Honoring the Seams: The Memoir-in-Pieces
THE PAST IS present, and the present isn’t yet. We are what we remember plus the current circumstance. Time hurtles forward, but look at us contradicting ourselves as we zig and we zag all over the place.
Those of us who wish to write memoir—to engage with the facts and confessingly subvert them, to measure the actual scene against the aspiration—have a challenge. We forget too much, and we’re overwhelmed by what we remember. We work so very hard to hold our storytelling frames, but paradoxically our experiences can seem less true when we present them as one breathless continuum.
But what if we allow our writing to reflect the fragmented nature of life itself? What if we rely on white space and seams, celebrate explicit contradictions, make more room for the tangent and the metaphor and the sideways glance? What if we decide that the whole is not just bigger than the parts, but also that it may be more finally true for having been assembled in pieces?
I like the memoirs built of pieces. I write here of some of my favorites.
WHEN SONJA LIVINGSTON began to write about her life with an itinerant mother and six siblings in the raw corners of western New York, she wrote, she says, in snatches. “I wrote of living in apartments and tents and motel rooms. Of places where corn and cabbage grew in great swaths. Of the Iroquois on their reservation outside of Buffalo.”
But when Livingston tried to connect these fragments into a memoir, she told Bookslut interviewer Elizabeth Hildreth in March 2010, she ran into a problem:
I tried to connect them in [a]
