graciespeaks

book 24 of 24 books in 28 days: old friend from far away

I've been reading, practicing really, Natalie Goldberg since I was in graduate school the first time, writing bits of my dissertation in a coffee shop Writing Down the Bones-style.  I read Old Friend from Far Away in 2008, writing the first draft of my MFA thesis. 

As Lee Gutkind blurbs, "If you are a new writer with a memoir in mind, then [Old Friend] will start your creative engine and get you going.  If you are a writer who has lost your concentration and writing rhythm, Old Friend will help center and re-inspire you.  In this book, Natalie shares her heart and her overflowing spirit."

In 2008, scraps of writing in notebooks and computer files, I followed Goldberg's instructions because I didn't have a better way.  I still found myself screaming (quietly, politely, of course),

But I have all these bits and I don't have a structure!  When will the structure appear? 

Keep writing was the only answer that came.  Ten minutes of "I remember" if that's all you can do.  And finally a structure did come.  And that structure I wanted so badly is now, at this point in the process, about to fall away, because the project doesn't need it so much anymore.  It needed it then, but it's about to stand without it.

I decided to make this the 24th book in my 24-book series because, as Gutkind says, it works, or fits, or, maybe better, serves, at every stage of the writing process.  That's the beauty of what Goldberg teaches.  Just go back to the writing.  Pen to paper.  Butt in chair. However you want to think of it.  It's the only way.

Goldberg writes in "Read this Introduction,"

We are a dynamic country, fast-paced, ever onward.  Can we make sense of love and ambition, pain and longing? In the center of our speed, in the core of our forward movement, we are often confused and lonely.  That's why we have turned so fullheartedly to the memoir form.  We have an intuition that it can save us.  Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect.  It's not a diet to become skinny, but a relaxation into the fat of our lives.  Often without realizing it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning.  What does our time on this earth add up to?

The title Old Friend from Far Away comes from the Analects by Confucius.  We reach back in time to another country.  Isn't that what memory is?

        To have an old friend visit

            from far away--

                    what a delight!

So let's pick up the pen, and kick some ass.  Write down who you were, who you are, and what you remember.

I hope you're inspired to pick up a pen, too.

book 23 of 24 books in 28 days: memoir: a history

I like Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History for what it accomplishes--an ambitious cataloging of memoir from the beginning of the genre, with offshoots and subcategories, and examinations of the difficulties of navigating memory and truth.  For my purposes, which lately have been to teach myself about memoir and place my own writing within it, it works very well.

The New York Times Book Review wishes it went farther.  Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post likes Yagoda's book more than he likes the genre anyway.

Yagoda writes, "My main approach in seeking the answers to [questions of truth and memory] is not thematic, theoretical, generic, psychological, moral, or aesthetic, but historical."

He zigzags from the current fascination with memoir, to its origins--"chronicles and confessions"--and back to the present, with a break for "truth, memory, and autobiography," before going back to the Victorians and then back again to memoir in the present and then back again to the mid-20th century.  To me the back-and-forth structure makes the point that memoir has always been popular, and to think that it's only just now coming into huge popularity (and alternately reviled) is incorrect.

In his final chapter he addresses at length the James Frey fraudulent memoir.  After reviewing the press around the release of A Million Little Pieces, Yagoda rightly asks, "Is it any surprise that such a self-absorbed poseur should, in his book, have pumped up his life to make it seem more violent, painful, melodramatic and extreme than it was?"

He concludes his book with this same commonsensical approach, by

reproduc[ing] the wisest statement about [the standard of truth in memoir] that I've ever come across.  It was written in 1960 by a New York Times reporter named Raymond Walters, Jr. He observed:

The reader who picks up an autobiography merely for several hours' entertainment is not likely to be troubled about its truthfulness as long as it tells a good yarn.  But what of the reader who hopes to learn something about the ways of the world and how one individual responded to them?  He may follow a method discerning critics have used for centuries: when you start reading an autobiography, think of it as a person to whom you have just been introduced.  Size up as best you can the personality of the man or woman who is talking and take it constantly into consideration as you judge the truthfulness of what he has to say.

