Writing a beginning for your memoir is probably the last thing you should do. Often what happens is that we begin at the beginning and thus become inordinately attached to that beginning and will revise it up only after a lot of kicking and screaming. My advice is to revise it. After you've gotten to the end of your first draft, if you're like Hampl and most of us, then by the end of a first draft you've figured out your subject or at least approached it with some confidence. At that point you need to go back and revise the beginning to reflect this new insight into your subject.
To see how Wolff does a beginning for his memoir, This Boy's Life, let's first look at his "thank-you page". It's the page that starts out "I am especially grateful to . . . ". Look for it between the dedication and quotes pages. He says near the end: "[T]his is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story." The idea that memory is somehow sentient connects to Hampl's idea that a memoir is like meeting a person and getting to know them. The more you are with that person (the more you revise the words) the more she (the work) becomes coherent and interesting. That’s to say: there is not a coherent self in the text to be revealed, but the text becomes more and more revelatory the more you work with it.
Wolff talks about memory from a slightly different perspective--from the end of this process of revelation. (The thank-you page appears at the beginning of his book while it must have been the last thing to be written. We wonder why?) But he gives memory a certain agency but reserves the right to control it--to "make it tell a truthful story".
As a reader we know that once we finish a book, we often return to the beginning to see what we missed that we could not have known for not yet having read the book. And this making-memory-tell-the-truth business is what Wolff has tried to do to his younger self who was as we've seen and will see a compulsive liar. Wolf has in effect given us his subject right here in the thank-you page.
When we open the memoir we are thrown into a scene on some road out West (just after the Continental Divide) where a mother and son (our narrator) have paused to wait for their car's radiator to cool down. A truck careens past them out of control; its brakes have failed. It falls out of sight and off the road shortly there after.
What do we know already from this opening paragraph and from what follows next? Of all the places to start talking about your "boy's life", Wolff picks an incident where a truck loses it's brakes and crashes. Why pick this scene? Well, it demonstrates something from the start about the boy's character. He is pretty much of an out of control narcissist--out for his own pleasure and reward. He twists his mother's concern for him into an opportunity to get what he wants from her. He wants the trinkets, the belt and moccasins, etc, and sees that the truck accident is moment to make a move to get them.
His mother misreads him. She imagines that he is traumatized while it is obvious from his lack of feeling (not his feigned reaction) for what has happened that he has no idea what it meant for the truck to crash into the ravine. Children don't have the experience or knowledge to know such things or at least they don't know them like adults typically know them. Toby is not stupid, he's just willful. He's constructed a world around his desires and if he gets what he wants he's happy. The child's inability to understand the reaction to such brazen wanting is the subject of the book. It becomes clear to him as we read on that others slowly start to understand him and this behavior of wanting what he wants when he wants it. And these adults have their own problems and refuse Toby's prevarications. And Toby does not for most of the memoir have a back-up plan and because he continues in various ways to "make a play for souvenirs", he comes to some grief.
Wolff lets his Toby character play out these acquisitive and mendacious tendencies to see where they lead. It's like he has his character pull a string that leads into the future which Wolff is pulling on his end as writer from the past. That string is what connects the two of them but the middle space can't have been clear at the beginning of the writing. It took Wolff letting the memory (of his boy, Toby) act on it's own while exerting control on it from his sense of adult self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge only became clear as the boy, Toby, starts to speak and to act in the book.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Hampl's “Memory and Imagination”--the first six paragraphs, a naive report
Look at how Hampl begins her memoir. By setting us in place and time: the what: music (her father, piano, etc); the who: her seven year old self; and, the where: in the basement of St Luke's. We don't know where St. Luke's is but if we do a search we find out that Hampl grew up in St. Paul, MN.
Then there are two characters that emerge, first her father but then she is "given over to" Sister Olive and Sister Olive becomes the way that Hampl gets us into the memoir and her own objectives--the ways she had at that time for making sense (2ndpar, 6thline).
She then shifts momentarily back to her father and the family recitals. She sets up the motivations for going to the basement room with the pianos where she finds Sister Olive. She was to learn how to play the piano so that she might play her part in family recitals. Those are the facts.
Is there a question embedded in this beginning? What does Hampl want to know about her seven year old self and her interactions with her family and Sister Olive? She says that the Olive “made sense” and she seems glad of it. What other things did or did not make sense for her? The melting into one another when the family played together is definitely one of those things that surely stood out in her childhood and couldn't have made sense. Right? How did it happen that playing music together did that to her family and why does she remember it so clearly? These questions are certainly ones that she could have had as she started this memoir. Questions that she wished to explore.
