Life in a memoir trance

...is fruitful but only sometimes fun and also hard to sustain.

They say that living in the past is unhealthy, but I’m not 100% on board with that notion. I’ll allow that getting stuck in grievances, repeating old complaints in the same old language, is generally useless to those who indulge in it and tiresome to those who might still bother to listen. At the same time, I know that over the years I’ve gained a great deal of general insight and specific self-knowledge from what looks like obsessive revisitation—of ancient disappointments and traumas, or of complex recent incidents that can bear fresh interpretations based on slowly accreting wisdom. Basically, I like peeling the layers of the onion. It gives me an illusion of control or at least mastery. It helps keep me from making the same stupid mistakes more than, say, three times in a row.

Or maybe it’s just my favorite hobby.

In any case, I think the Santayana maxim, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, is as true for individuals as it is for nations.

I never intended to be a memoirist. My earliest book ambitions in my late teens and early twenties were focused on densely plotted novels and feisty political arguments. I sketched out many of each and finished none. I won’t bother repeating the not-very-interesting story of how I slowly found myself turning—first with reluctance, then with grudging acceptance, and finally with some genuine satisfaction—toward autobiographical writing. At least for the time being. Suffice it to say that here I am, forty years after the first of my adolescent book schemes, finally knowing that John Gardner’s description of “the vivid, continuous dream” can apply to the raw material of one’s own actual life as much as to the fancies of an overactive imagination. That’s because we are creatures of our imaginations even as we go mucking about in the so-called real world. There is no self without some story of that self, whether consciously burnished or simply followed by rote.

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

I want to thank you all again for allowing me the month of March to be quiet here while I let my memories chatter at me without significant interruption. Anyone who’s written any kind of book knows that at a certain point, you enter a trancelike but functional state where you can do plenty of other stuff—cook your meals, take your dog to the vet, compile your tax documents, go on first dates, investigate your college sophomore’s chosen major requirements—but still be living in the fog of the story you’re writing. You are present insofar as you need to be, but otherwise, it’s secretly all book, all the time. It feels great, but only in the way that a nice, slowly built-up liquor buzz feels great. Great but unstable. Great but perilous. You are there and not there at the same time. At any moment you might tip over into blech, too much.

My monthlong book trance has been very fruitful. I haven’t hit the word count I wanted but I’ve made enormous strides in plotting out the narrative arc of a memoir that I believe will resonate with many readers. I’ve written several first chapters and what I believe to be the last few paragraphs. The final work will be one woman’s answer to some hard, important questions for many of us: What do you owe your mother if she was not a very good mother? How do you care well enough for the person who didn’t care well enough for you? Can you unearth—for your own sake—enough forgiveness and love to become the sensible, responsible, compassionate decision-maker and proxy, the parent of your parent, when that time inevitably comes?

It’s been a very fruitful month but I can’t say it’s been all fun. In addition to revisiting painful old episodes within my family of origin as a child and young adult, I have also had to delve into my own middle-aged missteps with love, romance, anger, sex, trauma, and money. The downside of possessing a good memory and a penchant for self-narration is that you end up essentially reliving some of the darkest episodes and most dramatic situations, and you might fall prey to the same intense emotions you experienced the first time around. You even go through worse and newly painful reinterpretations of certain events now that the numbing effects of the original experience have worn off.

I went through a small depression for a few days mid-month, waking up in tears about things that happened anywhere from two to twenty years ago. A professional hazard, no way around it. The challenge is to pull up out of those moments to remember that the emotions serve no purpose now other than to help guide words onto the page and arrange the story elements artfully. Craft is what moves you out of self-involvement. A doable process, simple but never easy. Art and therapy are not the same things, but in a pinch, skill with the latter can help out with the former.

That said, there’s only so much time you can spend on a bender made of your own memories. It’s fruitful if not always fun to live inside the buzzy, boozy trance of a book like this, but then you do need to sober up—if only to get steady for the next deep dive. So I’ll return to my regular Tuesday & Friday posts next week, and try to redirect my attention to the bigger world outside my own skull. At least until the next sabbatical…

Thanks for sticking around to see what’s what.

~S.