I talked about the truthfulness of Running With Scissors (and only after a commenter raised it). 

Food for thought, from the fiction side of things:

I said, "Stuart, I read fiction, my job is to be gullible.  I believe anything anyone tells me except for people who write memoirs."

--John Dufresne, "I Will Eat a Piece of the Roof and You can Eat the Window"

So, how do you tell whether a memoir is true?

book 22 of 24 books in 28 days: writing creative nonfiction

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and insights from the teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard, has the same textbook-y feeling of other neglected books on my sagging shelves.  It is also similarly a shame that I am just now digging into it.

It's divided into three sections:

• I. The Art, the Craft, the Business 
• II. Aftershocks--Responses to the Genre
• III. Creative Nonfiction Reader

The first selection  of the first section is "Why I Write" by Terry Tempest Williams.  Download Whyiwrite.  Yes, please download it and read it.  It's very short, and I can't do it justice by pulling out bits of it.

Another chapter in the first section that I find really insightful is  Phillip Lopate's "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character."  When I think of characters in memoir, I think of other people, not myself.  I know that I am revealing my self, that just like McCarthy and other writers, I want to let the reader know my flaws and shortcomings; I know that the "I" of my memoir is distinct from the "I" who physically sits at my keyboard right now. 

But I hadn't made this leap: "A good place to start is your quirks.  These are the idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, antisocial mannerisms, and so on that set you apart from the majority of your fellowmen."  I have a few tics and mannerisms, and I don't think I included them in my memoir. 

He also warns against self-dislike, writing that

an odor of self-disgust mars many performances in this genre and keeps many would-be practitioners from developing into full-fledged professionals.  They exhibit a form of stuttering, of never being able to get past the initial, superficial self-presentation and diving into the wreck of one's personality with gusto.

The proper alternative to self-dislike is not being pleased with oneself--a smugness equally distasteful to the reader-- but being curious about oneself.  Such self-curiosity (of which Montaigne, the father of the essay, was the greatest exemplar) can only grow out of that detachment or distance from oneself about which I spoke earlier.

Self-dislike as stuttering and the alternative to self-dislike as self-curiosity: these are ideas I can remember and use.

In "Researching Your Own Life," Michael Pearson writes, "As strange as it may sound, all memoir is a process of researching one's own life.  By that I mean rethinking, of course.  I also mean reimagining and perhaps revising--because to see the past anew is often to view it, even at great distances, more clearly."

Pearson sites Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mary Karr, and Frank McCourt as memoirists who returned to the scenes of their projects not only to verify their memories but to stimulate them.  "Memory is an archive like any other and can be used as such.  The materials stored there can sometimes be tested against other sources."

I'm going to have to step away from the computer and take a drive or two--unless I listen to E. Ethelbert Mille, who, in his essay "Learning to Breathe After the Memoir" advises the opposite. He writes, "I wrote [Fathering Words] from memory.  I decided not to read old journals or letters.  I didn't want to talk to anyone in order to obtain an opinion or insight.  I needed to trust my memory."

Miller concludes,

A memoir is a photograph.  It captures the pose, the way we wish to see ourselves and how others see us.  My life has been a way of learning how to push back the darkness in this world.  One struggles to be good and when one fails, one struggles again.  This is how I write.  Starting over meant writing my memoir.  I needed to know more about the writer I am, and the writer I am becoming.

Section III is a collection of creative nonfiction pieces.  I recommend  Barry Lopez's "Murder" and Annie Dillard's "Flying in the Middle of Art."

What do you think: to research or not to research?

book 21 of 24 books in 28 days: keep it real

Keep it Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind (aka the godfather behind creative nonfiction and the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction), is a slim, practical guidebook as the title suggests.  It covers a lot of ground that the other books I've discussed cover in greater breadth and depth, but it also, because of its brevity, makes some useful summations.

