An Artist's Rendition
you don't say...

I hate my sister; she hates me. It’s a mutual feeling. But from all the hate that can be seen between us, there is love. One cold evening in December, my parents went to the theater - a rare occasion for them. My sister was made to baby-sit me; she complained heavily that she had wanted to go out herself. To keep her mind from wandering out, she tried to study, but my constant nagging and attention grabbing acts were keeping her mind on my destruction. Her eyes wondered around the room, trying desperately to keep from giving into my acts and fits, when they fell upon the Christmas tree. Her eyes lit up and she walked with function to the kitchen. I followed, curios at this strange turn of events. She brought out flour, sugar, and other ingredients when I finally felt courageous to ask, What are you doing? Shortbread cookies she replied, want some?

From that night on I’ve been addicted to shortbread cookies. And now that my sister lives far from me, every time I visit her there are always shortbread cookies in her house. They have become a way in which we express our selves, and unwritten contract in which we proclaim our relation of support. Yet, there is more to our relation then shortbread cookies, it spans our age difference, our geography, and our parents. In a memoir I could explore this relation even deeper, but what is a memoir?

A memoir is hard to define. It is personal yet selfish in purpose. It focuses on the self but explores all human relations. It is also truthful. However, it is hard to talk about all aspects without relating to another. Memoirs are a mesh of many purposes and emotions that express human experience, that can be seen when memoirists describe their experiences with writing these amalgams of autobiography and literary art. Often the memoir is born from the conflict of emotion and purpose brought about from the writer’s life. And it is through this conflict that the characteristics of memoirs arise.

The search for truth is one such characteristic in memoir. Purpose and emotion conflict here for, more often then not, memoirs stress the relations between the writer and their family, or the writer and their geography. Such relations are accompanied with strong emotions, and often this conflicts with the purpose of the memoir. Russell Baker went through this challenging truth process as he wrote his memoir Growing Up. Baker’s first draft was a magnificent piece of journalism, truthful and objective, however without emotion. He later admits that he wasn’t being truthful or honest because even though it was accurate, Baker comments, [it] was dishonest because of what I left out (34). Here, Baker comments on how his emotion conflicted with his purpose; writing about his relation with his mother. Because, as he explains I was uneasy about what had always been an awkward relation with my mother […] I kept her out of it; even if he wanted to write about her, he felt uncomfortable about doing so (32).

Henry Louis Gates Jr. also encounters this challenge with conflicting emotions and purposing hiding truth. Gates confesses that after finishing writing the book, I realized that I needed to talk to a therapist (108). This therapy resurfaces a painful memory from his youth, which he asserts explained everything: why I joined the church and why I always felt such a strong sense of guilt (108). Here, his emotion and feelings are hidden from himself, and are so important that the purpose of his book that it was virtually in galleys when [he] discovered that memory (180).

Gate’s struggle with being truthful furthermore displays other important decisions made by memoirist in the writing process: what to include and what to exclude. Of course some things are easily left out. Annie Dillard illustrates that You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting,’ as she explains why she didn’t include an important summer of her life in her memoir (154). Dillard also explains that she was not writing social history, and so left out things that were popular at the time; she also left out her private involvement with various young men because she didn’t want to kiss and tell (153, 154). But there are other things in which the conflict between emotion and purpose influence the writer to leave out, or rather the affairs of those presented in the book. Dillard confirms this when she admits, I tried to leave out anything that might trouble my family (155).

Jill Ker Conway expresses these same concerns when she notes, the danger is that in telling your life story you’ll hurt some people’s feeling (50). Wanting to be truthful leads to such confrontations with reality and emotion; even though the writer may feel that revealing information about others is critical to his memoir, the writer must also take into consideration that it may ridicule, embarrass, or hurt someone. Memoirists faced with such problems opt to either leave such parts out, or ask permission from anyone involved.

Yet even as memoirists juggle who and what to include in whatever manner, they may also juggle on how to include the self. Even if a memoir is about the self, writers resist writing about themselves, afraid of self-indulgence (Gates, 108). Eileen Simpson faced this problem with her memoir. Her first draft had focused more on her maybe too much on the purpose of her book, showing the lives of the poets she knew, but had left out the interface from which she had planned to see the great poets: herself. Simpson notes she fell into a trap, trying to reconstruct something when you were much more unformed, but as an artists you have to be true to the older wiser person you have become (94). In contrast, Dillard knows how much of her to leave out or in. Dillard states the personal pronoun can be the subject of the verb […] but not the object of the verb: ‘I analyze me, I discuss me, I describe me, I quote me’ since she understood her position in the focus of the memoir (154).

Even as the writers progress with how to present themselves or to be truthful, the memoir evolves with the conflict of emotion and purpose, an emotion that pushes the purpose, and a purpose, which restrains emotion. The emotions of my sister that pushed me to write about our strange relation, and the relation that restrained me from being overly approving, or overly grieving; being truthful to both of us. From this conflict there should arise a common human experience. Like Simpson comments I also hope the book [Orphans] has been helpful to other people who have been orphaned one way or another, it shows a multiplicity of the memoir, that while its purpose and emotions may be personal, it should connect to all of human experience (100). Which maybe why people wonder about Frank McCourt’s awful childhood how could you laugh? How did you find humor in all this? (80).

Works Cited

Baker, Russell. “Life with Mother.” Zinsser 23 - 40.

Conway, Jill Ker. “Points of Departure.” Zinsser 41 - 60.

Dillard, Annie. “The Past Breaks Out.” Zinsser 141 - 162.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Lifting the Veil.” Zinsser 101 - 118.

McCourt, Frank. “Learning to Chill Out.” Zinsser 61 - 82.

Simpson, Eileen. “Poets in My Youth.” Zinsser 83 - 100.

Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.