Narratives & Memoirs

While the sample essays did not include in-text citations, please use them as you compose your paragraphs. You can acknowledge what you borrow by either using an author lead in or by placing a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence.

a) Group A (Description): What are the characteristics of memoir?

b) Group B (Definition): What is memoir?

c) Group C (Compare-and/or-Contrast): How is memoir like (or different from) other genres that represent events? Or, describe how memoir represents traumatic history differently than another genre. Or, compare/contrast the way memoir and another genre, such as the history text, influence the reader. Or, compare and/or contrast memoir to other forms of autobiography.

d) Group D (Persuasion): Persuade readers that memoir is/is not capable of telling the truth. Or, convince readers that memoir does a better job of encouraging students to empathize with the “Other” than does another genre (building upon above).

e) Group E (Process): How is it made? Define how memoir is made.

f) Group F (Causal Analysis): What are its effects? For example, how does memoir nurture empathy?

Example Paragraphs

Comparison/Contrast:

Although historical textbooks and memoirs can address the same historical event or time period, there are major differences between the genres concerning point of view and focus in terms of “essence” versus “factuality.” Because a textbook focuses on conveying to the reader a general sense of the event and all of the “facts” surrounding it, a textbook tends to be written from “above.” A memoir, on the other hand, tends to be written from “within,” and therefore the focus tends to be on the emotional essence of the event rather than the factual accuracy. Although both genres are true in some sense, their effects on the reader’s understanding of that event or time period can vary greatly. For example, reading a textbook account of the Holocaust will give the reader important information about dates, locations, ethical issues, etc. while a memoir may give a reader a better understanding of the Holocaust’s effect on the humanity of the individuals involved. So, in order to truly understand an event in history, it’s important to read accounts from multiple sources and multiple genres while recognizing the benefits and limitations of each.

OR

Memoirs are both similar to and different from historical texts. One way that memoirs and historical texts are similar is that they both present some aspect of an event from the past. The degree of truth is where they may differ. People assume historical texts will be truthful because they are objective and because they incorporate factual material. Many readers approach historical texts and memoirs with an expectation of accuracy and truth. Both genres, however, have the opportunity to present inaccuracies and blatant lies. The intended audience may affect the degree of truth. Therefore, readers are obligated to be discerning about the degree of truth presented. Memoirs differ from historical texts in several ways. For example, memoirs are written by one person whereas historical textbooks are usually a compilation of many people’s writing. Further, memoirs are person, written in the first person, and limited in scope. Historical texts are written from the third person point of view; consequently, their scope is often national or international. The intended audience may also affect the truth of memoirs and historical texts. Because Ann Frank did not have an outside audience in mind, readers may more fully trust the facts of her writing. Other memoir authors, however, may embellish their texts to get published and to make money. Although historical textbooks also have intended audiences, their bias may be less obvious to less mature readers. This bias may reflect the current popular worldview or the expected perspective of the textbook buyer. While both modes have their use and place, both memoir and the historical text are worth reading with a critical eye.

Classification:

Memoir is one among genres that convey stories of an individual’s life. An important question that arises about memoir is whether or not it is fictional. The classification of memoir emphasizes the question more than answers it. Stories about individual’s lives are categorized in four ways. The most trusted as being objective is the researched biography. This category is written by someone else in order to celebrate (or not) the place of an important individual. The biography concentrates on the entire life of the individual and his/her place in history. The autobiography is very similar in its acceptance as factual and its placement of the individual in history but it is written by the individual him/herself. Both of these categories are generally trusted but may repress disagreeable facts. Memoir is a separate category because it celebrates the effect of an incident or slice of a person’s life. Strikingly, its veracity is less trusted than biography, but reader’s trust its emotional appeal. Memoir also has many elements in common with fiction, such as narrative structure, dialogue, and reconstruction of events with plot and conflict. It is represented as truth but a trust that is written not remembered. Finally, fiction is represented as a story rather than as truth. These life stories exist as a continuum more than as completely separate categories because there is so much overlap despite the distinctive characteristics of each.

Persuasion:

Memoirs that contain elements of embellishment are essentially truth. Although a memoir might not be a literal truth, its ambiguous status does not invalidate its inclusion in the genre. For examples of this, one needs only to look at how our own children recall certain events. My daughter was bitten twice by our family dog: once at age 1 ½ and again at 2 ½. Although there is no way she recalls these events (due to her age), she is still able to tell people about the times Foster bit her. She is actually only able to recount these events because her father and I have told her they occurred. She is also unable to tell people about how much her face bled and swelled, or about how much she screamed when the ER doctors strapped her down for stitches because we chose not to discuss those facts with her. This does not, however, change either the fact that she was bitten by our dog or the fact that she claims our version of it as her memory. Even though her memory is only a version of the truth, it is not invalid. As Tobias Wolff claims, “Memoirists are not writing proper history, but rather what they remember of it.” After all, remembers the details of a specific day in the life isn’t nearly as significant as understanding what they say about that life.