"The Five Rs:" worth keeping in mind, on a monitor Post-it if I can clear a space, the Five Rs of creative nonfiction:

• real-life aspect
• reflection
• research or reportage
• reading
• 'riting

Gutkind and the contributors to this book are also aware of the difficulties of creative nonfiction and memory and facts: "Memoir presents its own challenges and, to some extenet, demands its own set of rules.  In the absence of transcripts from interviews, memoirists must re-create scenes and conversations to the best of their abilities."

They delve into the practical side of things, with chapters organized alphabetically on such topics as  "Checkbook Journalism," "Composite Characters," "Defamation and Libel," "Immersion," Point of View," and so on.

One of the most interesting sections to me is "Quotation Marks," in which they write, "It's hardly a secret that some writers, particularly when writing memoirs, accounts of past events they weren't keeping records of, do the best they can at re-creating dialogue and place those re-creations within quotation marks."  This is a convention that has caused me some concern as I "quote" dialogue that is based on memory.  They offer a solution I will explore in my next draft: "One of the most useful innovations may be dialogue without quotation marks.  Frank McCourt used this approach in Angela's Ashes, and Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm."  Great idea.

Finally, in a section called "Scenes," they remind the writer of creative nonfiction to "use all the literary techniques available to fiction writers and dramatists.  These techniques include dialogue, description, action, and suspense."  This may seem to go without saying, but it, like the 5 Rs, is a good reminder.  With each draft, I should ask, do I have a narrative arc from scene to scene, from chapter to chapter?  Do I have good description using all the senses at my disposal?  Do I have action and suspense?

As with several of the other "overview" or "how-to" books I've blogged about, this one is worth a read mid-and late-project, not just early-project. 

book 20 of 24 books in 28 days: tell it slant

Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, is the kind of book one might buy, as I did, at the beginning of a nonfiction project.  It is a guidebook to the variety of material that falls under the heading "creative nonfiction" and a collection of questions and writing prompts.  But I am thinking as I read it now that it's valuable, too, as a source for fleshing out later drafts.  

It also covers some of the genre-defining ground that Lopate covers in his introduction and Hampl covers in her book, so I won't revisit that here.

One of the best things about the book (for the purpose of my thinking today and this blog) is its chapter-heading quotes from nonfiction writers.  I can't resist copying a few of them.

The best work speaks intimately to you even though it has been consciously made to speak intimately to thousands of others.  The bad writer believes that sincerity of feeling will be enough, and pins her faith on the power of experience.  The true writer knows that feeling must give way to form.  It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.--Jeanette Winterson

I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.  My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance . . . I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols.--Michel de Montaigne

Facts in all their glorious complexity make possible creativity.  The best nonfiction writers are first-rate reporters, reliable eyewitnesses focused on the world, not themselves, and relentless researchers with the imagination to understand the implications of their discoveries.--Philip Gerard

I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures and, like poetry, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme.  The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story.  It can do everything.  I felt as though I had switched form a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.--Annie Dillard

These books, these quotations, these writers: I am inspired to get back to my revisions.  I hope that if you're reading this, you are, too.

book 19 of 24 books in 28 days: the art of the personal essay

Phillip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay is another big book that has been untouched on a shelf until recently.    The class-syllabus-esque subtitle, "An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present," made it easy for me to pass by it on my way to, say, The Liar's Club.  This was an error in judgment; the book is a treasure trove.

The table of contents is presented in three ways: by chronology, by theme, and by form. 

I chose to read most of the essays in the "Memoir" section: Richard Steele's "An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow," George Orwell's "Such, Such Were the Joys," Walter Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseilles," Carlos Fuentes's "How I Started to Write," Mary McCarthy's "My Confession," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Scott Russell Sanders's "Under the Influence."  This book will remain off the shelf so that I can dip into it again.

Orwell and Baldwin are often-read-and-discussed classics; I found Steel and Benjamin and Fuentes slightly opaque for my current obsessions with revelations and undercurrents; I was most taken with McCarthy's and Sanders's essays.

But before I get to them, some insights from Lopate's "Introduction"--fortunately for me, they line up with the things I've been thinking (and quoting everyone else saying) about self-disclosure of not only one's shortcomings but of the gaps in one's memories and understanding:

"So often the 'plot' of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how far the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty."

