On Memory and Forgiveness

One of the books I read as part of my master’s program in creative writing is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. While the first half of the book is a history of the documentation of horrors like war – particularly through photography – the last half of the book examines how people respond to horrific images and also discusses how such documentation allows us as a culture and as individuals to remember.

As I’ve discussed in this space before, one of the reasons I am doing the master’s – at mid-life – is to complete a memoir I started several years ago. I wanted the accountability of having to write it to finish the degree, but also I wanted the support and knowledge base that would come with faculty mentoring. I have found both. My mentor, Donald Morrill from the University of Tampa, has suggested a number of books as reference and for contemplation over the past few months, and one that has resonated is Sontag’s.

My memoir, in part, recounts the severe and sustained trauma I suffered as a child, first in a car accident and subsequently through numerous surgeries over fifteen years. How best to help readers understand and connect with the narrative in a way that allows for understanding and empathy without desensitization, which would render the recounting impotent? Sontag says, “Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else; they haunt us.”

This presents a difficult problem for the memoirist who wants to relate how trauma affected her without turning her readers away with narrative that serves to horrify rather than inform. How to impart the lessons of the experience? How to engage the reader without repelling her? I have been working to find the deeper message, the layering of meaning upon experience that will allow a reader to access the material without being overwhelmed by the emotion. Time will tell if I am successful. Sontag’s book, at the least, offers the opportunity to be aware of the pitfalls of trying to write about grievous injury.

She writes: “Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead…. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

What an interesting idea, that to make peace is to forget. Memory serves us in ways we do not suspect. Making peace is connected to remembering and forgiving. I’m not sure it requires forgetting, though once you forgive, there is no longer a need to remember. And perhaps that is what Sontag means.

Discovering a Vanished Life

This week I finished another of the 10 books I am reading this spring for my master's degree program.

Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories is a collection of previously published essays on memory and autobiography. Delving deeply into what memoir is and what it isn’t, Hampl leads the reader through thoughtful essays focused on her own experiences as a younger woman reading Whitman, on her acquaintance with a woman who came to the United States during World War II who carried a terrible secret she could not tell, through meditations on Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil and St. Augustine’s Confessions. But the most compelling, it seems to me, are Hampl’s own meditations that book-end the collection: “Memory and Imagination,” at the beginning, and the final two essays, “The Need to Say It” and “Other People’s Secrets.” These three essays reveal insights into memory and writing memoir that I found engrossing and instructive for my own writing.

In fact, “Memory and Imagination” turned out to be a powerful catalyst for me in terms of discovering what my own memoir is about. Hampl says, “…I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know.”  She talks about how a first draft can be the key to understanding the real story, the story that reveals meaning. “We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us – to write the first draft and then return for the second draft – we are doing the work of memory.”

She describes how she realizes the first draft of a memory about her first piano lesson is most likely about her father. I have struggled for several months to write about a trauma I suffered as a child. Suddenly it occurred to me that my story is about my relationship with my mother, a difficult relationship that was forged and cauterized in that moment of trauma.

Later, in “The Need to Say It,” Hampl says, “…(M)emoir is not about the past. As I understand it, memoir is not about nostalgia. Its double root is in despair and protest (which, at first, seem no more kissing cousins than memory and imagination). …

“Out of dread of ruin and disintegration emerges a protest which becomes history when it is written from the choral voice of a nation, and memoir when it is written from a personal voice. The dry twigs left of a vanished life, whatever its fullness once was, are rubbed together until they catch fire. Until they make something. Until they make a story.”

Now I am about the task, to make a story – a raging fire – of a vanished life. Thanks to Hampl, I finally have a framework from which to fan the flames.

Memoir: Not just a 'recital of events'

Tomorrow my second packet of writing and book annotations is due to my graduate school professor. Yikes! Earlier this week I was feeling energized and confident I could get another 10 pages written (for a total of 20 due). Today, I am struggling to piece together what seems a jumbled mass of images, memories, snippets of dialogue and characters.

I am writing about a childhood trauma – a car accident that nearly killed me when I was 5 – and trying to link it to decisions I made as an adult that turned out to be not so great. But going back to that time has proved difficult, if not painful. Trying to mine those memories for insights that will connect with others is the challenge. How did my experience affect my family? How I related to others? What others expected of me? How to weave all those pieces together?

In The Situation and the Story, the Art of Personal Essay, Vivian Gornick writes: “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

So, then, what have I come to say? I thought I knew, but every time I try to grasp it and write it down, it wisps away like a dandelion seed carried on the wind. It feels as if it’s there, under a sheet of thin ice, just out of reach. So, here I sit today, writing scenes, preparing dialogue, opening my veins. But I can’t seem to bring it forth.

Gornick, again: “The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement toward it – that counts.”

Aha! The “movement toward it.” That opens up the possibility, the potential, of connection. What did enduring 17 surgeries from ages 5 to 19 have to do with who I became? How has my adult insight at middle-age changed my understanding of those experiences, and how can I write that so that others can relate to it?

“…(M)emoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription,” Gornick says. “A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Trust in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required.”

Now, I’m moving toward it.

What is your experience in writing memoir? How did you approach it so that it did not become, as Gornick says, simply “a recital of actual events”?