What do you think of this idea? How would we begin the movement?  Has it already begun?

Writing our own memoirs is a way to reflect and answer the big questions

by Shirley H. Showalter

Friday May 22, 2009, 9:07 AM

“This is the age of memoir,” declared writing expert William Zinsser in 1989.

Evidence all around us suggests Zinsser is right. Recently Rick Bragg held a full house at Kalamazoo Central High School enrapt as he told stories from the three memoirs selected by the Kalamazoo Public Library (“All Over but the Shoutin’,” “Ava’s Man,” and “The Prince of Frogtown”) in the excellent Reading Together series. A few days later, Susan Boyle’s appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” was the talk of America, and more than 33 million people have viewed the YouTube video of her instantly transformed life.

Personal stories completely infiltrate our lives. Technology and entertainment outlets sizzle with them: reality TV shows, blogs, vlogs, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, self-published books, podcasts, six-word memoirs, “This I Believe,” Story Corps, “This American Life,” the scrapbooking craze, birthing, christening, graduation, wedding videos on the Internet and “Life Story” funeral homes.

A new journal called Memoir (and) includes poetry, photography, graphic essays and short stories. Samsung just brought out a new camera/phone combo called the Memoir! Businesses have sprung up to help elderly people digitize photos, video, journals and memorabilia from their lives. A “viral” feature on Facebook, “25 Things About Me,” involved more than 5 million people within a four-week span.

The field of philanthropy is being transformed by social entrepreneurs who have discovered the power of personal stories. Kiva.org raised more than $36 million online last year by helping more than 93,000 people, who needed small amounts of capital, tell their stories.

President Barack Obama penned his first memoir at the age of 34. We have yet to comprehend how much “Dreams from My Father” (and, to a lesser extent, “The Audacity of Hope”) contributed to the making of our first African-American president. Had he not taken more than a year of his young life to wrestle meaning from the givens (his “Kenyan father” and “Kansan mother”) and the choices (community organizer rather than Wall Street lawyer, Christian rather than humanist or Muslim), he would not have become the leader he is today.

Some people decry and deride all this self-revelation. Too much information, they may say. Narcissism! The preening of celebrities and the role of media in making and breaking shallow identities make easy targets for critics, and rightly so.

But there is another side to the popularity of memoir, a side Rick Bragg showed us during his Kalamazoo visit. Good memoir teaches both the reader and the writer humility. St. Augustine, after all, is credited with the first autobiography that he titled, appropriately, “Confessions.”

We might all consider memoir writing, not necessarily for publication, but for the same reason the best spiritual memoirists examine their lives: to see the shape of our souls, locate our central tensions and conflicts, ask for God’s grace, forgive our debtors, discover our voices, and find the courage to continue the journey home.

In the decades ahead, 78 million baby boomers will reach the ends of their lives. We know from hospice workers that those who are dying face four main tasks, encapsulated in these words:

• “I love you.”

• “Thank you.”

• “I forgive you.”

• “Please forgive me.”

If a whole generation could find the courage to go through this process before they lay dying, we just might unleash the love energy this poor planet needs right now. That would be a new vision worth working for — a more humble, spiritual age brought to birth, and commemorated, in memoir.

Shirley H. Showalter is vice president for programs at the Fetzer Institute, www.fetzer.org and maintains a blog at www.100memoirs.com.

Originally I thought I would review books almost exclusively.  Now, however, I have developed a whole list of other diverting memoir topics–see categories on the right-hand side.  The political campaign provided more grist for the memoir mill than I could every have imagined.  And then there’s life.  I notice in the tag cloud that mini-memoir has become the largest category.  I also notice that I seem to get more comments on mini-memoir than on reviews.  Hmmmm.

Since this is the second Rick Bragg book I read in a little more than a week, I won’t write as much about this one as I did his first memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’. The bottom line:  this one is just as good as the first.

You can tell a lot about a book by the kinds of review excerpts gleaned from other writers and printed on the back cover or opening pages of a book.  Here’s a sample.  Notice how many people try to come up with Southern witticisms to match Bragg’s own style:

“As toothsome as a catfish supper: [Bragg] is every bit the equal of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.”–People

“Rick Bragg has once more gone to the well of his family’s history and drawn readers a story that goes down like a long drink of sweet spring water–with a little taste of whiskey on the side.”–Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Rich in the raw materials of character and local color, enhanced by language marked with extravagance and economy–and the born storyteller’s gift for knowing when to be lavish with words and when to be lean.”–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Bragg writes like his grandfather drank. . . .He cuts loose with wonderful flowing descriptive floods. . .that can cripple another writer with envy.”–The Miami Herald

It’s as though these reviewer’s remember their own granddaddy telling them to avoid a pissing contest with a skunk–but they can’t help themselves.  And in fact, they admire the skunk’s perfume.

So, this “review” is not much more than a teaser this time.  All you need to know is that Rick Bragg tells a great story and that his innovation in this book is to “create” a grandfather he never knew out of family reunions, photographs, and interviews with his relatives and friends.  He illustrates one more motive for writing a memoir–getting to know the ancestor you never met in life.

