I’ve been reading The
White Album by Joan Didion. I think her writing is wonderful because she
questions why we write stories. In her book, she says, “We tell ourselves
stories in order to live,” and then she gives all these examples of bizarre
stories that people come up with to tell each other. Yet she questions the
authenticity of these stories that we tell ourselves or that we believe are
real. She writes, “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the
premises of all the stories I had ever told myself…” (11).
I’ve been experiencing that as well when I’ve been writing
my memoirs. I haven’t doubted that my
stories are true. I know these events actually happened, and I try to recount
the stories with as much proper detail as I can remember from pictures that I
look at. But I’ve been beginning to feel that my stories are not quite right
somehow. How can they be truly accurate unless they are completely objective?
If they are completely objective, where am <I> in the story? Where is my
personality, and do my opinions matter? And if I AM in the story as completely
as I should be, what is my perspective? It is what my view is of the situation
at the time that the event happened.
…But as time passes, I see how much I have grown, and I
realize that my interpretations of various events that happened in the past
should be called into question because I did not know as much then as I do now.
One example of this is my negative judgments of the kids that sniffed glue in
Kenya. At the time, I thought they were just doing it because they were dumb,
because they were addicted, or because they were poor. I don’t even know what I
thought. But some years passed, and I read in a book one time that they do it
because sniffing glue dulls the hunger pangs… See how much we change in our
understanding? How much we mature as we get older, and how we place value on
different things, on the things that are MORE valuable (as compared to what we
thought was valuable when were younger).
Yes, these are a lot of things for my mind to think about.
Sorry if there is not a lot of sense or structure or order to my thoughts. I am
still processing. And these thoughts don’t seem like something I could order
very easily anyway. It’s a twilight area, a gray in-between, a space between
what is real and what is not… like how we don’t always remember things clearly,
or how we may not have noticed them as we should have in the first place.
i am just taken with how life is both objective and subjective. Think about your eyes, and all that they mean for you. What you can see, as i understand it, is the thought-image which your mind has summoned in response to the photons which your eyes have seen. I'm so thankful for my eyes. We talk like our eyes see, which is true. Science can talk like our eyes just register light particles, which our minds then "sees." The perfect tornado of subject and object.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like, then, that God made us in harmony with what's out there, so that our inside seeing can be true—it can receive the truly objective message of light bouncing off mint-green walls, oranges, and sky-blue eyes.
Now this side of Eden, even our eyes can mess up. They don't quite channel the light in the right spot, so i have to wear glasses. Or they don't quite register certain points in the color spectrum, so i'm color blind and have to ask people whether this is the lavender shirt or the blue button-down that i'm holding.
Maybe your time in Kenya is similar. You experienced the glue-sniffing children as best your mind could perceive them. And now you think back, and you see things you didn't see before. You might have thought it was the blue shirt. It was really lavender. You have glasses now. Or your prescription is sharper.
Jesus will, one day, wipe every tear from our eyes. And, i think, every astigmatism.
Personally, I love the way our perspective of a situation changes because it means that we're continuously growing as people. If I held the exact same beliefs and priorities I did ten years ago, I think I'd have cause to question if I'd done any maturing or experienced any growth since then.
ReplyDeleteBut when it comes to putting this down in memoir, it kind of muddles things up. I always feel the need to letting the readers know what I thought of the situation at the time; after all, my then-thoughts were true to the what happened. But sometimes, in times of reflection in a memoir, I'll let readers know that I don't quite think that way anymore. Or I'll give the whole piece a small sense of "unreliable narrator" throughout the piece. It's tricky to do, but in some situations, I think the richest memoirs come from letting readers see that growth in our perspective.
It's okay that you're still processing--I think that is part of what we spend our lives doing, and certainly what our writing is for. The memoir is the perfect place to struggle on paper with the conflict or growth between your old view of a situation and your new view. Why do you think what you think now, and why did you think what you thought then? What is the truth of the matter, and how do you know? I think we can feel pretty smart at this age when we look back at ourselves even a few years ago, but we're missing a valuable lesson until we realize that we will continue to learn and gain new perspectives. That is what life is, and it isn't going to stop.
