a self-actualized individual who had, by some mysterious invisible means, moved beyond the hierarchy of basic needs.

“Hey, Uncle Joe!” I’d call to him on a summer’s day, as he’d sit in the chair by the peony bush at the far end of the porch. “Dad said the lawn needs watering. Wanna help?”

The strong silent type wouldn’t reply. I never expected him to. So I’d move the conversation along. If my friends were busy, I could always sit out there and talk to Uncle Joe. He was a great listener.

“I’ll just go ahead and get the hose out for us, okay?” I’d continue, marching down the red brick steps of our house on Selwyn Road. I’d uncoil the hose and bring it over so we could moisten a lawn that was the size of a postage stamp.

“Mom!” I’d call. “Would you please help Uncle Joe down the steps?”

I could usually hear the sounds of a baseball game on the new television set drifting through the open screen door. After all, this was the summer of 1954, when the Cleveland Indians were already well on their way to a record-breaking 111 wins, for which they’d capture the American League Pennant. And my mother was one of the Tribe’s biggest fans, unaware at that point that they’d lose every single game (only four!) to the New York Giants in the World Series later that fall.

Most of the team drove fancy cars, and my father worked as a service manager for both Cadillac and Pontiac during the years we lived in Cleveland. The ball players liked my easygoing Dad, and would often give him free game tickets when they’d leave their cars to be serviced. So our family practically lived at the baseball stadium.

All of this meant that my mother would be glued to the TV for a while longer though, while she ironed Dad’s shirts—and even his white handkerchiefs. She spent a lot of time at that ironing board. So did a large number of her contemporaries back in the Fifties, until their irons ran out of steam in the late Sixties and early Seventies. After Sears rolled out those Perma-Prest fabrics and Women’s Lib started to make a lot of sense, ironing boards began to vanish. But not quite yet. It was still 1954, and there she was, ironing my father’s shirts.

I’d look at Uncle Joe and sigh. I knew Mom wouldn’t be coming out until after Larry Doby had finished his turn at bat.

“C’mon, I’ll help you up from the chair,” I’d mutter, knowing my six-year-old arms couldn’t get him beyond standing upright. Hoo boy, was he ever heavy! And sometimes his knees would give out because they got stiff. That usually happened on rainy days.

When Mom finally emerged, she would help him down the steps so he could stand in the front yard with the hose in his hand. Then she and I would head inside to fix some cinnamon toast fingers for me to munch on.

Neighbors would often ask who that was they’d seen watering our grass, since he kept to himself most of the time. We’d just tell them it was Uncle Joe from Brooklyn. He never spoke of his past, so we figured that was a likely spot.

Dad used to give Uncle Joe some of his clothes. And sometimes I’d let him borrow my straw hat. He really liked to wear hats.

My older sister, Roberta, would screech every time she came home from a date because she never knew where Uncle Joe would be hiding. I personally think my parents assigned that watch to him because they just didn’t want to stay up late. Nevertheless, he seemed to relish his post. Sometimes he’d be standing at the front screen door. Other times you could see his eyes peeping out the front window, the Venetian blinds propped open by his bulbous nose. Once he was even sitting in a wicker chair right out on the porch at midnight.

Roberta never knew where he’d be. If she’d been out with a guy she liked, she’d come in all upset at our parents for Uncle Joe being there. But if she’d been on a blind date with a guy she didn’t want to hang around with afterward, then she’d be really grateful Uncle Joe was there. She could say to her date, “Uh oh, I better get in. My uncle’s watching us.”

We moved to Alabama two years later. Uncle Joe came with us. Guess he didn’t have any other place to go. He’d definitely worked his way into our family by then. And if you ask me, he could always spot a free ride. So there we were, headed across the Mason-Dixon Line together. Uncle Joe followed us in the moving truck.  Dad drove our car and Mom routed us on the map. Of course, we had to keep stopping for new maps, as I had a tendency toward motion sickness and Mom usually had one in her hand when I’d lean over the seat with that funny look on my face.