"The personal essayist must above all be a reliable narrator; we must trust his or her core of sincerity.  We must also feel secure that the essayist has done a fair amount of introspective homework already, is grounded in reality, and is trying to give us the maximum understanding and intelligence of which he or she is capable. . . .  Part of our trust in good personal essayists issues, paradoxically, from their exposure of their own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust."

McCarthy's confession has to do with her interaction with members of the Communist party during the 1930s.  She sees everyone, including herself in her post-college arrogance and naive shallowness, through a clear lens, and doesn't shrink from showing herself in a "negative" light.  One example, from the beginning of the piece, exemplifies her wit turned on herself:

Yet whenever I entered the New Republic's waiting room, I was seized with a feeling of nervous guilt toward the shirtsleeved editors upstairs upstairs and their busy social conscience, and, above all, toward the shabby young men who were waiting too and who had, my bones told me, a better claim than I to the book I hoped to take away with me.  They looked poor, pinched, scholarly, and supercilious, and I did not know which of these qualities made me, with my clicking high heels and fall 'ensemble,' seem more out of place.

Later, she writes, concerning the comrades' assumption that she cared about what they cared about, she writes, "Speaking for myself, I cannot remember a single broad altruistic emotion visiting me during that period. . . ."  The story of her unwitting alliance with Trotsky plays out through her unblinking self-analysis.

Scott Russell Sanders's piece about his alcoholic father mines the depths of his emotions and memory.  He is aware of the limitations and demands of memory, self-conscious.  He has done the "homework" that Lopate says his genre demands.  At the beginning of the piece, he refers to "the perennial present of memory," and he introduces a description of his father's car with "in memory," as if memory is a country always available for exploration.

He is aware of the risk of telling a tragic addiction story, and gets that out of the way early, making instead the point that he writes in pursuit of understanding: "I do not wish to compete for a trophy in suffering.  I am only trying to understand the corrosive mixture of helplessness, responsibility, and shame that I learned to feel as the son of an alcoholic."

He returns to shame of secret-keeping again, and implicitly to the redemption of secret-telling: "The secret bores under the skin, gets in the blood, into the bone, and stays there.  Lon after you have supposedly been cured of malaria, the fever can flare up, the tremors can shake you.  So it is with the fevers of shame.  You swallow the bitter quinine of knowledge, and you learn to feel pity and compassion to the drinker.  Yet the shame lingers in your marrow, and, because of the shame, anger."

In the last paragraphs, he restates why he overcomes the shame and tells his story: "I am moved to write these pages now because my own son, at the age of ten, is taking on himself the griefs of the world, and in particular the griefs of his father. . . . I write, therefore, to drag into the light what eats at me--the fear, the guilt, the shame--so that my own children may be spared."

book 18 of 24 books in 28 days: michel de montaigne: the complete essays

The picture of this book, Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, doesn't do it justice.  At 2.5" thick, and 1284 pages, it's pretty daunting.  After my less than scholarly foray into Boswell territory, how to approach Montaigne? 

I chose four essays to read with the help of Phillip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay, which will have a post of its own soon. Lopate devotes a section if his book called "Fountainhead" to Montaigne's essays "On books," "On a monster-child," "On some lines of Virgil."  I read these and the last essay of my big collection, "On experience." 

I was delighted to find Montaigne engaging in questions of truth, memory, writing, and visibility.  I really can't do better than to quote him.

from "On books"

On revealing his own thoughts:  "I have no sergeant-major to marshal my arguments other than Fortune.  As my ravings present themselves, I pile them up; sometimes they all come crowding together: sometimes they drag along in single file.  I want people to see my natural ordinary stride, however much it wanders off the path."  He continues, "I freely say what I think about all things--even about those which doubtless exceed my competence and which I in no wise claim to be within my jurisdiction."

