How to Remember When Writing a Memoir - Part 2

How does an author remember all the things they put into their memoir?

Last week I started writing an answer to this question and began answering it by exploring memory. Memory is simply the stories we tell ourselves and others that make up our idea of who we are and how we are in the world. Most times, those memories are what we know as fact. We believe those memories are fact. Sometimes they are not. (Please see the part where I sat on a rusty nail.)

As a writer, I want to tell you the best story I can made up of the best memories I can gather. I want to share with you what happened that changed me, that created the ‘me’ I am now, the things that moved me to tears or rage or joy or laughter or hope. I want to tell you the best story I can, and I want you to know what happened.

A life of storage

The first thing I’ll tell you about how I remember is that I have lived a life of storing memories. When something is happening that I want to remember, I try hard to imprint it on my mind. I try to feel every feeling, smell every smell, hear everything, see it all. I hold it and take in as many details as I can. And then, right after that, I repeat those things in my mind, the way you would repeat the name of cities for a geography test.

This has not been difficult. It’s something I’ve always done. I love memory. It is the way I return to the best parts of my life and process the worst parts until the worst parts don’t scare me anymore.

I tell stories as often as I can. You know how they say (who ‘they’ is I don’t remember) that if you repeat someone’s name three times in your first conversation with them you’ll remember it. I’ve found that to be mostly true with names. And I’ve also found that to be mostly true with my memories. So when I tell stories, those memories become more and more imprinted in my mind.

Start with the easiest memories

And then I sit down to write. Where do I start? With the memories that are easiest. The effort of writing can feel monumental, so you reach for the lowest hanging fruit.

What are the stories you tell at dinner with your friends that make them light up? What are the stories that moved you to tears? Don’t analyze them yet. Don’t try to find the meaning. Just write them down.

When I think of Armenia these are the first things that pop into my head:

My friend Gayane and the last good day we had to hang out as friends. After two years of living In Stepanavan she and another friend from work and her son took me and my friend Claire to a small church a small hike up a hill. I’d never been to that church, and I was stunned to find a place so beautiful on a side of Stepanavan I’d never explored despite living in this tiny town for two whole years.
Alvard, who made me coffee every day I worked in the World Vision office. I think of her immediately coming through the door of the kitchen asking me, “Surj uzum es?” Do you want coffee? And after I say yes, because she knows me she asks, “Shakaravas? Kes gtal?” Sugar? Half a spoon?
My host family, their two daughters. Having coffee with them after work. Playing nardi with Artur when he came home.
My cottage in my host family’s yard. The pink walls. The window above my table top gas stove which I opened in the winter to let the steam out when I cooked pasta.
Coming out to my friend Liana after I’d fallen in love for the first time and needed to explain why I was absolutely distracted from my work.
Dancing at the unofficial gay bar in Yerevan, the song “Dancing Queen” coming on near closing time, the men standing on tables, fully clothed, lassoing their scarves in the air.

Follow one memory onto the next. As if the memory is a key to another memory.

When I first sat down to work on this book years ago, I started stream-of-conscious writing on any topic that came to mind. I didn’t write an outline. I didn’t put down every single story that would make up my book. I started writing. This did a couple of things.

First, it helped build momentum for my writing. And secondly, it helped me explore the crevices of my mind. Writing is like stepping back into a room you left years ago. Stepping into it with your mind. My memory is cinematic. When I close my eyes and imagine my host family’s kitchen, I see Serine at the stove, the spoon scraping the sides of the jazzve while she makes coffee. I can feel the upholstery fabric that covered the bench of their dining room table. I can feel the sunflower seeds in my hand, the lift of a seed to my mouth, finding a groove in one front tooth, cracking the shell and sliding the tiny morsel onto my tongue.

In writing this way I can feel the world expand in my mind. I couldn’t tell you at first what color the drapes were, but as I walk through their house in my mind I not only remember the thin, translucent white drapes over their long windows, but the red wooden stairs that connected the kitchen to the room where the girls slept. And then suddenly, I remember my mom sitting on a chair in the room looking out the window while Serine does her hair, blowdrying it after a shower.

I didn’t have a blowdryer in my cottage. And just now, right now as I write this, I’m recalling that I’d never seen anyone outside of a salon do my mother’s hair. Not her mother. Not her sisters. Not any friends. The only person I’ve ever seen do my mother’s hair besides my mother is Serine, the mother of my host family in that tiny town of Stepanavan. As if they were childhood friends.

I’m making a note right now to add that to the book.

And I have more questions? I don’t even know how that happened. I know my mother would have wanted a blow dryer. I would have asked Serine if my mom could borrow one. But how did my mom end up in a chair with Serine actually styling her hair? And it happened every morning after that for the entire time my mom was in Stepanavan. It charmed the heck out of me. But I don’t know how it happened.

