How to Remember When Writing a Memoir - Part 1

My friend Sarah and I were talking over Instagram about how memoir writers can possibly remember all the things they put into their books. We were having this conversation because a tex-mex restaurant famous for their signs, El Arroyo, posted a sign to their instagram that said, “WHENEVER I READ A MEMOIR IM LIKE HOW DID YOU REMEMBER ALL THAT.” We were also, of course, having this conversation because I’m writing a memoir.

El Arroyo’s sign originally posted at https://www.instagram.com/elarroyo_atx/

Sarah wasn’t the only one in my Instagram community to share this sign in their stories. Over private message, Sarah offered that she seriously has this question every time she reads a memoir. And so I offered to tell her how I remember all that stuff. This is a pretty big subject so I’m going to break it up into a few blog posts. Here’s part one which is more of the ‘why’. I’ll follow it up with the ‘how’. Sarah, this is for you, and for anyone who’s wondered how a memoirist actually puts all that stuff on paper.

Why this question actually matters

Most memoirs I’ve read that have been published since 2006 include a disclaimer that the book that’s being offered is the best version of the writer’s memory. This, I have always assumed has been a trend because Oprah called out James Frey for his fake memoir A Million Little Pieces.

Here’s an example: Jedidiah Jenkins writes in his Author’s Note for To Shake the Sleeping Self, “This story is based on my memory which is imperfect. Terrible sometimes. There are parts I’ve oversimplified or omitted for clarity. Life is damn complex and a lot happened.”

And another: On the first page of original text in Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland, Abbot writes that although she has sourced much of the story from actual documents of her father’s, much is built from her own memory and she sometimes re-created scenes and dialogue. “I’ve also invented dialogue,” she writes, “and changed the names of a few individuals in the book, but only when doing so had no impact on the veracity and substance of the story.”

I really appreciate what Abbott is trying to say, what does that actually mean? Is a memoirist a journalist for their own life? Can you expect to read a memoir and believe that everything they write is absolutely true? And who decides which details have impact on the veracity and substance of a story? And can we trust a writer’s memory?

The best memoirists will put things down that they themselves believe are the most absolute and accurate recollections of the events they want to share with you. They will omit areas they are unsure of and use research to fill in the gaps. Ultimately, you will have to decide whether or not you believe the writer which is the precursor to whether or not you accept their version of the world and the lesson they’ve learned.

But ultimately, a memoir isn’t an offering of journalistic integrity. It is an offering of self.

Memory isn’t fact. Memory is self.

When I was in college I returned home for a long weekend to visit family. My dad was working from home at the time. My mom and sister were at school, teaching and learning respectively.

I took a shower, and my mind wandered through memories in my childhood home. And for some reason I began to remember the time I sat on a nail and it broke off in my butt.

I had been small, maybe four years old. We lived in an old, white house with paint peeling inside and out. I used to slide on the wood floors in my socks until I got a long splinter in my big toe. And one day while playing with my brother and two of our friends, I climbed up on the old white fence on the side of our backyard. I sat on the top most board squarely onto a rusty nail that broke off in my rear end. My parents rushed me to the hospital. I was mortified that all of these adults standing around me could see me in my bloody Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles briefs. And I couldn’t sit on my right but cheek for a week until the stitches healed, a hard task for a four-year-old.

Now a college student, I stood there drying off, looking at myself in the mirror, recalling this story. And suddenly, I thought, is there a scar back there?

I have a scar on one of my eyebrows, another on my lip and a third on my ear, all form various childhood falls. What about the scar on my butt from the extraction of a rusty nail?

I stretched around to look in the mirror. Nothing. Shouldn’t there be a scar?

I got dressed and quickly went to my dad’s home office where he was quietly typing away.

“Dad,” I said, “Do you remember that time I sat on the rusty nail at the old white house?”

He paused. “What?”

“The nail. The time I sat on the nail and it broke off in my butt? We went to the emergency room? I was just looking for a scar, and I couldn’t find one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The nail,” I said again. And suddenly, fifteen years of lying flooded into my brain. There had been no nail.

I had told that story for so long, I believed it myself. I remembered suddenly why I’d made up the story. All the kids in elementary school had such great tales of bodily injury. Broken leg from falling out of a tree. Gash from a car accident. Scar from appendicitis. I had nothing. So, I’d made up the rusty nail story. And I’d been telling it for so long that by the time I was in college, I’d forgotten it wasn’t true.

More importantly, it had become part of my identity.

Your sense of who you are, your ‘self’, is built on the stories you tell yourself about what happened in your life. We tell ourselves these stories over and over and over again. We tell these stories to ourselves while we share them at dinner parties or in emails to a friend. You say to a friend, “I was waiting in line at the grocery store, and I couldn’t help myself. I bought a king size Reese’s and ate all four peanut butter cups before I drove out of the parking lot.” You’ve just told yourself and your friend that you are impulsive and that you love Reese’s so much you ate them all before doing anything else. The more you tell people the story of your chocolate indulgence, the more you reinforce those things about yourself.

I’d told the story of the rusty nail because I wanted to be cool. I wanted to think of myself as someone who’d been through something interesting. I wanted people to hear a story about my life and stop in their tracks. I wanted that to be part of my identity.

And, are you ready for the Inception-like twist of it all? Now that rusty-nail story is still part of my identity but means something altogether different: I am sometimes my own unreliable narrator. And now I care more deeply than before about being vigilant in my truth-telling. I didn’t simply stop telling the story. I let it evolve.

I’m writing a memoir because I want to share myself with you.

In writing a memoir, my dream is to hand over to you the best and most accurate version of my life. I will not share with you a day-to-day chronological explanation of every day of my life during Peace Corps. My goal is to share with you what it was like to be alive right then in that place and in that time. I want to share with you what it felt like to come out, to move across the world and try to build a life. I will gather every morsel, every crumb I can find of what I left behind all those years ago and put them together in hopes that you’ll be able to see a part of me. And in turn, I hope you see a part of you that connects to that part of me, that in that exchange we have a greater sense of the world around us.

But like, how do you actually remember the stuff? Next week I’ll share some actual, practical things I do to try to remember, my ways of gathering the bits and pieces of my memory. And I’ll reveal a bit about how my own memory and the facts have allowed the story of my time to Armenia to change and evolve these 13 years later.

Until then, go get your Reese’s and eat them all in the parking lot. I won’t tell a soul.