Essay by Sam Bell
–
I am in the middle of a long process to reconstruct an accurate memoir of my life experiences, my personal history. The memoir focuses mostly on my burgeoning post-college sense of identity, a time when I was involved with a dangerous and violent man, and a time when my father had the first of many mental breakdowns. The memoir process has caused me to mine and surf through my childhood for hints of what was to come. Mostly, I have been struck by the impact my family had on my developing identity. As I probe further into my own past, I have been reading other memoirs, primarily by women in or following crisis or trauma. I relate to these memoirs. I endorse their construction, their brave narrators, their collective experiences with abuse, both from family and from sexual relationships. Looking at the genre of recovery memoir another way, however, causes me trouble. What is troubling is the growing market for trauma and recovery memoirs that focus specifically on the journaling self – not the journalist-as-memoirist, but instead the woman who kept a journal, turned it into her agent, and had it published. These memoirs have moments that lack insight, depth, exploration, even consideration for the literary value of the writing.
In her essay “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdiction of identity,” Leigh Gilmore writes, “the memoir boom’s defining subject has been trauma.” I read this and I think, yes, it has. To argue this is to throw the premise of my own book away. Some of the best contemporary memoirs have been about trauma: Lauren Slater’s Lying, Alice Sebold’s Lucky, Stephen Elliott’s The Adderrall Diaries, and the memoir by Kim Barnes called Hungry for the World. Even the recent memoir by Emily White, Lonely, takes a stab at loneliness as a form of trauma – a brave decision in 2010, when we are constantly able to connect electronically to another person. White’s trauma is the shared experiences of Thoreau’s solitude he held so dear, except White probes her solitude and finds depression, loneliness. So she moves outward in the world, consults neurologists and experts in the field of loneliness – a new and exciting field – and uses this information to support her own experiences in the memoir. This means she cares deeply for her reader – she is a resource and a narrator. What these memoirs share is the glare outward, the probing for specific wording, the lack of the journal-esque writing style. The journal-turned-memoir’s narrator says to me, the reader, “I wrote this fast, and I know it will sell, and isn’t my story extreme enough to be interesting, but also relatable?” I find this subset of new memoirs troublesome.
Published in 2010 by Stacy Morrison, Falling Apart in One Piece is a memoir that exemplifies this phenomenon. Morrison, the current editor-in-chief of Redbook, has written a memoir about her experiences divorcing her husband and being a new single mother. The problem with the memoir has less to do with Morrison herself as it does with her decisions as a narrator. Morrison’s memoir reads like a 38-year-old’s journal, night by night. Time frames vacillate from winter to fall back to the previous winter, without navigation for the reader. In parts, Morrison simply lists her feelings instead of putting them into prose. She uses rushed sentence fragments. To help finalize her feelings regarding divorce she excerpts a letter from another Redbook editor toward the end of the memoir. It’s not so much that I didn’t root for her life to improve – it’s that I rooted for the writing to improve.
Perhaps another example might help clarify, my meaning: in one of the most damaging, traumatic experiences in Kim Barnes’s memoir, Hungryfor the World, she writes of it this way:
I cannot cheat here; I do not mean to be coy. Let me play it like a movie, then, because that’s how it exists for me, a reel that can be run forward and back and wraps around on itself and begins and end and begins again.
A man comes to the door, and the woman lets him [...]
This passage is purposeful, meaningful in its careful carving of Barnes’s changing identity as she remembers, and then inscribes, her memory of the trauma. The words are here on purpose. I feel I know a certain intimacy about her; as I read it, I leaned into the words, held my breath through the worst of the physical trauma she goes on to describe. The trauma takes a backseat to the decisions the narrator makes as she tells it to us – in this, we hear and feel the processing of the events, not simply the telling that they exist.
By contrast, in Morrison’s book, there is a chapter toward the end titled “The End Is the Beginning,” and it focuses on Morrison accepting herself and her newfound identity five years after the divorce proceedings began. She muses:
I used to judge the success of my life by the answer to this question: How close am I living to my dreams? But I realized that somehow I turned my dreams into a list of things to accomplish no matter how I had to get there. Now I judge my life by my answer to the following: How close am I living to my truth? […] Am I surrounding myself with people who help me be the me I love the most? And the answer if definitely yes.
The sentiment here, near the end of the memoir, is nice. Morrison seems forgiving, a kind person. The issue is the desire she has, even here, two pages to the last word, to answer her own questions. Shouldn’t the prose have already shown this to me? Shouldn’t a memoir’s narrator trust the reader? Her reader seems to be reflexive: Morrison is Morrison’s primary reader. And here is the trouble: this memoir becomes a form of self-expression – from Morrison, back to Morrison – rather than a form that explores the development of an identity. Memoir has created a niche market, and though some trauma is inherently part of the process of a memoir’s subject, shouldn’t a goal be to refuse to so blatantly ask and answer the most important questions of the memoir at the end? The drafting process includes and answers these questions, and then the prose can move onward into new, deeper meaning.
