Many years ago I took a writing class with Eileen Myles. For one of the exercises she led us through, we watched an old movie—black and white, eerie and dramatic—with the sound turned off. As we watched it, we wrote. We wrote the scene, the dialog, descriptions of unscrolling setting.
Now when I revisit my memories to write this memoir I’m working on, I have the same impression of watching something with the sound turned off—although it’s not always the audio that is missing. Sometimes it’s the soundtrack of emotion, the nuanced ups, downs and sideways of real life, faded into a single flash of feeling or only the gestures and words—just the facts ma’am. I have to dig in to narrate myself, to find/ remember the beats.
I have to borrow complexity and shift from the roar and rumble of now. I have to shape the particular from the general—what might have been then from what is known now. In this sense, it’s not so different from fiction, which takes the raw materials of life and makes them into story. Invention is necessary to both, but in memoir you are not inventing the time or place or action but the underlying self that gave those meaning.
There is a way to dig into your story and to steal the thick flow of reality from now and bring it into your story.
Here is my simple secret. Ask yourself:
How would I feel if this were happening today, right now? Include the inconvenience of having to deal with it, the fact that you have other plans, a body, needs . . . Bring what you know about yourself now—so much more complex and contradictory than the self in memory—to bear on the circumstances and discover the complexity and contradictions of then.
Now tell me in the comments below, when you do this thought experiment even now, how does that bring the full force of life into your memory of the past?