Memoir Writing - The Process and The Purpose
/I’m currently working on writing a memoir. Nearly every single day, I think I should abandon the project. It seems like such massive, overwhelming task. I often find myself wondering who cares anyway if I get the book written, or if I don’t.
I’ll be honest with you, dear readers, I am all over the place when it comes to writing this memoir of mine. I refer to it as “my damn book.”
Will I ever get it finished? I don’t know. Actually, a better question I find myself asking is, “What is the reason you want to put yourself through the agony of trying to write a memoir?”
For decades so many have told me, “You need to write a book.” For decades, I have said, “I hope to do that.” The decades have come and gone. So many decades! Frankly, the truth is staring me in the face: I’m running out of decades. If I don’t get this book written soon, I will be out of time and my life will be over. It seems the writing life does have an expiration date. My writing life dies when I do.
Hopefully, I can keep my cognition firing enough to do the work as I approach the end of my seventies. I hope to hold on to: the ability to form words into sentences that make sense. I search for: just the right combinations of words and sentences to create meaning. I hope to: use those words and sentences to convey a sense of story worthy of being read.
Sadly, I am very much aware that the abilities I once had when it comes critical thinking are not what they once were when I was younger. Age, illness, head injuries, and vestibular issues have left their mark when it come to my ability to read, write, and think as I once could.
Still, I press on. I hope to carry on and write with what I have left.
I feel as if my current project, my memoir, is one great big rolling and rambling narrative that is disconnected and discombobulated. It creates great dissonance within me as I try to makes sense of a story that at times makes no sense even to me, the one who lived the story. In time, perhaps I will be able to wrangle this story into something that makes sense to me and to any potential reader.
The writing process is still a mystery to me.
I don’t understand it at all.
My words seem to have a mind of their own when they present themselves on the paper. I see new insights. I have new questions. This part of the writing process slows me down, but if I don’t take the time to think, ponder, question, reflect, dig deeper, I know I will only wonder if I really got to real story I have to tell.
Why is it then so important to me for me to continue my work, to get the “damn book” written? I ask myself this question daily. This answer keeps coming back to me:
My words matter.
My story matters.
I own a pen, and I know how to use it.
I am the only one who can use that pen to write my story.
My story is mine alone to tell.
I always wanted to be an anthropologist, so now I get to be one. I am digging into the layers of lived experience to see what remains. I’m often surprised when I uncover fragments of truth about me, my family of origin, that I never saw or understood before. I see how each new discovery leads to new understanding of how I became who I am, who I was, or who I became, or who I thought I was.
A family portrait - Easter 1948
The backdrop for the photo is the house next door. We are all dressed up in our Sunday best. I remember the scratchy hat, the way that ribbon under my chin felt like it was choking me and I wanted to take it off! My mother loved hats; therefore, I wore one because she insisted. Thus began one of our early struggles about who I was and what I wanted to wear, and who she wanted me to be and how she wanted me to look.
I am discovering much about how I developed my identity: the one thrust upon me by others, and the one I have fought to establish as my own. Teasing apart the assumed identity that I adopted when I was a cult member and the one I adopted as I left the cult has been painful and liberating. Writing has allowed me to more fully identify who I really am.
Some call this work deconstruction. I was introduced to work of cultural deconstruction when I was working on my masters degree many years ago, so the work is not new to me, but I am realizing now just how much deconstruction I have to do in so many other areas of my life. I now prefer to call this work that I am doing as I write: excavation.
I am using my pen to excavate my life.
This excavation work is not for the faint of heart. I’m hauling out buckets and buckets of dirt and depositing them on the page as I write. I’m uncovering new truths, new insights, new understandings.
As I do that, I am reminded of my father as he dug out our basement one shovel full, one bucket full at a time when I was a child. He did this backbreaking work because he wanted to create more space for his family. He had a vision of what he could accomplish with all that digging, so he went to work and got it done.
My father a railroad man, and a man who loved and was well versed in Colorado mining and railroad history, was creative in that before he began the excavation work of digging out our basement, he rigged up a way to haul the earth from one place to another by building the same sort of structure that miner’s used to bring gold or silver from the depths of the earth.
We already had a small space beneath the house that was accessed by a by an old wooden cellar hatch door. He built a track that went from the ground level outside of our home to the lower basement level of our home. He then somehow acquired an old ore cart. The ore cart was on some sort of pulley system that allowed him to pull the cart up and down the track. Oh how I wish I had photos of the track, the ore cart, and my father, digging, digging, digging, hauling, hauling, hauling, but I don’t. I remember the time clearly, the images remain only in my mind.
Shovels full of sand and dirt were thrown in buckets, the buckets of sand were thrown into the cart, and then the cart was pulled to the ground level where it was dumped to create the biggest sand pile on the block. (We loved playing in that sand, as did all the neighborhood kids.)
How I wish my father had written more about that project. I wish I could read his words about how he accomplished that impressive feat of digging out a new room underneath our tiny house. All I have of that time is my memories of the project and end result: a room for my brother was built and finally my sister and I had our own bedroom to share.
Sally in 1949 at age four
I loved being outside playing in the yard behind my childhood home. Those lilac bushes sheltered me on many a summer afternoon as I played with my toys and made up stories of the pretend life I was living with my dolls and stuffed animals. I was known for my rich imagination. I lived mostly in my head even then.
