A few weekends ago I attended a three-hour memoir workshop with screenwriter and memoirist Annick Smith—
(Belated post, I know. I’ve also been moving across town, and you would have no idea how well and neatly I had packed my old apartment with things I didn’t need. Lessons learned: accept only edible gifts, love your local Goodwill, don’t own a piano if you live on the third floor of a walk-up and are too frugal to hire movers.)
—anyway, Annick Smith. Her opening lecture on nonfiction and memory was great, albeit somewhat of a repackaging of techniques carried over from fiction. The narrator is a character. “I” is a character. Therefore, in writing creative nonfiction, you are creating a character who is very much like you, but will never be you exactly. She said that in memoir the “I” is a free thing, free of linear story, free to roam and encompass a mind. The goal of writing memoir, then, is you can’t achieve truth (verisimilitude, pathos, rapport with the reader, whatever you want to call it) by writing story, but to write an entire mind. This is the cosmic I.
She also said to shrug off the guilt of writing all about yourself, because good memoir is not really all about you. It’s about writing about your experience so that readers can see themselves in it. So, your memoir is ultimately about your reader. This is also the cosmic I.
Finally, she offered some technical advice. The first draft is always easy–scrawl it down, reel it off, follow your mind where it leads you. The second draft is about finding the lies. Memoir writing is psychotherapeutic, it seems; we tell ourselves lies, and hold onto erroneous details in memory, so that we can maintain a comfortable self-image. In order to get to the truth, however, we must use revision to find the errors in our own memories, and correct them. From that, we make it possible for the reader to see themselves in everything that is uncomfortable, illogical, gauche, vulnerable, and silly in our own lives. I suppose this is the cosmic I, too.
So, if the cosmic I happened to be watching me sort out my belongings this week, it might have wondered why I kept the piano, which I never play; why I got rid of the bathrobe that I wore almost every morning. Why I kept cornmeal, vinegar, corn syrup, and peanut sauce; but why I packed away the silverware that my mother set out at every dinner of my childhood, and taped up the box, and put it in a far corner of storage. It’s a good subject for another post, probably.