ReplyDeleteThis was a great post, Bethany! Thank you. When I was writing my memoir for class, I experienced this too. I always wondered, "What if this isn't really how it happened? What if I can't remember it right?" But I think that's okay. People know that memories aren't perfect, and that's where we come in as the writers, to fill in those blank spaces. And as for the things we thought when we were younger but have had revelations on since, that just makes for a better personal essay. Being able to tell the story how we experienced but then how we see it now. At least I think that's part of memoir writing. I don't have a whole lot of experience with it.
ReplyDeleteI've definitely experienced this before. It's so hard to draw the line between objectiveness and subjectiveness when writing memoir, and to keep the story both detailed and honest at the same time. I also liked how you mentioned that you know more now than you did then. That also brings up the problem of whether you should keep things at that viewpoint in that moment of time or enlighten your readers with what you later found out. I don't have a whole lot of experience with memoir, but I think it's probably important to draw from both to keep it balanced. No one has a perfect memory, and there will always be the details that you get wrong, but as long as you try to keep it honest as possible, I don't think there's much more you can do.
ReplyDeleteI know my perspective has changed on many topics, even in the last five years. I think what's frustrating is that I don't know how to communicate the significance of that experience into my writing. Are those things that are interesting to my audience? I think I put too much weight into my audience. I should probably start pretending they don't exist. Recognizing this transformation of perspective change is not only useful in memoir, but in any charcter description. Even within my memoirs, I could be pointing out more of the transformations in the people around me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Bethany! Lately I've been thinking about stories, and how we tell them, but really, how every part of our bigger world is an element of God's story that he's crafting, and just like sometimes I can't follow why an author put certain things in their story, but they resolve in the end, so God is doing the same thing, down to grass blades and stubbed toes. And my perspective is a part of it, and my storytelling too. But not all of it--his story is the biggest art, the true objective.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that those unknown details are scary territory. However, recently, I've begun to view them as something really beautiful. The human mind is obviously imperfect, but even still, God has given us each the ability to create and make beautiful things out of dust (just like He does everyday with each of us...and in that we are a reflection of Him).
ReplyDeleteI think it's okay to not get all the details wrong sometimes. It doesn't mean that something lovely can't come out of the story, and I don't think it makes the story less true. As long as its not a blaring detail, the way your mind has perceived a memory is actually pretty interesting and should be thought of as a treasure.
It is amazing how growing up, moving on, and gaining more experiences in life can change how you perceive events from your past! I bet if you tried to write another memoir on the same subject in 10 years it would be radically different, and then 10 years later different even than that! It can be hard when you are trying to convey the "truth" about a given situation because, like you said, you are a part of it and therefore not capable of being objective. Then again, objective stories would be pretty dry.
ReplyDeleteJoan Didion has also made the wheels in my head turn like no other author. She seems to write for herself more than her reader at times, which somehow connects with the reader and questions like these are asked.
ReplyDeleteOnce an older friend told me that retrospect can be a good and bad thing. It can bring healing and closure but it can also skew something into what it isn't. Say you're trying to recall a memory from your childhood. You will never be in that moment ever again, so you won't be able to exactly summarize your response from that moment. But you can try to frame it to understand it enough to do it justice. A writer really must try not to fictionalize your own life in light of retrospect.
I think the beauty of memoir is that it is the marriage of what you thought then (in the moment) and what you perceive about the situation now. If you were writing an autobiography, then you would probably need to research it in order to get it completely factual--sounds dumb, doesn't it, to research yourself? But one thing that I learned through one of my honors projects is that memoir has the license to be an interpretation by the author instead of a completely objective account of a situation, event, or life.
ReplyDeletePeople really get to see how you think/thought, and I think that's what makes memoir so attractive. We get to get inside your head, even if we know you may not think the same way anymore.