On why he reads: "I also like reading Cicero's Letters to Atticus, not only because they contain so much about the history and affairs of his time but, even more, so as to find out from them his private humours.  For as I have said elsewhere I am uniquely curious about my authors' soul and native judgment."

On interiority over exteriority: "Now the most appropriate historians for me are those who write men's lives, since they linger more over motives than events, over what comes from inside more than what happens outside."

On truth: "We can see . . . what a delicate thing our quest for truth is when we cannot even rely on the commander's knowledge of a battle he has fought nor on the soldiers' accounts of what went on round them unless, as in a judicial inquiry, we confront witnesses and accept objections to alleged proofs of the finer points of every occurrence.  Truly, the knowledge we have of our own affairs is much slacker."

from "On some lines of Virgil"

On no self-censorship: "I have moreover bidden myself to dare to write whatever I dare to do: I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot published.  The worst of my deeds or qualities does not seem to me as ugly as the ugly cowardice of not daring to avow it."

On being known: "I hunger to make myself known.  Provided I do so truly I do not care how many know it."

from "On experience"

On self-study: "Whatever we may in fact get from experience, such benefit as we derive from other people's examples will hardly provide us with an elementary education if we make so poor a use of such experience as we have presumably enjoyed ourselves; that is more familiar to us and certainly enough to instruct us in what we need.  I study myself more than any other subject.  That is my metaphysics; that is my physics."

On unreliable memory: "The slips by which my memory so often trips me up precisely when I am most sure of it are not vainly lost: it is no use after that its swearing me oaths and telling me to trust it: I shake my head."

On (though I'm sure he wouldn't call it this) mindfulness: "When I dance, I dance.  When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me."

book 17 of 24 books in 28 days: the life of samuel johnson

First, two confessions: if I were making my reading list today, I would not include James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.  I would include in its (pre-1900, evolution-of-the-genre) place, say, the work of St. Augustine, Anne Bradstreet, Benvenuto Cellini, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Margery Kempe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, St. Teresa of Avila, Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman.  And, second confession, I did not read this book cover-to-cover, but only around in, and about, it.

Boswell's Life is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the development of the genre of biography, and by extension, autobiography and memoir.  But by the time I came to this book, I was doggedly looking for what the memoirists I was reading were telling me about memory and truth and writing process, whether they were telling me overtly or between the lines of their writing.  

When this book begins with Boswell's inclusion of Johnson's schoolboy translations of Latin poetry, I find myself asking  what this tells me, not so much about Johnson, but about Boswell, the biographer committed to writing nearly every detail of recorded and remembered conversations he had with his subject, and referencing every bit of written material he can find.  And 18th-century British Literature is far enough outside my area of expertise that it seems presumptuous of me to even ask.  If there is merit to the question, it is likely that there are articles, dissertations, and books devoted to it already. 

So, instead of real analysis, a bit of trivia and, I hope, food for further thought: Johnson wrote his own memoir of his life, and before he died, he burned all the papers, knowing that Boswell was writing his biography.  In I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl describes Franz Kafka's deathbed instruction to his friend Max Brod to burn all his papers, knowing that Brod would not do it (and didn't.  Dora Diamant, Kafka's lover, burned what she could, but that's another story--see Hampl).  

If you have notebooks, computer files, journals, half-baked manuscripts, what will be your deathbed instructions to a friend (unless he's writing your complete biography)?

book 16 of 24 books in 28 days: i could tell you stories

I've had Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories on my bookshelf for over a year.  I don't know why I haven't read it until now, but if you haven't read it either, please do, and as soon as possible.  Hampl sprinkles her clarifying tonic on memoir, memory, and writing process through essays on poetry and memoir (from Whitman to Milosz to Plath to Augustine).

It's perfect for me to read at this point in my projects--the reading project and the writing project-- because she addresses many of the questions, fears, and conversations rattling around in my brain.  She shares her thoughts and writing process in ways that prod me. 

Hampl begins I Could Tell You Stories by asking what readers of memoir seek and find in it.  Her answer: "Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately.  More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear."

She writes about memory, and by extension, truth: "I am forced to admit that memory is not a warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures.  I must admit that I invented. . . .  It still comes as a shock to realize that i don't write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know."