In her article titled “Trauma, Coping, Recovery,” Joyce Carol Oates discusses the memoir, “Ours is the age of what might be called the New Memoir: the memoir of sharply focused events, very often traumatic, in distinction to the traditional life-memoir.” The autobiography, I am guessing, is what Oates sees as traditional – a chronological ordering of one’s life events. Instead, what memoir sets out to accomplish is to discover a narrator, a purpose, and specific events that hold meaning both for a reader and for the memoirist herself.
I write about my father to understand him, but I also write for my readers who I hope are in part adult children of alcoholics like me. My intention is not to write about how to live with an alcoholic or addicted parent, but to help provide my own specific insight into the trauma, challenges, and small victories of living with my father. Similarly, in her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls doesn’t want me to rush to the streets and reunite homeless family members; she wants me to experience her memories and rediscover yet another way to view what it means to be human.
I am naturally drawn to memoirs written by women who have domestic abuse in their past, or who experienced familial trauma and addiction. I read these because I have lived these experiences. If they were all written in the process of the memoirist processing the trauma or abuse, the memoirs would read like manuals. They don’t. They don’t because the strongest, most well-crafted memoirs focus on the memoirist’s individual self, her struggles, her external surroundings, and her specific coping mechanisms she has already utilized. I get the feeling Morrison wrote the memoir as she was enduring the pain of the divorce, which is why there are fragments, unrelenting crying jags on her kitchen floor, repetitive issues with a flooded basement. I wanted to ask of the narrator each time, so what? Why does this rainstorm matter? The rainstorm the week before yielded the same results: a plumber, a crying jag, a flooding issue. The prose doesn’t move, it stalls, because it reads like a journal, not a memoir.
When I read the memoir Fierce by Barbara Robinette Moss, I related to it viscerally. Moss, a woman who battled extreme poverty growing up, wrote a memoir in the wake of dating abusive men – she was repeating a family pattern. Moss’ memoir is so impactful because she wrote it looking backwards. She created profiles of the most violent men, collapsing some into smaller parts of the larger narration, because the point wasn’t to chronicle every last abusive moment, but to evoke a sense of the repeated feelings of failure, fear, and fatigue when stuck in abusive relationships. I related to this due to my mother’s experiences with my own father, and my own experiences dating a violent man. Yet what impacted me about Fierce wasn’t how to get away from the abuser – this I knew already; instead, the identity Moss created for herself in the aftermath, and how empowering her newfound freedom to live life for herself was – made a difference in my own life. When I went to meet Moss at an art exhibit, she was what I expected: open, warm, and exuberant; she was attuned to her surroundings with open curiosity, giving of herself to those that approached her. I expected this from her prose. By contrast, I imagine meeting Morrison would involve listening to Morrison speak about her daily life until she exhausted the subject. This isn’t to say Morrison would not be fun to meet, but there is a difference in writing about the self to elucidate meaning and purpose and writing about the self because one wants to make sense of it only for oneself. The advice from memoirists I have been given is to make sense of the trauma or events first, then write about them.
I struggle with how much of my own identity construction has been determined by trauma. Family trauma and an abusive relationship in my early twenties contribute to my sense of self, surely, but do they necessitate who I am? Further, my book involves a focus of trauma and psychological abuse from my father; is it conclusive then that based on my self-representation of the most eventful moments in my past, the trauma and struggles define me? Pieces of my book involve my experiences being a new teacher at multiple community colleges and universities, but they, too, revolve around students struggling with chemical and alcohol addictions. Have I let the trauma in my life support my identity? If so, what are the benefits and downfalls of this approach?
Patricia Foster speaks to this matter of trauma and memoir in her recent essay in the Iowa Review called “Stripping the Memoir.”She writes: “The contemporary memoir need not be stranded on the shores of predictable trauma […] but can be illuminated by the narrator’s insight into the contradictions of her quest.” Insight seems the best word here. Insight involves the steps to make sense of, or as my therapist once put it, process the events that transpired into trauma, and why they hold meaning. Just because Stacy Morrison went through a challenging divorce doesn’t mean she should write a book about it. It’s what insight she believes she is imparting – both onto herself, and her readers – that contribute to the decision to write and share the details. The insight I see with my memoir-in-progress is to illuminate more positive approaches and coping strategies for children of alcoholics as they strive to become adults. I dove head-first into a relationship that nearly cost me my life when I was twenty-three. The violent events that led to my boyfriend trying to kill me are interesting to some readers – but their meaning, the insight afterwards of how I left that relationship, and how I recovered, are all critical points of entry into my identity, my personal growth as an adult, and my book’s purpose.