Interviews

I will have to ask my mom about this. My editor would call this an “interview” and ask me to log it as such so that when he reviews my work. Mom, I know you’re reading this. I’m sure you’ll tell me before I even ask. (Mom is great at that kind of thing. I love it.)

Memoirists interview people. All writers do, actually. Fiction writers might have a character who is, say, a paleobotanist. And you know who loves to talk about paleobotany? Real, living paleobotanists. So, a fiction writer may well reach out to one and interview her about her life, her work, and then, with permission, add details into the book. (If you’re looking for a paleobotanist to interview, it took me two seconds on LinkedIn to find one who looks amazing. A real life Ellie Sattler!)

A memoirist will likely reach out to interview anyone that might help them fill in the gaps that they don’t remember. I will certainly interview my mom about her relationship with Serine and how the morning blowdrying became a thing.

Photographs

Photographs are extremely helpful. You can write pages and pages from one single photograph, filling up paragraphs with details of a room, the people in the room, the things that happened in that room, the last time you left it, or what you took with you when you left.

Photographs are good for writing memoir not only for the exact memory they depict (I have so many pictures of hikes with friends at Lori Berd, the 1000s fortress balanced on the edge of the canyon that runs along Stepenavan). They also take you down memory rabbit holes. You can look at a picture of a trip, then remember the first time you met the person in the photo. Then you can remember they time you got in a fight, when you made up, the hike to Lori Berd and then the last time you saw them. And all the sudden you have memories strung together into a narrative arch worth exploring.

I dig into my photos constantly. All my pictures from 2009-2011 were taken on a chubby little Olympus camera with a little square screen on the back. They’re stored on a number of harddrives in a box in my office, and when I want to remember, say, the memorial for the genocide we helped create in Privolnoye, I pull out the harddrives.

As another example, here’s the oldest photo on my phone.

I took this photo on my first vacation I took from my first job in Minneapolis. I visited a Peace Corps best friend, Margaux, in San Francisco. We went to some market by a pier I can’t quite remember. Then we went to a beach on the side of some neighborhood where we ran barefoot in the sand and looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge. We were staying at her sister’s apartment, and that night we walked to a bar down the block and shared a fish bowl. What did we do after that? For obvious reasons I do not remember. Was there a drag show? Perhaps I’ll need to interview Margaux. Or her sister.

Emails

I never delete emails. This is not a strategy for memory. It’s laziness. But it’s turned out to be very helpful. I do like to be able to search old emails to find old things. A digital hoarder. Sorry, Google Mail. It has served me well. I spent a lot of time in Peace Corps writing long emails to friends and family describing my life in Armenia. That has been a treasure trove of stories, though most emails simply add detail to things I do already remember.

Journaling

This is the last and best way I remember things that have truly, already left my brain.

When I was nineteen and in college, my mom told me I should start journaling. She said to me, “I wish I’d written things down. Especially when you were little kids. Like, I remember that it was wonderful. But I don’t actually remember what it was like to hold you.”

That spoke to me, the loss of time and the memories that fall away from us. So I started right then at nineteen. I journaled. I filled up an empty sketch book and then filled up a second one. I have been journalling ever since (though, strangely, much less since I’ve become a parent). I have dozens of journals, and I’ve read through the journals that I filled up during my years in Peace Corps.

Without those journals, I wouldn’t have remembered the time my host sister came into my room with her family album full of old gray photos, watching her run her hands over them with tears in her eyes while she told me their stories in a language I didn’t yet understand.

My book is about coming out, and without those journals I wouldn’t have remembered that my first two romantic encounters with men happened on the same day in two different cities. In my mind they were two different events, totally separated from each other. But no, the journals set that awkward record straight.

Without those journals, I wouldn’t remember so much of my mom’s visit to Armenia, and I would have forgotten completely the moment, right before she got onto the bus to leave Stepanavan, when she reached out to take Gayane’s hand, clasping around her wrist a bracelet Mom had made and brought with her to give away to a new friend she was sure she’d meet in on her journey to the other side of the world.

Write what comes

Ultimately, I write what comes. I close my eyes and explore the memories I can find in my mind. I look photos. I log into old email. I page through journals and mark pages with sticky notes. And I sit down and write what comes.

My book, it turns out, will not be the chronological detailing of days. It will be much more like a sculptor who finds objects that inspire feeling, then assembles them into a work that says something to you, the observer of that art. My memories, right now in this moment, are strewn about on a digital table, and I am currently looking out at them hoping they all come together in the end and make sense to you. Oh, how I hope they will.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’m likely in my attic, simply trying to remember.