by David W. Berner
“Just the facts, ma’am.”
Well, Joe, I hate to tell you: the facts aren’t quite enough. Not when you’re writing memoir. A true story, even a crime story, is not completely true if you give the reader just the simple WHO, WHAT, WHEN and WHERE. You need at least one other very important ingredient–the reflective moment.
It’s a key element in memoir writing and it’s the genuine voice of the writer. Anyone who is familiar with the story can detail facts, but only the author can look back at an experience and make sense of those facts in a most personal light, seeing them in a nuanced way, viewing them with a newness that gives the story a truer truth. This is the part of an author’s narrative that goes deeper, has richer significance. Memoir is just not memoir without it.
In my most recent book, Any Road Will Take You There, I recount a night when I chaperoned my younger son and two of his buddies – all around 13 years old – to a heavy metal rock concert. The facts of that night might be interesting enough to some, but the deeper meaning is in the reflection. That night was not so much about my son and the performances, it was about me accepting my son’s favorite music and ultimately accepting him at a time when he was struggling with school, his health, and his place in the world. As the author of my story, I needed to step away from just reciting the particulars of the event but also look at it from a distance, examine the bigger meaning. If I had only told the facts of the narrative, the simple black and white, the true colors in that story would never have emerged, the emotional truth would have been lost.
If memoir is to be memoir, the writer has no choice. He must go deeper than the essentials. He must interpret the facts with the reflective voice and uncover the wisdom that is underneath. And it doesn’t matter how fantastic or simple the facts might be. You could have bodysurfed the English Channel, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, or sailed the oceans alone, or you could simply be telling the story of your family’s life on a Texas farm. It doesn’t matter. Every good memoir – every style and approach – needs the reflective voice.
Given this, how then does a writer avoid what is frequently called navel gazing, that narcissistic inward observation that is all about ME, ME, ME? Well, first, you have to accept that the story IS about YOU. Personal memoir is, by definition, about ME, ME, ME. But…and here’s the big difference…your story has to be concerned with the universal me. We all share the aspects of the human condition. We all have the same wants and needs, the same fears and desires. This has to be forefront when you are about to reveal the reflective voice. Being reflective is not being self-absorbed; it’s about being a member of the larger community, the human race. Find common ground in your reflective moments then share it with no fear.
In Any Road Will Take You There, I write about returning to my hometown of Pittsburgh from my new home in Chicago, fully aware that my mother, living out her final days in an elderly care home, is nearing the end of her life. I could have wasted words writing about how this so deeply changed me. Certainly, it changed me. What I instead decided to write about was the shared truths of this experience in a more nuanced way. I wrote about what I saw in those miles returning home–lonely farm land, a young man apparently making his way to college and away from his family the same way I once did, and an elderly woman, about the same age as my mother, traveling alone, full of life and spirit, an awful contrast to my mother’s last days. This, I believe, kept the story more universal and less about ME, ME, ME. But it still permitted the reflective voice to be realized, giving the facts of the story a more fully formed truth.
The inclusion of the reflective voice in a personal story is, in many ways, a pause in the action. It permits the reader to take a moment to sigh, cry, mediate, laugh, or recollect. We all need space in storytelling to permit the narrative to sink in, and the reflective voice is the tool that makes this to happen.
So, when shaping your story take all the care you need to get the facts right, but take plenty of time to consider the bigger significance of those facts. What really was going on in the car during that vacation road trip to the lake, around the table at that holiday dinner, on the trails during that hike in the Appalachian Mountains, or that long walk to the principal’s office at school? Tell that story. This is your truest truth. This is the soul of memoir.
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