Flash Memoir Friday: Finding a Way In
Robert Hass, Nancy McCabe, and approaching difficult subject; plus announcements for paid subscribers!
There’s a prose poem by Robert Hass I love called “My Mother’s Nipples” which is about the helplessness a son feels in relation to his mother’s alcoholism. (It is also ultimately about her terribly human vulnerability in general.) In the poem— a hybrid piece mixing lined poetry and prose— the speaker shows himself spinning his wheels at first, trying to gain traction and a way into his subject. (“He wanted to get out of his head,” she said,/ “So I told him to write about his mother’s nipples.”) What follows are a series of poet jokes about how different types of poets would approach the subject (“The romantic's song/ What could be more fair/ than les nipples de ma mère?”). As a reader I am on the verge of losing patience, when there it is, several stanzas in, the poet breaking through to his subject:
Pink, of course, soft; a girl's.
She wore white muslin tennis outfits
in the style Helen Wills made fashionable.
Trim athletic swimsuits.
A small person, compact body. In the photographs
she's on the beach, standing straight,
hands on hips, big grin,
eyes already desperate.
Following this stanza, we are given a prose account of his mother being taken away from a family dinner by men in white coats, and then another scene, years later, of visiting his mother in the state hospital as she undergoes a treatment program: “My mother was sitting on a bench. She looked immensely sad, seemed to have shrunk. her hair was pulled across her forehead and secured with a white beret, like Teresa Wright in the movies. At first my brother and I just sat next to her on the bench and cried.” The poet here shows what it can mean, this linking of physicality, vulnerability, memory— the power in that linking. The adult poet reproduces the child’s experience of mixed grief, compassion, and confusion in relation to the alcoholic mother. It is an astounding accomplishment, what Hass is able to express as the poem proceeds.
I’ve been thinking of the issue of finding our way into difficult material as I work with some of my own difficult material. A subject I knew I wanted to write about (but didn’t know how to write about) recently became accessible for me after I found a scene in a movie incredibly moving and paused to ask myself why. The question then became whether to retain my discussion of the movie in the essay or not. I think this can go either way. Sometimes the way in becomes extraneous. It is the impetus for writing, but the heart of the matter is elsewhere. Often though, a poet or essayist can include this “occasion of the writing,” weaving it into the piece in a way that gives the reader access into the writer’s mind— what draws her forward, what she feels compelled to unravel. It can be very compelling. (By the way, my discussion of the movie is still in the essay, but I am planning to work with it more, to more fully illuminate how my response to the film connects to the other life material I’m writing about.)
Memoirist and essayist Nancy McCabe (who will be teaching the course Shapes of Stories for Muse starting April 17th) has written about finding her way in to her subject. In her piece “Writing the Story of a Marriage,” McCabe describes the long process she went through to find her approach to the material that become her book Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir. McCabe recounts the difficulty she initially had connecting to her audience as she approached her narrative about a young marriage that ended in divorce. Finally, a hermit crab essay landed in a new way:
The next year, I published a hermit crab essay that used the form of a women’s magazine quiz to tackle the material, resulting in e-mails from women who related to my experience. I didn’t know if I’d done a better job or just found a kinder audience. Or maybe the meaning and interpretation of a story changes as the culture changes.
Nancy ends her craft essay by reminding the reader what’s at stake in searching for a form to tell our most difficult, vulnerable stories, noting,
gradually I realized what I should have aspired to all along: to reach those readers who said that the book helped them recast their own early “failures” as essential parts of their own stories rather than as sources of shame. That, I was reminded, is the purpose of memoir. Not to set the record straight or make ourselves look good or win others to our side, but to offer our experience and insight as honestly as we can, and hope that our words help others make sense of their own lives
This, then, is what we continually need to ask ourselves as writers searching for form— not just “does this work?” but “what’s at stake? how can I make sense of this for myself and others? what insight can I provide, and how does that involve showing courage and being vulnerable?”
I’ll turn on the comments for all subscribers on this post. Feel free to comment on the Hass piece or ideas from Nancy McCabe’s post. When and how have you found your way in to difficult material through the side door?
EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS:
In addition to our upcoming writing workshops through Muse (beginning April 17th!), I wanted to share some new ways paid subscribers to Muse with JPC can connect!:
I’ve enabled the chat function, which you can now access on the web. (It used to only be a feature on the Substack phone app.) The first post is now up, and paid subscribers can use this space for an intimate chat amongst ourselves about writing!
I am going to try out offering a monthly writing session to paid subscribers to my Substack. These will take place on the second Saturday of the month. The first one is tomorrow Saturday 4/8, 1-3PM ET. AND this first one is also open to anyone who has taken a workshop with me and/or been an editing or coaching client.
Reply to this newsletter with an email if you are in one of the categories and would like the Zoom link for tomorrow. You can come late, leave early, share work at the end or not. This is not a workshop with prompts, just a space and time of writing together. [Sorry for the late notice! There will be another one next month for paid subscribers!]
Love both Nancy’s and your thoughts here. AND . . . one of the things I like about memoir is that it is usually non-prescriptive. It’s an offering--here is the meaning I made of my experience and how I fit it I to the universal experience of being human. I also have some trauma around other people telling me what to think and defining reality for me, so I’m particularly drawn to works that leave a lot of the meaning-making up to me. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, for example, and thankfully so many others. And right now I’m reading Marya Hornbacher’s essay “Whether to Brine a Turkey,” which I love, but I’m still in the process of discovering why that is.
Correction: “Whether to Brine a Bird.”