Readers, I’d love some feedback to the categories on this blog:

Is the mix of reviewing, reflecting, and commenting on the news:

A. About right

B.  Too much reviewing

C. Too little reviewing

D. Too many mini-memoirs

E.  Not enough mini-memoirs

F.  Too much social commentary

G. Not enough social commentary

Rick Bragg had a tough childhood, growing up poor and with an abusive, mostly absent, father who died young.  His mother’s life was no cakewalk either.  So Rick set out to wrassle some beauty and joy out of the pain and humiliation of growing up in the foothills of the Appalachians in Alabama.  He takes his readers on a big ride, leaves them begging for more, creating a thirst he later slakes by writing two more memoirs.

The Kalamazoo Public Library chose this book and those two later memoirs, Ava’s Man, and The Prince of Frog Town. for their Reading Together series (see pictures of Bragg here)  this year.  I love the fact that a city of 70,000 and a county of 256,000 supports readers and writers in this annual series.  The auditorium of Kalamazoo Central High School holds 800 people.  About 750 of those seats were full last Tuesday night after people streamed in from miles around to hear the author speak.

I used my 30 seconds with the author at the back of the room to ask what he thinks of memoir as a genre (after writing three of these, he will next try a novel).  He had a quick reply, “It all depends on the writing.”  He explained, “You can have a great story, and if you don’t tell it well, the story doesn’t matter.  You can take an ordinary life and make it sing.  You got to write the hell out of it.  Tell it with drama, color, and detail.”

I would love to take a writing class with Rick Bragg (he teaches writing at the University of Alabama now, having left the New York Times reporting job in 2003).  But reading his books carefully might be just as good as sitting in his classroom.

Here are a few things I noticed about Shoutin’. The book is divided into three sections:  The Widow’s Mite, Lies to My Mother, and Getting Even With Life. The few photos become mesmerizing as we get to know the the mother and her three sons.  The story consists of many vignettes, often only a few pages, which could stand on their own.  Each has a beginning, middle, and end.

Bragg wants to brag about his people, his foothills, his culture.  With a kind of barbaric yawp he celebrates the likker-makin’, likker-drinkin’ men of the old South, never romanticizing them and, in fact, when it comes to his father, he shows the cruelty that results from the lethal combination of war and moonshine.

This is memoir the way a journalist writes it–and Bragg’s kind of journalism is the best there is.  Gritty, detailed, and full of last-sentence zinger punchlines and also full of country-flavored metaphor and analogies between the people, the foothill topography, and the birds and animals that inhabit the same territory.  The preface, for example, begins this way:  “I used to stand amazed and watch the redbirds fight. They would flash and flutter like scraps of burning rags through a sky unbelievably blue, swirling, soaring plummeting.  On the ground they were a blur of feathers, stabbing for each other’s eyes.”  Bragg recited those lines by memory when he spoke in Kalamazoo last Tuesday night, explaining that redbirds are Cardinals in our northern jargon, and teaching by example how to love the way words dart and hover and suggest more than they can literally mean.

When he signed the copy of my book, he noticed how many underlinings I had made in the text.  I told him I read with a pen. Here are a few more of my favorite lines:

About himself while a young reporter without academic credentials working at the Anniston Star:  “I did not even try not to be bitter. I had long talks with the sage senior editor, Cody Hall, who made it plain that I should be proud of who I was. ‘Life is too short to dance with an ugly woman,’ and my ugly woman was my own envy.”

“All I knew how to do was tell stories on paper, and didn’t even have one dollop of what one respected editor, Basil Penny, called ‘jelly.’ Basil explained ‘jelly’ as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension. Me and him, we were just plain biscuit.”

These two sentence go straight to the heart of the subtext of this memoir.  Underneath the focus on momma’s sacrifice and the American Dream story of rags to (relative) riches, a fight is going on inside the soul of the author.  The impulse is revenge, and this man hails from a long line of what he himself described as “haters.”  Every snub encountered along the way, every subtle condescension from the “trust-fund babies” he worked with in New York and in various newspapers along the way, these he would avenge by winning prizes and writing bestsellers.  Not only could his momma now hold her head up, but he could rub the faces of his rivals in some good ole red Alabama dirt.

Fortunately, the better angels of his nature have a voice also.  He acknowledges some Yankee journalists with long pedigrees genuinely wanted to understand and help the southerners and blue collar workers.  But most importantly, he sees through his own desire for revenge.  His brilliant solution to this problem of tone is to make the envy itself part of the story. The cheap shot would have been to make all Yankees fools and all college graduates snobs–and coincidentally to cut out more than half of the book-buying public.  By showing us enough of his own self-doubt, judgment, insecurity, he makes us root for him to learn and grow.  I cheered more for him when he acknowledged envy and fear than when he won the Pulitzer.

He reminded me, in these moments of another Southerner, William Faulkner, who did not want to go to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1950 to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, but nevertheless gave one of the most memorable addresses in the history of the prize. His entire speech is recorded here, but these words, especially, might have been written for Rick Bragg: “the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.”

Shoutin’ is full of the human heart in conflict with itself–with all we know of heaven and all we need of hell, to borrow also from Emily Dickinson.

Quite simply, Rick Bragg wrote the hell out of it.