Those facts require response, and it’s there that we start to deepen character. These are the facts.īut memoir is so much more than facts. My father would half-sing and half-talk the lyrics along with her. She would sing “Happy Birthday” to me in her thin and off-key voice. My mother would light the candles on the cake and tell me to make a wish and blow them out. We would sit at our chrome-edged dinette table, and I would enjoy my feast. It was our habit to have these things for supper each year on my birthday.
It was what I asked for each year for my birthday supper-that and baked beans, scalloped potatoes, a lime Jell-O salad with nuts and cream cheese, and a German chocolate cake for dessert. One of my mother’s specialties was chopped steak that she browned in a frying pan and then baked in the oven. Revising a memoir is often a matter of responding. It’s one thing to narrate a story it’s quite another to use that story as a way of responding to ourselves, others, and the situations we find, or have found, ourselves in. “If you do not tell the truth about yourself,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “you cannot tell the truth about others.” So much of revising a memoir has to do with discovering more layers of truth about ourselves and about the other people in our lives. The truth, though, is that the primary work of revision in a memoir has to do with deepening characterization, particularly the character of the writer. This isn’t to say that the structure of the memoir rarely needs reshaping. Because, as this student said, the stories are already set by what actually happened, we generally have to look elsewhere when it comes to what we need to pay attention to in the revision process. For the most part, though there are exceptions, it’s the way I approach the writing of creative nonfiction. How, then, do I know what I need to do in order to revise? We don’t have to spend time inventing a plot. The student who asked the question made the good point that the plot in memoir is always set for us by the recollection of actual events. One of them had to do with how I went about revising a memoir.
Last week, I visited, via Skype, an MFA course in the memoir taught by Ira Sukrungruang at the University of South Florida. My mother is all about more even on this day when she shouldn’t have to be working at all. When my father and I sit down to eat, we never have to worry about wanting more. She makes noodles, mashed potatoes, a roast, whatever is in season in our vegetable garden-corn, peas, green beans-and a pie or cake-angel food, apple, blackberry, chiffon. This is her day of rest, a day she doesn’t work in the laundry or the kitchen at the nursing home, but she makes sure we have a good dinner after church. She has prepared as much of our noon meal as possible before church, but she still has work to do. Today, I start with a memory of my mother in the kitchen on Sundays.
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