Playing Into/Against Chaos
Am I writing a speculative memoir?
I had dinner with a friend last night and she asked about my writing. “How’s it going?” she asked. “What are you working on?” A reasonable enough question, given that our friendship is predicated on our both being writers. And it would seem to be an easy enough question to answer. But the moment she asked it, I felt my face get hot and my tongue get heavy in my mouth.
“It’s…going?” is all I could manage, and added a nervous “haha” as punctuation at the end.
And it’s true that it IS “going.” I’ve kept my promise to myself to stay close to the draft every week. But the “how” part is harder to get my brain around, let alone describe to someone else, even a fellow writer who is no stranger to the complexities of early drafting.
I tried to explain my current process:
“Well, I have the transcripts from our interviews separated into individual files and I’m reading through them and adding marginalia like we do with students, annotations…uh, I’m talking back to them? Arguing?”
She nodded her head and seemed to get it so I continued,
“I have no illusions whatsoever that this is at all literary at this point. I’m just experimenting. Playing. Trying to trust my instincts and the process.”
A week or so ago, another friend sent me this essay from the Brevity Blog, saying it reminded her of my project. In “Ouija Boards, Erasure, and Speculation: Experimentation in Memoir,” the writer Marty Ross-Dolen describes her struggle to write a memoir using artifacts—letters and personal effects collected by her mother— from her grandmother’s life and the feelings of overwhelm that arose from it:
But at the same time, that overwhelm of material translated into a kind of writer’s paralysis. How was I supposed to tell the story of my grandmother’s life through her letters in a way that would be of interest to anyone other than me? And how could I take that story and fold it into my own, conveying my drive to know the woman whose name I share but never actually knew?
It’s a fascinating read and one that made me wonder if I, too, am writing something like a speculative memoir. (Elsewhere I’ve called it “documentary.” I may need to spend some time with these descriptors to figure out what I mean.) It also made me feel immediately more comfortable sitting in the middle of the chaos of the video transcripts, not to mention the morass of memories from 50 years of life with my mother. Ultimately, Ross-Dolen decides that she needs to “loosen the clutch on worry” and “just play.”
That’s what I’m doing, too, though I am also starting to move towards more intentional, structured efforts as well. I’ve applied for some funding from my university so that I can travel this summer to write in Yonkers, NY, where both my mother (in 1949) and I (in 1970) were born (in the same hospital.) As I said in my application,
“It’s true I can write anywhere, but being able to drive by the places my mom has talked about, visit the hospital where we were born, and get to spend time with her surviving brothers and sister will infuse this project with a kind of energy I won’t otherwise have access to at home in Pittsburgh.”
So, dear aunt and uncles, I may be coming your way sometime this summer. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we can tell stories about mom. I’ll bring the Kleenex, too.