This book, which was a bestseller in 2002, has been joined by memoirs by his brother John Elder Robison and most recently, from his estranged mother, Margaret Robison.

Reporter Lynn Neary on Morning Edition of NPR today interviewed all three members of the family this morning. Listen or read the transcript here.

Neary’s conclusion is one we need to hear and discuss:

“Memoirs have been much maligned of late because they are all about memory. But while they may be notoriously unreliable vehicles for facts, they are endlessly fascinating sources of speculation about what really is the truth.”

I confess that, although I have been reading about Burroughs, his law suits, and his family, I have not read any one of the books mentioned in the NPR story. Have you? Please enlighten us with your thoughts.

My niece Joyous Derner asked the above question on her Facebook page a few days ago. She got lots of responses, which led me to remember a wonderful book:  Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses. I read this book soon after it was published in 1990, and it has lingered in the memory like a powerful perfume or a vivid poem.

Just one quote from the book will explain why I remember it: “Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.”

From Facebook: what smells trigger memories for you?

1.      Cigars… I miss my grandpa!

2.      A very familiar stink=the rotten smells of New Orleans after the hurricane

3.      Snickerdoodles – make me think of my Nanny. She died in May of 1988.

4.      Nana and Papa in NJ’s house always smelled like wicker.

5.      Roasted green chiles.

6.      Babies heads – thinking back how little my (quickly) growing kids used to be.

7 .      I opened a box from Grandma Rittenhouse a few days ago. A mix of cigarettes, cleaning products and asian cooking (maybe rice wine).

8.      Moff Balls? Grass … Fresh cut!

9.      The creamy custard & blushing apple candle reminds me of the smell of our hallways where my sister and I played w/ our Barbie dolls. The tobacco aisle smell in Rite Aid, pipe cleaners and reminds me of my dad who used to smoke a pipe.

10.     Leather. Reminds me of my cowgirl days in VT, the first 19 years of my life. How I’d love to be back in my tack room polishing a saddle…

12.      Sometimes I smell my grandmother’s perfume and no one is there. She died 18 years ago.

13.      Coffee aromas always give me the warm fuzzies…I remember going to family Christmas gatherings on my Mother’s side of the family..the house was always filled with the wonderful scents of great food and coffee!…and there were lots of cousins to play with!!

14.      Fun Q’s For me…tar that covers asphalt is one of the best smells in the entire world. I know totally crazy. A house I was living in as a small child was on a county road that was being fixed that summer and that smell brings back the memories of that house, summer and wonderful grandma who caring for me then!

15.      For me the smell of gasoline reminds me of many rides in my Dads truck and snowmobile trips!!

16.      Gasoline – reminds me of going to the garage where my Dad worked while he worked on our car Saturday mornings. Me and my sis would play in the car up in the car lift while Dad worked.

17.      Hyacinths remind me of when the twins had chickenpox – right around Easter one year, so we put those in their room to brighten the mood (and maybe mask the smell of sick babies?). And orange Dial liquid handsoap reminds me of one time as a… child when I woke up in the middle of the night, couldn’t go back to sleep, and decided to go into the play room and color.. I don’t know why the soap reminds me of that, except I must have stopped in the bathroom and washed my hands at some point. I guess these aren’t quite as sentimental or warm and fuzzy as most people’s, but those are the two I thought of

What about you? What smells unleash memory for you?

Don’t think about it too long, just comment below. Smells are overwhelmingly nostalgic, says Diane Ackerman, because they trigger powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them. Maybe something on this list has stimulated a memory from deep in your past just like Proust’s madeleine brought back his remembrances of things past.

One of my stories, “Daddy’s Girl,” which tells the story of how and why I bit a tobacco worm in two at age 13, was published in this essay.  You can find it here.

For those of you who are interested in why memoir is so important, I recommend the essay of Connie T. Braun, a young scholar whose essay is called “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story.”

Here’s a juicy morsel extracted from the essay to entice you to read the whole thing:  “History provides facts, but narrative provides the individual truths of history.  Story becomes the metaphor for a life in history.”

Congratulations, English department members both past and present, who have created an excellent new journal with great potential to become a gathering place for writers interested in any aspect of Mennonite life as a whole, Mennonite literature, and the experience and expression of individual Mennonites.