She continues, "Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing.  It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story.  The first commandment of fiction--Show, Don't Tell--is not part of the memoirist's faith.  Memoirists must show and tell.  Memoir is a peculiarly open form, inviting broken and incomplete images, half-recollected fragments, all the mass (and mess) of detail.  It offers to shape this confusion--and, in shaping, of course, it necessarily creates a work of art, not a legal document."  This work of art vs. legal document distinction is one I am only now beginning to understand, now that I am about to embark on my fifth (or is it sixth?) draft and having read and discussed memoirs with a different purpose than I had a year or two ago.

On why she writes memoir, she echoes what so many memoirists mention as the pull of the past, not to luxuriate in its beauty, but to understand its suffering, : "I suppose I write memoir because of the radiance of the past--it draws me back and back to it.  Not that the past is beautiful.  In our communal memoir, in history, the darkness we sense is not only the dark of forgetfulness.  The darkness is history's tunnel of horrors with its tableaux vivants of devastation. . . .  There may be no more pressing intellectual need in our culture than for people to become sophisticated about the function of memory.  The political implication of the loss of memory are obvious."

My professor told me that I should be prepared to talk about the evolution of my thesis at the beginning of Tuesday's defense.  Even though my writing sample for admission to the MFA program was mostly memoir--the nonfiction pieces were the strongest I had to submit--I started the MFA with the goal of writing a novel.  Hampl addresses her process of evolving into being a memoirist this way: "What bothers me about this brief history of my literary attempts is that I ended up writing memoir . . . when that was the last thing I wanted to do.  Wasn't it? . . .  Put another way: How did I come to believe that what I knew was also what mattered?  And, more to the point for the future, is it what matters? Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.  For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's."

A must-read.

book 15 of 24 books in 28 days: moments of being

My methodology, if you can call it that, for writing these posts is to read a book, underlining as I go, and then reread the underlined sections, making little stars or asterisks in the margins, and then, as some theme or focus begins to take shape in my mind, go back through the book one more time with Post-it notes or flags and mark the pages with the stars that back up my theme. 

With Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being, my system broke down.  I read the collection of five essays ("Reminiscences," "A Sketch of the Past," "22 Hyde Park Gate," "Old Bloomsbury," and "Am I a Snob?"), marking them liberally, and then, because the five pieces touch on roughly the same topics, on the second time through, more sentences begged to be underlined, more lines made me say, oh, I see. 

So I'm only going to focus on the difficulties of memoir she writes about in "A Sketch of the Past."  She knows the difficulties because she pursues writing by practice, trying it this way, reading more of what other people do (her mother kept De Quincey's Opium Eater by her bed, and Woolf mentions reading Boswell), writing pieces over and over, from another angle, for another reader, writing, writing, writing.  The last three essays in this book were written for the Memoir Club, a group that must have been extraordinary.  They met to read, write, and discuss memoir, and one of the problem is that the memoirs "must turn that beam inwards and describe ourselves."

She writes of memoir in general, "There are several difficulties.  In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written.  As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways."

She makes herself begin writing anyway (usually a good idea) but soon enough she interrupts herself: "Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties--one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures.  They leave out the person to whom things happened. . . .  I do not know how far I differ from other people.  That is another memoir writer's difficulty.  Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold--?"

Part of the trouble, she realizes, is shame, first shame upon looking in a mirror--"I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall.  I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body"--and then, the shame that comes from looking into the mirror of the memoir.  "Witness," she writes, "the incident of the looking-glass.  Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others; I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident; and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it.  In spite of all this, people write what they call 'lives' of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown."

But in spite of the risk of shame, she perseveres because writing will give her power over events and also because it gives her great pleasure.  ". . . I make [a shocking event] real by putting it into words.  It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.  Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.  It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together."

Reading these essays, I resolve to continue my apprenticeship, reading, reading, reading, and writing, writing, writing, long after the end of 28 days, all the while, looking in the mirror, banishing shame, creating pleasure.