Come again?

Hello. I’m sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but it was as necessary as it was unexpected. I’ve been thinking – and playing catch up/reading – and I hope to regain the pace with which I flew through the first six books or so of this project. With five weeks of junior year left and “senioritis” already settling in my bones, I see no sign of that speed returning any time soon. Don’t fret, beloved reader! Memoir, the genre of silent conversation (I see that interrobang (?!, combined) over your furrowed brow. Let me explain…), will always lure me to the nearest armchair. Like any English major, I examine a memoir for its content and form, but judge the work for its character. Memoirs are petitions for sympathy, an open palm extended towards another.

I accept.

Finally returning to this project, I read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, a book on my “To Read” list since my sophomore year of high school. Born in the U.S., the America of beaming smiles and gilt eagles, McCourt immigrated to Ireland as a young boy. Job scarcity and his father’s alcoholism kept McCourt, his mother, Angela, and his younger brothers on the move, leaving one “lane” (slang for slums or ghettoes) for another, but never out of severe poverty. (I wonder, must a memoir include hardship of some kind, or merely a change, a shock to one’s system?)

Casting nets

For whom do we write? A memoir recalls and responds to intimacies lived. It is a collection of our experiences, many of which are foreign to others, simply because our life is not theirs. Whether we produce confessional or meditation, we must present our memories in a way that is not only intelligible to our readers, but accurate to the visceral and intellectual impressions of that experiences. Our words must be effective and affective. But, as with all writing, we risk being misunderstood: we anticipate the shape of our words’ impressions on the minds of others. In what shapes, what colors will traces of these words, these bruises, surface?

I’ll stop the melodrama, but the translation process from author- to readership, is an extractive, even violent one. You delve – dive, dive, dive – into the personal to find something for public consumption. You come back up for air and offer pearls to buyers. You offer, but is it the color or size they want? Do they even know what they want? When I finished Speak, Memory, the memoir of Vladimir Nabokov, I could not forget the distance between myself and the narrator, and between the experiences of author- and readership. How accurately can a memoir translate a person’s life into one with which I, the reader, can understand and sympathize (read: feel with)?