Several people have told me that Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is on the list of their top ten memoirs. Now I understand why.

But first I must admit that I could not escape the thought, reading this book, that an ailing man in his 60′s who will soon commit suicide is writing it.  (He finished the book in the fall of 1960.  On July 2, 1961, he pulled both triggers of a double-barreled shotgun aimed at his head.)  Oh yes, and did I mention that, as I write these words, I am almost as old as the old man.

Hemingway the old man breathes in this book.  We see the old man as he looks at his young first wife Hadley almost as if to say that she was the mold for all the other women who followed.   We see the old man as we read the deep appreciation for Sylvia Beach and her generous lending policies and nurturing spirit toward struggling young writers at her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.

The word portraits the old man paints of Gertrude Stein and her “companion” (never mentioning the name of Alice B. Toklas) and of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald bring them to life as complex human beings with great talent and greater failings.  Hemingway the competitor assessing other competitors comes through even though in 1960 both Stein and Fitzgerald are dead.  This memoir destroys Gertrude Stein’s claim to have invented the phrase, “The Lost Generation” and shows Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and his wife to be the enemy of his art.

Ironically, the alcoholism and difficulties with women Hemingway sees in Fitzgerald, as well as the fierce protection of reputation and competition with other writers he describes in Stein, apply equally to himself.  How self-aware and reader-aware could he have been?  We cannot know, and, because the book succeeds brilliantly in other ways, we do not care.

Throughout, Hemingway employs the metaphor of eating and drinking to describe how important writing was to him when he was living in Paris from the ages of 22 to 27.  He quotes Hadley as saying, “Memory is hunger.”  The scenes in this memoir alternate between the gnawing of near starvation and the relish of simple food and drink–tangerines, chestnuts, oysters, little goujon fish pulled out of the Seine and consumed bones and all.  We feel the immense appetites of the young man as he writes, walks, talks, gossips, gambles, and makes love.  This feast moves to the reader, and we understand why the phrase joie de vivre is untranslatable, except, perhaps, by this young American writer in Paris.

Hemingway hated formula writing.  He fumed when Fitzgerald admitted he changed his stories to fit standard tastes for Saturday Evening Post editors and readers.  But he had his own formula for the writing process, which is one of the biggest gifts to other writers:  “I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and to let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

The practice of writing while hungry, going to the deep well of memory and imagination, then resting and forgetting, eating and drinking, returning and writing again–all that was established in Hemingway at the age of 22.  He recognized that the best feasts are not only moveable but they are so because deep, mysterious wells fill up the writer’s cup so that the feast continues day to day and place to place.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

–Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950

I learned to appreciate timed writing when I took a workshop with Barbara Samuel, who is also Barbara O’Neale and has just published a new book:  The Lost Recipe for Happiness, a novel, which is off to a great start. Here’s how Barbara herself describes her recent life:  “It’s been a thrilling few months, with auctions in the US, between the UK and Australia, and in Germany. The book has also sold to Denmark, Holland; to Recorded Books (read by the wonderful Bernadette Dunn, who has read all of my books). It’s also available in electronic form. My new website should be up and running by the end of this week: www.barbaraoneal.com and you can always still find me at my regular blog, A Writer Afoot.”

Barbara used a lot of five-ten-minute writing assignments last summer at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.  I was amazed to see how much good work and insight can come from asking interesting questions in a safe and stimulating environment.

I can’t tell you what the students learned from me, but I can describe a few things I learned from my students today:

• each of them wrote a gem of a story within 15-20 minutes
• each of them has nourished a hidden desire to write, perhaps even a repressed calling to write
• each of them experienced love in childhood that still exists as sensory-rich memory
• workshops give people a structure and an audience, two things aspiring writers cannot take for granted
• loving and truthful criticism helps writers gain courage
• writing helps people sort their thoughts
• writing helps us deal with fear and anger without taking out these feelings on others and may help the writer transform fear and anger into love and forgiveness
• learning more about each other in a setting like this workshop brought us closer together even though we work in three different units of our organization. Writing increases love!
• love naturally leads us to gratitude. We were grateful that on a very wintry day in Michigan we could experience together our organization’s mission through the powerful combination of writing and memory.