This question of the purposes of family music gets more specific when in the next paragraph (par. 4) she finds "middle C" and determines that it is "the belly button of the piano"-- a first realization of metaphor. But think about it. She couldn't at age seven have put the name "metaphor" on the idea of middle C--her play with words. Kids play with words naturally and maybe she realized this back then but couldn't have known why it was interesting. It's the adult Hampl who tells us that her kid self was working in metaphor. See what she does: she takes a childhood wonder and describes it for us in adult language but keeps us securely in the world of her seven-year old self.
And this metaphor talk has two purposes as we will see, 1) is to recognize a moment where she marvels about something she recalls from that time and, 2) she gives that moment a meaning that comes from her experience as an adult writer and writer of memoirs. This last purpose is of course the purpose of the essay: to demonstrate a memoir. For in a memoir, you pay attention to images (metaphors) and you try to exploit them for meaning. You try to figure out your younger self and why these things, these marvelous moments, occurred to her. And in fact, at the end of this paragraph she addresses the reader, a reader who wants to know even if he doesn't know he wants to know what it is she is doing by writing a memoir.
After this bit of voice over, Hampl returns to the music room and to her metaphors--her attempts to reveal herself--and to Sister Olive. This time to Sister Olive's sneezing at the window. Now you might ask how did she recall that Sister Olive sneezed the way she did at that moment on that first day, etc. The skeptical among you might say that it is impossible. Others will not have even stopped to consider whether she was telling the whole truth here and accepted it as fact.
You might think that you could not ever recall a scene so rich and you would be right because Hampl probably didn't recall it either at least not in its entirety. What I'm saying is that she might have seen Sister Olive on another occasion sneezing her little sneezes after showing her middle C but those two incidents probably never occurred at the same time but they occurred nonetheless, so as a writer she has license to warp time and put the two things together. It's not lying exactly because the two things did happen but not at the same time, but for effect (thinks Hampl) I will put them together. And the effect she wants is to paint a enticing picture of that first day in the basement of St. Lukes in order to tell us more about how things make sense so that we might read on to find the answer.
Then there are two characters that emerge, first her father but then she is "given over to" Sister Olive and Sister Olive becomes the way that Hampl gets us into the memoir and her own objectives--the ways she had at that time for making sense (2ndpar, 6thline).
She then shifts momentarily back to her father and the family recitals. She sets up the motivations for going to the basement room with the pianos where she finds Sister Olive. She was to learn how to play the piano so that she might play her part in family recitals. Those are the facts.
Is there a question embedded in this beginning? What does Hampl want to know about her seven year old self and her interactions with her family and Sister Olive? She says that the Olive “made sense” and she seems glad of it. What other things did or did not make sense for her? The melting into one another when the family played together is definitely one of those things that surely stood out in her childhood and couldn't have made sense. Right? How did it happen that playing music together did that to her family and why does she remember it so clearly? These questions are certainly ones that she could have had as she started this memoir. Questions that she wished to explore.
This question of the purposes of family music gets more specific when in the next paragraph (par. 4) she finds "middle C" and determines that it is "the belly button of the piano"-- a first realization of metaphor. But think about it. She couldn't at age seven have put the name "metaphor" on the idea of middle C--her play with words. Kids play with words naturally and maybe she realized this back then but couldn't have known why it was interesting. It's the adult Hampl who tells us that her kid self was working in metaphor. See what she does: she takes a childhood wonder and describes it for us in adult language but keeps us securely in the world of her seven-year old self.
And this metaphor talk has two purposes as we will see, 1) is to recognize a moment where she marvels about something she recalls from that time and, 2) she gives that moment a meaning that comes from her experience as an adult writer and writer of memoirs. This last purpose is of course the purpose of the essay: to demonstrate a memoir. For in a memoir, you pay attention to images (metaphors) and you try to exploit them for meaning. You try to figure out your younger self and why these things, these marvelous moments, occurred to her. And in fact, at the end of this paragraph she addresses the reader, a reader who wants to know even if he doesn't know he wants to know what it is she is doing by writing a memoir.
After this bit of voice over, Hampl returns to the music room and to her metaphors--her attempts to reveal herself--and to Sister Olive. This time to Sister Olive's sneezing at the window. Now you might ask how did she recall that Sister Olive sneezed the way she did at that moment on that first day, etc. The skeptical among you might say that it is impossible. Others will not have even stopped to consider whether she was telling the whole truth here and accepted it as fact.
You might think that you could not ever recall a scene so rich and you would be right because Hampl probably didn't recall it either at least not in its entirety. What I'm saying is that she might have seen Sister Olive on another occasion sneezing her little sneezes after showing her middle C but those two incidents probably never occurred at the same time but they occurred nonetheless, so as a writer she has license to warp time and put the two things together. It's not lying exactly because the two things did happen but not at the same time, but for effect (thinks Hampl) I will put them together. And the effect she wants is to paint a enticing picture of that first day in the basement of St. Lukes in order to tell us more about how things make sense so that we might read on to find the answer.
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