Time and your memoir – part 2

Time slips through our fingers like sand. To capture the moments that define you takes courage and discipline. Let’s consider time and your memoir – and which approach to choose.

THERE IS NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL

There is no one-size-fits-all in memoir and life story writing. You can literally choose the approach that best suits your personality or works within your scope of material.

You might have amassed information in your journal writing. Or you have a very definite storyline that you are pursuing in chronological fashion. You might be alternating personal history with insights into the human condition. You might write to prove your integrity in a political or geographical arena.

Whatever the case may be – the trick is to stop agonising and start writing.

Last week we considered four possible approaches. Here are three more:

APPROACH FIVE: A COLLAGE

When you write your memoir as a collage, you use fragments of story and arrange them like a puzzle. The plot becomes less important, and the fragmented bits take dominance.

As Bekhart says: “Time is discontinuous—a stutter and a sidestep.”

Her recent favourite is The Crying Book, by Heather Christle. It is a non-fiction book which is a “catalogue of thoughts, separated by white space, about leaking eyes, elephant sadness, writers who have cried, the author’s own sadness, and so many other crying-adjacent things. One might say that time stands still in a collage.”

APPROACH SIX: WRITING IN SINE CURVES

You might choose to write chronologically, which is a linear approach – going from point A to point B in a straightforward fashion.

Another approach is to let your writing follow the sine curves of your thinking. Sine also changes its speed: “it starts fast, slows down, stops, and speeds up again. It’s the enchanting smoothness in liquid dancing (human sine wave and natural bounce).”

When you use this approach, you will track your thoughts about issues, which is a way of demarcating time as well.

Casey Gerald does this in his debut, There Will Be No Miracles Here. “Watch how he puts his own thinking on display… Gerald does not frame his book according to hours or days. He frames it as if memory and epiphany are their own kind of chronology, as if time itself must be cranked apart to make room for his pronouncements like these: “Anyway, I’m back. I have not returned with empty hands. No. I have come with urgent news: we must find another mountain, if not another world, to call our own.” Gerald lays down the track of his thoughts,” explains Bekhart.

APPROACH SEVEN: A COIL OF INTENSITY

American author Kathryn Harrison was raised by her maternal grandparents in Los Angeles, California, after her teenage parents separated when she was a baby.

“Her memoir The Kiss documented a love triangle that developed involving her young mother, her father, and herself. It described her father’s seduction of her when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss.”

Bekhart calls The Kiss an example of a coil of intensity: “A story sprung from an incessant circling of complex relationships: father-daughter/daughter-mother/father-mother? Raised first by her single mother in her grandparents’ house, and then mostly raised by those grandparents, Harrison grows up desperate to know her elusive father until, as a college student, she becomes entangled with him in a sexual romance. It’s not just the language that is spare in The Kiss: ‘We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we’ve never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.’ It is Harrison’s commitment to keeping her story tightly controlled and contained. There are no tangents here. No small asides. Nothing regarding the content of those years save for the story bound up with the family’s unsettling dynamic. Time spirals and twists in The Kiss. It is not then or now, not just one scene and many tentacles, no circle. Time, in the whorl, is emptied of all that does not illuminate the cardinal story.”

TIME AND YOUR MEMOIR

I look forward to a conversation with you about your memories and the approach you would like to use when you write your memoir. As an author coach, I am here to assist.