Roberta had just graduated from college and she accompanied us on the drive to L.A. — Lower Alabama. Then she was headed West to live in a different L.A. — Los Angeles. She did her best to keep the new set of brown Samsonite luggage she’d gotten for graduation over on her side of the back seat — well out of range of my waves of nausea. I tried to tune out the whole lot of them with some guy singing about a hound dog on my little transistor radio.

My father had recently retired from working on cars. In fact, Pontiac Motors was where he’d first encountered Uncle Joe. Dad noticed him sitting right there in the showroom cars, just as big as you please — day after day after day — like he owned the place. Uncle Joe didn’t want to buy a car, or even go for a test drive. He just wanted to sit there. The dealership manager was ready to kick him out because Uncle Joe really looked like a seedy character back then. But Dad spoke up and offered to give him a home. The manager was so glad to get him out of the place that he readily agreed. By the time we headed South, Dad and Uncle Joe had bonded.

Uncle Joe got into some of his shenanigans again in Alabama, but nothing like the ones in Cleveland. Maybe all of us were getting older and losing our sense of humor. Roberta was in California. Mom had put away her ironing board and found her True Self, creating a thriving business making artistic sand bottles with all the colors Baldwin County had waiting for her to dig up. Dad kept busy puttering at his workbench, making and repairing everything in sight. And when I wasn’t in school, I was usually down at Wolf Bay or Gulf Shores with my pals.

Maybe Uncle Joe felt neglected. He was certainly looking weaker and weaker. I remember the last time we were together, when I had come home from college during a break. I kind of avoided him then. You know how teenagers are. When I saw him sitting on a trunk in the carport almost doubled over, I made a beeline back inside. I think he finally just plain wore out from neglect.

I miss him. He was like a member of our family in a peripheral way, and a big part of my growing up years. My mother played out her impish sense of humor in all his escapades. Roberta and I would join in until the three of us were laughing so hard we’d have tears coming. My father would just shake his head, chuckling when he’d come home and find Uncle Joe standing there in the driveway wearing an apron and holding a tray of cookies. He liked Uncle Joe a lot.

Uncle Joe represents a time and a place long gone except in my memory — a carefree Cleveland childhood on a street where all the kids on the block played together. He remains an icon for me still, symbolizing a shared family joke that united us all together. I’m so grateful that Dad rescued Uncle Joe. My youth simply wouldn’t have been the same without that ol’ wooden showroom dummy.

©2010 by Elaine F. Tankard.

All Rights Reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission.

The Help spent 379 days in the Amazon Top 100 list. It has 1,751 reviews on Amazon.com and rates 4.5 stars. It is a novel, but, as Lanie Tankard argues, it deserves consideration from a memoir perspective.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

New York: Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam), 2009.

Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, CD, and Kindle editions.

Movie in the works.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

The Help is a testament to the power of memoir, even though it is a novel. It’s actually a book about writing a book — a metabook. And the writing is clear and pure and true.

Kathryn Stockett has created powerful voices for three main characters, and alternates them in chapters much like Barbara Kingsolver did to great effect in THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. The reader is thus privy to different views of the events as the lives of the characters intertwine.

The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement of the Sixties, and eloquently illustrates the boundaries between the help and their employers. This wise book captures a time period important in our history as a country. Even the cover is brilliant both in color and design, and is a subtle portrayal of the book’s theme.

The Help captures the edge — that space between marginalized peoples and those in power by virtue of skin color, gender, age, wealth, heritage, wedding ring, beauty, or Junior League membership.

As a young woman of the privileged class begins to collect stories of the help to publish in a book, the activity changes them all. The maids without power begin to find strength through the telling of their stories, although they fear for their lives. Even the writer’s life is changed while collecting these stories as she begins to view her town through the eyes of the maids.

The simple act of putting down on paper the events of one’s life is empowering. The Help gives pause for thought and should foster deep discussions about prejudice of all types. The book is rich with insight for writers of memoir.