Flash Memoir Friday: "Crux Moments," Guiding Questions, and Personal Essay
Also Roland Barthes, Andy Garcia, and Julian Sands
This week, I thought I’d talk about guiding questions for essays, discussing the way that it’s useful when writing personal essay to stop at some point in the drafting and/or revision process and assess for yourself what overarching question you are really exploring. Then I realized I already wrote a post on that. Here is part of what I say in that post:
I think this is how many essays and poems are born. There’s something that tugs at our attention, that has an excess (of something) you can’t explain. And then we follow the thread. We allow ourselves to exist in and with mystery, and we discover the larger “guiding question” from there. We have to begin writing, to set out with a terrible, daunting faith, in order to even get to the point in a draft when we can stop and assess for ourselves what the larger question is.
So, what is the thing that tugs at us? It’s usually a scene, behavior, or object from memory that stays with you, that contains an excess of energy that bears examining, even if the essay remains about the examination and comes to no definitive “answer.” A professor in my doctoral program (Robert Caserio) talked about the significance of the “crux moment” in a novel, by which he meant a scene that seemed to have unexplained excess energy about it that one couldn’t fully account for as a reader. This idea has stayed with me, and it’s something that I’ve found useful to think about in relation to the personal essay.
In my last post about this, I used the example of an essay by my (our) friend Jessica Mesman:
How do we find the urgency? It’s important not to get stuck in thinking we need access to a Big Idea in order to begin writing. In fact, the opposite is true. Often, the way in is through the concrete detail of a specific memory that stays with us. We follow the mystery embedded in a memory, the “what was that about?” in order to get to a larger question. For example, in Jessica Mesman’s essay “He Shall Be a Light,” she starts out following the thread of memory of “the glowing nativity from my bedroom window, the whole set in molded plastic: Mary, Joseph, three wise men, two sleeping sheep, a donkey with a saddle, Baby Jesus in the manger.” The essay then moves through a meditation on the religious scrupulosity of her childhood, to a memory of sitting outside by herself as a solemn teenager listening to Depeche Mode while her mother “was in bed back at our house, suffering another toxic dose of chemo, dying at thirty-five.” Finally, the piece turns toward an account of being given the book Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and discussion of her burgeoning writer identity.
When I asked Jessica what the guiding question of this essay was for her, she told me that originally it was “why do I unironically love my tacky light-up nativity,” but “then it became about being a writer.” The nativity set was for Jess what we might think of as a crux moment—an image, scene, or exchange that has an unexplained excess energy one can’t fully account for.
This is also connected in my mind to the “punctum” in photographs, an idea from Roland Barthes about the detail in personal photographs that creates an emotional “wound” in a specific viewer. (I wrote about it here.) Below is an example of one such punctum for me, and this detail from a photograph could become its own crux moment or point of entry into a new personal essay, perhaps exploring the question(s) of what animal companionship means to us and the extra grief that comes around the end of an era of one’s life when an animal dies.
Throughout my 20s and most of my 30s, I had a gray cat named Andy Garcia. Andy was half-feral, and I had named him after the crazy look that Andy Garcia has in his eyes in The Godfather Part III. He was crazy, but he was my friend. The only time he was ever consistently docile was toward the end of his life when he was very sick. A friend who had known him years before visited my house at that time and remarked on his gentleness. We both knew he wasn’t long for this world, and in fact he died that week. I have a photograph in which I’m leaning down to place my head close to Andy’s, and the punctum for me in that one is that my eyes look very bright and very blue, but I know they look that way because I’ve just been crying.
Here’s another possible entry point. In my last post about guiding questions, I included this picture of Julian Sands from A Room with a View.
This was two months before Sands went missing in the California mountains. I’m thinking now about how the image of Julian Sands as George Emerson in A Room with a View carries so much meaning for many people in my peer group (sensitive/literary Gen X types). In the film and in Forster’s novel, George Emerson represented the individual’s search for truth and a commitment to not bowing to social convention and compromising what one feels to be true. This was also one of the first movies I saw with my college boyfriend, and when I think of it now, I think of the trajectory of a life— the newness of youth and then what comes after, and also the way that former boyfriend and I both would and wouldn’t recognize each other if we met again. Sands and this character and the memory of seeing this movie are a sort of crux moment for me, a tangle I could dive into and explore for the energy it holds. And I know that if I did so, I’d have to stop at some point and ask myself what my guiding question really was, how I might narrow it down to fit in one essay …
So, here are some questions for you:
What are some of your crux moments? Can you think of a moment or image that stays with you that could be an entry point into an exploration in essay form? What about a detail from a photograph or an experience of seeing a film or performance?
Do you have any drafts that might click into place if you take a step back and ask yourself what your “guiding question” is, and revise with it in mind?
This is really helpful. I’m now wondering if I can impose a ‘guiding question’ from elsewhere (like a submission theme) onto previously written relevant drafts to bring them together and reshape them into something slightly different to fit the theme better?
That question mark on the back of the painting in the pensione gets me every time!