Definition:

A memoir can be defined as a genre that encompasses multiple rhetorical elements that are used to capture a personal story. Elements may include contextualized meaning, causal analysis, classification and division, descriptive detail, process, and persuasion that allow the readers to live vicariously through the author to derive a connection between their lives and that of the author. A memoir is also a creative account of significant life events.

Description:

Monday Morning Memoir Moaning.

It was a cold and stormy morning. I had vivid and important memories dying to be expressed, recorded and preserved for generations to come. These were snapshots. Little incidents, but important. I told myself “Explode the moment,” and I began to write. Should it be fully truthful? Yes, but perhaps fictionalized—having a storylike tone—and imbued with a rich truthiness. Every juicy story drips with conflict and metaphor like a salty black coffee on a Navy steamer. Could I resolve it in just a few pages? Without getting too detailed? Without getting carried away? Without going on and on and on? Catharsis! That's what I was looking for. My only hope lay in the expression of my most deeply honored and protected memories. A memoir!

Links to sources:

• “How to Write Your Own Memoir,” by Abigail Thomas http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200808_omag_memoir_how-to

• Inkspell definition of memoir from Dr. Z’s Education Website http://inkspell.homestead.com/memoir.html

• Memoir Synthesis Prompt from AP the English Language and Composition Homepage http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/06EngLangComp07-1070_pp.ii-82.pdf

• “Seven Types of Paragraph Development: Annotated examples of narration, exposition, definition, classification, description, process analysis, and persuasion” by Gerald Grow, Division of Journalism, Florida A&M http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/modes.html

Excerpts

Excerpt from Ann Patchett’s “Afterword” to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face:

“’It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,’ a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf, ‘All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?’

‘I didn’t remember it,’ Lucy said pointedly. ‘I wrote it. I’m a writer.’

This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

By telling us that the sentence spoken in the book were not necessarily verbatim, Lucy claimed complete ownership of her history. It was her world and she would present it the way she wanted to. Her memory and desire were indeed the facts” (231).

• • • • • • • Excerpt from “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel” in Susan Rubin Suleiman; Comparative Literature, Harvard Poetics Today 21.3 (2000) 543-559

________________________________________

Abstract: This essay explores questions about memory and its relation to historical truth, chiefly through an examination of the “Wilkomirski case,” involving a highly acclaimed Holocaust memoir that has now been shown to be a fake. The categorical distinction between memoir and novel, while not always easy or even possible to determine, is nonetheless important; Wilkomirski’s Fragments is neither an authentic memoir nor a novel but a false or deluded memoir. I discuss in contrast to this work a passage from the recent memoirs of Elie Wiesel, in which Wiesel himself revises a fragment of his acclaimed work Night. Such revision enriches both the author’s and the reader’s interpretations of a life-shattering experience.

The French poet André Breton once wrote: “Life is other than what one writes” (1960 [1928]: 27). He did not mean that writing is a lie but rather that writing is always one step behind or ahead of or next to the facts of lived experience—all the more so when that experience took place decades ago.

This essay will attempt to follow up on some of the theoretical implications of Breton’s remark. What happens to the gap between facts and writing when the latter is concerned with issues of great collective significance such as the Holocaust? The two examples I will discuss—Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996) and Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea (1994)—both raise, albeit in very different ways, questions about memory and its relation [End Page 543] to historical truth. Being literary memoirs, they also raise questions about genre. In what kind of writing do facts matter most, and why?

“Memory” and “memoir” are almost the same word in English, and are the same word in French: mȭoire. But memory is a mental faculty, while memoir is a text. Although memoirs have no specific formal characteristics (other than those of autobiographical writing in general, which comes in many varieties), they all have at least one thing in common: a memoir relates “experiences that the writer has lived through.”1 Unlike a full-scale autobiography, a memoir can be confined to a single event or a single moment in a life. It need not be the work of an important person, nor does it have to be well written (though that helps). Its primary claim to our attention is not literariness but factuality. In the novelist Anna Quindlen’s words, “What really happened—that is the allure of memoir.” She adds almost immediately, however: “Fact is different from truth, and truth is different from insight . . . with few exceptions, . . . fiction tells the truth far better than personal experience does” (1997: 35).