I actually never intended to begin my memoir by writing about my childhood. Then one day, the memory of my father digging out that basement came to me. At the same time, I began to think of how my childhood home was literally built upon the sand. Suddenly, the whole focus of my memoir changed and I truly began the hard work of excavation into those early years.
As I’ve done some digging and some remembering. I’ve wondered if any of that part of my story will be interesting to even my children. Then, thanks to the memories section on FaceBook, I saw something my daughter had written to me the day after her birthday in 2009:
“Hi Mom. Thanks again for the great memories of the day I was born. Even though I’d heard all of the stories surrounding that time before, I’d forgotten many of them. It just goes to show the importance of writing down memories for future generations. Speaking of which, you should write some more about other dramatic moments in my life like being run over, splitting my head open the day of Suzanne’s wedding, Ryan throwing my “pantyhose” in the light fixture and them burning up, etc.
I’d completely forgotten how I liked to carry around your hot pink silky pajamas. When I was reading about them I had a distinct recollection of searching for them in the laundry room in Mt. Eyre. Funny, huh?
XO,
Keicha”
“It just goes to show the importance of writing down memories for future generations.”
That is why I write. I’m doing this for my children, my grandchildren, those who come after me. It is the one legacy I have to give them: my story.
Today, I finished reading a short memoir of sorts that my father wrote. He began by writing about the home where he lived during his childhood. I just happened to come across it as I was going through some other papers. I learned so many new things about my father that I never knew while I read that account.
I found it fascinating that he began the story by describing in great detail what the first house he remembers, the one where he spent his earliest formative years, was like.
As I read his accounts, my own memories of listening to my grandparents and my father recall special stories came flooding back. Connections formed by listening to stories from long ago became alive again when I read the words crafted about those times. He wrote because my father didn’t want the memory of those times forgotten. He wrote because he wanted to leave a lasting memory for those who came after him. He left a legacy of stories, memories, and words.
I truly hope to do the same for those who come after me.
More on the writing process:
Early in my writing journey as I began to develop plans for writing memoir, I consulted with a gifted writer Anna LeBaron who wrote “The Polygamist’s Daughter.” She told me just to write, and write, and write some more and not to edit. “Just leave it all on the page,” she said.
Then she told me something else that I have found to be true. She said, “when you need something to help you keep writing, to give you insight, or perseverance, or understanding, you will find that suddenly the very thing you need to keep writing finds it way to you.”
Thankfully, much of what I have needed in this journey is other writer friends. Many of them I have met online and some I have never met in person, but thanks to modern technology with Zoom, and Voxer and other apps, we stay in touch as we seek to keep our writing lives well and functional.
Out of the blue, one of my friends, Jenni Baden Howard who lives in London and writes a newsletter called “Accidents of Time” on Substack wrote a post entitled, “Finding Our Way Home. I was stopped me in my tracks when I read her post because we were so much on the same wave length in our writing lives. You can find and read her lovely post here: Accidents in Time: Finding Our Way Home
We do send message on Voxer several times a week, but I had not told her about finding my father’s writing piece when she wrote her post. Yet, there it was. She was writing memories of her childhood home as I was writing mine and reading about my father’s childhood home. Then she quoted from a book she had recently read called “How to Inhabit Time.”
“I’m drawing a map but inhabiting a history. This looks like cartography but is actually archaeology … this floor plan is a timeline …”
Jenni, thank you for helping to inform my own work with your beautiful and brilliant writing.
When my father wrote his short memoir piece, he actually included a map of the neighborhood where he lived showing the streets, intersections, who lived where and then telling a bit about the people who lived in those houses in his neighborhood. He didn’t draw the floor plan of the house, but by drawing the map of the neighborhood, I can now go over to where that house once stood, or at least nearby the location and see for myself how time and progress has changed the world in which my father grew up.
Most importantly, his memories captured in words and by drawing a map created a time capsule of the day in which he lived his boyhood. His “cartography” acted as a bit of “archaeology” which helps me to form the process for my own archaeological work as I excavate the ground that became the foundation of my life story.
Writing Memoir Provides Connecting Points Between Generations:
My youngest grandson began school this year. He was born in 2017, one hundred and one years after my father, his great-grandfather was born. He lives in the vicinity of the neighborhood where my father grew up. None of it is the same. Horse drawn wagons hauling sand and coal no longer carry loads down dirt streets. The house where my father lived was torn down long ago to build the interstate. But, the park where my father would go for picnics, or to play or to enjoy the landscape and flowers is still there. While it is no longer the beauty it once was, it is frequented by my son and his family just as my grandparents and father once did.
The school where my grandson attends kindergarten is the same one my father attended from kindergarten until grade five. The old school was torn down, but the new one erected in its place has the same name and the same traditions that were in place when my father went there. The church up the street from my son’s home was where my father first attended church.
The arrow points to my father at age eight. The photo is of his third grade class at Bristol school - 1924
What a treasure my father’s words will be to my grandsons as they get older and as they read of how life was in that same neighborhood when my father was a child.
Writing is gift we leave behind to those who come after us.
Writing leaves a map connecting the generations.
That is why I keep doing the work.
