“Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.”
–C.S.Lewis
Steeped as I am in books, story, and memoir, I’m sometimes taken aback to come upon people who don’t much know what a memoir even is.
When they find out, they narrow their eyes and ask with a barely-disguised sneer so you just know they’re thinking: “Has your life really been that interesting?”
What’s so great about you that we need to know about it?
Little do they know these are the very questions with which you yourself grappled for years, if not decades, before daring to venture forth!
Definitions of memoir range wide, but to my mind the simplest is that a memoir is a personal story. It’s told from the point-of-view of the narrator. Often, but not always, a memoir focuses in on a particular period of the memoirist’s life. Or a memoir might focus on a particular facet of the life, for example rabid alcoholism.
Unlike an autobiographer, the memoirist doesn’t pretend to objectivity. You’re not just stating verifiable facts like when you were born and where you grew up. You’re tellling the story from the inside so to speak. Necessarily, you’ve experienced your life in a particular way, and through a particular lens, that is yours alone. Many people will disagree with your memory, interpretation of events, method of telling.
They’re entitled to disagree. And you’re entitled–obligated–to stand on your own God-given right to tell the story the way you saw and lived it.
If you google What is a memoir, you’ll find definitions like this: “Memoir tells a compelling story using truth, theme, 1st person POV narration, voice, and a fifth element—the M&Ms of writing, Memory and Musing. It really happened. We know the trouble writers can get into by not remembering this.”
Remembering what? That “it” really happened? To me the question is Do I remember it as really happening? I’ve never made anything up out of whole cloth but I’ve absolutely juggled chronology, conflated two or more incidents into one, and left out huge chunks of places, people, and times in order to wrest the material into a coherent and it’s to be hoped absorbing narrative.
Where would we be if zillions of people hadn’t told their stories? The grandfather of them all, St. Augustine in his Confessions. Anne Frank. Helen Keller. Dian Fossey. Piatigorsky. Eugenia Ginzburg. Hope Jahren. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Ida Friederike Görres wrote a wonderful psycho-spiritual biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux called The Hidden Face.
Of Thérèse’s own spiritual memoir, The Story of a Soul, Görres noted: “The uniqueness of Thérèse’s message did not lie in what she confided to her loved ones, but in the fact that she dared to express it at all, and that she was able to do so [italics mine]. Only because of this have we heard of it. Only because of this has the form of life which has always flourished so silently acquired a face and a voice. Only because of this have countless persons realized that this existence of theirs is a ‘way,’ even a way to sanctity, a way to perfection; that there is an inherent value in all the things which seemed to themselves not worthy of attention.”
Let’s dare to express! And pity the poor naysayers.
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