It may seem that Quindlen is suggesting that fiction has no relation to personal experience, but her argument is just the opposite: personal experience, when written, veers almost inevitably toward fiction. The necessity for details that give the “feel of life” to narrated experience leads almost inevitably toward invention—which is why, as a former journalist who respects facts too much to invent them, Quindlen quips that she “will never write a memoir.” In a more serious vein, she concludes: “I’m suspicious of memory itself . . . Memory is such a shapeshifter of a thing, so influenced by old photographs and old letters, self-image and self-doubt” (ibid.) Individual memories may merge with family mythologies, eventually taking on the feel of lived recollection. Quindlen’s essay reminds us, in a pithy way, that the bedrock of factuality on which memoir rests (or is assumed to rest) is as fragile as memory itself.

Does that mean there are no significant differences between memoir and novel, between recollection and invention? No. Significant differences exist, but they are not so much textual as conventional or institutional.2 Textually, a fiction can imitate any kind of speech act, including the act of imperfectly recollecting a personal past. We have a brilliant recent demonstration [End Page 544] of it in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1996), whose narrator recalls fragments of his own past and seeks out the stories of dead relatives and acquaintances as they are recalled, incompletely and imperfectly, by those who knew them. Sebald even includes photographs in the book, a fascinating insertion of “the real” into a novel. But these photographs, apparently of real people long ago, highlight rather than efface the ontological difference between their historical subjects and the fictional characters whose stories they ostensibly illustrate.

In other words, novels can look and feel textually like memoirs. Is the opposite also true? One has but to look at the most successful memoir of the last few years, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), to realize how close it is, in its writing, to a novel. Not only is McCourt’s prose stylized, deploying a full range of rhetorical figures from anaphora to ellipsis to metaphor to onomatopeia, but he also presents us with detailed dialogues that took place before his and even before his mother’s birth! No reader can be unaware of such literary artifice and patterning—and yes, invention—in this work; yet Angela’s Ashes is internationally recognized as a memoir, recounting events that really happened during the author’s impoverished childhood in New York and Limerick.

Comparison of Memoir to Newsreel

Memoir is a like a newsreel; we all have sepia imagines of the past in our heads. We tend to focus on the theatrical, choosing clips to illicit the most dramatic reactions framing the shots, highlighting the best moments: the birth of your children, your wedding, your first home run, kissing Carrie Andersen behind the garbage cans—way to go, tiger! The pitfalls: the death of a loved one, a debilitating disease, losing a job, failing your 3rd grade spelling test—don’t worry, sport, you’ll get ‘em next time (fist tap on upper arm)! Each pitfall, each setback makes the taste of triumph so much sweeter, like mom’s homemade apple pie. Everything else—forgotten scraps on the cutting room floor. Memoir and newsreel should end with a 3-note crescendo and a fight about whose name is listed first in the credits.

Causal Analysis

As the cartoon suggests (G), memoir is a blur between fiction and non-fiction; the same is true for its effects. Some memoirs may make you smile. Some may make you laugh out loud. Some may make you cry. Some may make you think. Some may even make you question their validity. Since “’everyone remembers what he wants to remember’” and “’disagreeable facts are sometimes glossed over’” (D), sometimes the reader will question the significance or truth of your memory. But, ultimately, the effect is for us “to remember who we used to be and how we got to be who we are today” ( ). It is this effect that makes a genre such as memory worthy of study.

Definition

Memoir is perception of highlights, meaningful moments, slices of life, traumas, and secrets (to name a few possibilities): memories in which the author is the protagonist. That protagonist walks a fine line between autobiography and fiction (Inkspell.com). The writer makes deliberate choices of what to record—and what not to record—of what to spotlight and what to shade. William Zinsser argues that good memoirists “think small,” creating meaning from moments in which readers recognize universal truths that illuminate their own experience.

Persuasion

While people hold memoirists to a high standard of truth, writing experts such as Joseph Kertes believe that fiction inevitably occurs in memoir. The genre lends itself naturally to creative remembering and retelling. According to English novelist Anthony Powell, “memoirs can never be wholly true because they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened” (D). The fiction may occur when the author exaggerates or selectively omits certain life experiences. In How to Write a Memoir, William Zinsser advises writers to be their own “tour guide. . . . leaving out of your memoir many people who don’t need to be there. Like siblings (C). Moreover, fiction occurs when the author writes from the perspective of a fictional character as Sandra Cisneros did in the House on Mango Street (D). Perhaps Oprah should apologize for her vilification of James Frey for his partly fictitious memoir A Million Little Pieces. A Memoir, by definition, according to “The Art of Memoir,” has a fictional quality even though the story is true.