The self is naturally contradictory, as Foster posits. Once a memoirist accepts this idea, the prose evolves. In addition to my memoir focusing on trauma, I also focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays as a guide to lead me out of the challenges I was facing when my father had his first breakdown and entered rehabilitation. In Emerson’s essay “Circles,” he writes that “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” It has taken me years to believe this. As an example, when my father entered rehab, I waged an internal war with myself. I did not want him to live with me when he was released; instead, I wanted to believe that he would be “fixed” in this facility, then return to living a normal life without further disruption. This was naïve, and not the case. Instead, he relapsed, and went into a halfway house, and wandered for a time in a Midwestern city, causing me nearly constant surprise. This was where insight began for me; I saw my father in his pajamas at ten o’clock on a Thursday evening, turning back the flat, worn covers of a borrowed bed, hoping to stay sober for one more day; this was something both a new normalcy and also ephemeral.
Emerson also writes in “Circles” that “Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.” This is a wonderful way to re-see contemporary memoir. Instead of being awed by extreme trauma or a juicy storyline, we have to see the meaning behind the trauma – what caused it? What happened when it was over? Recovery memoir is more insightful to me than memoir that leads us into trauma and exits quickly out the back door – we see the memoirist claim she’s okay, but the resolution or discovery of the self in the time after the trauma is absent, shirked. I worry about this in my own work.
In my memoir, and more importantly, in my life, I struggled with anorexia. I was anorexic for most of my college life, and recovered without the help of a therapist. This is not a source of pride but resistance to recovery. My illness inhabits a brief section of the memoir, and it acts as a visible sign of childhood coping mechanisms that I employed to be a perfect daughter – perfection would cause the greatest amount of peace in my disruptive home life. Thus, the anorexia was a symptom of a larger disorder, which was how to reclaim my identity and my body without worrying about external validation. It has taken me some time to accomplish this. The illness, however intertwined with my sense of self, does not define me. This gets into unclear territory, according to Abigail Cheever in her essay “Prozac Americans – Depression, Identity, and Self-hood,” where she posits the two perspectives of the nonfiction writer writing about his or her own illness. She writes, “[William] Styron’s text Darkness Visible represents depression as simultaneously an illness and an identity.” She moves this argument further, “[Susan] Sontag’s account [in Illness as Metaphor] censures any description of illness that correlates the identity of the patient with the identity of the ailment, protesting that ‘the notion that disease expires the character’ is too easily converted into the notion ‘that the character causes the disease.’” The trouble here is the choice of writers. In one case, Styron waited until the second half of his life to disclose his depression publicly through his memoir. In Sontag’s case, she largely and purposefully avoids writing about her own struggle with cancer – she is not specifically a memoirist. So to compare the tactics of illness defining a self may not be fair. And, illnesses are challenging and do not live in one category alone. Depression, anorexia, and cancer share few symptoms, causes, or recovery strategies.
I subscribe to the idea that illness, in my case anorexia, informed my identity. My past informed my decision to stop eating. It’s a loop, an Emersonian circle. I consider myself a nonfiction writer, a memoirist. I look to Kim Barnes as an excellent example of a thoughtful woman who has a strong, developed identity. This was a critical step in the process of writing her memoir. By contrast, reading Stacy Morrison, I felt her reliance on me, the reader, to make her situation okay, to redeem her decisions as she makes them in the book. The lack of insight, at least as I see it, causes a lapse in development in her memoir.
My charge is to finish my memoir with purpose, something I cannot accomplish without a strong sense of my identity. And, as I understand it, my identity is a live, changing creation. My past informs my present, of course, but I pick and choose past traumas to include or write about in my book. Is it an American characteristic to focus on extremity, trauma, or abuse in 2010?
Abuse, illness, and trauma are, unfortunately, not new in American culture in 2010. What is new is the way we write about them, how we can utilize the memoir as a field of meaning beyond how to shock a reader. I am a recovering anorexic, a woman who had an abusive relationship end with extreme violence, but I am also a teacher, a wife, a friend. In this new era of sub-categories of memoir, I am struggling to discover why some memoirs speak to me and why others don’t. Partially, it’s relatability to the topic. Largely, the factors for a memoir to impact me involve the crafted decisions of the memoirist, the struggle to find a balance between purposeful disclosure and the meaning of life events, and the decision to create meaning beyond the facts of the life being told. My life events structure who I am, surely, but without meaning, without searching myself as a piece of the larger framework of where I live and who I live with, I could not write my life. I could not even eat regular meals or call my father today if I didn’t challenge and probe my identity, continually inquiring about who I am, what I mean, and to whom.
–
Works Cited
Barnes, Kim. Hungry for the World. New York: Villard, 2000.
Cheever, Abigail. “Prozac Americans – Depression, Identity, and Self-hood.” Twentieth
………Century Literature 46.3 (2000): 346.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Circles.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays. Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York:
………Penguin, 1982. 225-38.
Foster, Patricia. “Stripping the Memoir.” The Iowa Review 35.1 (2005): 175.
Gilmore, Leigh. “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-representation, and the Jurisdiction of Identity.” Biography
………(2001): 128.
Morrison, Stacy. Falling Apart in One Piece. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Trauma, Coping, Recovery.” The Times Literary Supplement
………20 June 2003: 15.
–
Sam Bell is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review
