Stories and Memories, Flashes and Forms

 

When I wrote my second novel, Bellflower, I was thinking about the end of a life, making sense of events and memories. I had seen loved ones lose their sense of time and place. At the end of my grandmother's life, she sometimes thought my mother was her sister; once, she asked about a place she hadn’t been for decades. I was contemplating that phrase—"her life flashed before her eyes"—and imagining the flashes of memory that might be playing on the screen of my grandmother’s mind during those last weeks of her life.

Bellflower is a “novel-in-moments,” the story of three families told in interconnecting flashes from their lives. The method is not unlike a novel-in-stories, books like Olive Kitteridge and The Things They Carried, and a novel that was one of the fundamentals for me as a youngish undergraduate: Winesburg, Ohio. 

If life is but a series of moments we’ll remember in flashes near our end, why shouldn’t memoir take a variety of inconsistent forms? Reader, it does! And for the past several years, I’ve been seeking out both novels and memoirs that experiment with methods of storytelling. Often, the line between genres is blurry, or filtered through a questionable lens. As memory itself is. There are novels that seem to be hardly veiled autobiography, memoirs so considered in their creative approach that they seem only partially true. Writers attempting to make some sense of their own life (or to distill and express some of what they’ve experienced into a fictional story) stretch, process, and create, and the myriad of forms for memoirs (and novels) continues to expand like the colorful feathers of a peacock’s tail.

A few such books made my list of Favorite Reads, 2020—things like Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl, a memoir that imbues the natural world into Renkl’s mediations on life, love, and grief, and Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a novel that reads like a series of journal entries (basically, a memoir). But you can read about those at the link.

Here are some recent reads.

Constellations, by Sinead Gleason, is a study of the female body in general and specifically, it’s about Gleason’s body—illnesses, losses, and other physical changes and experiences. By telling the story of her corporeal self, she explores the intangibles of her "self."  The topics in this collection of essays  vary as much as the methods Gleason employs writing them. She writes about things like pregnancy and breastfeeding, leukemia and blood transfusions, hair and loss. Despite a lifetime of bodily trials, an appreciation for the body—with all of its imperfections—emerges.

Wife / Daughter / Self: A Memoir in Essays, by Beth Kephart, is bold where form is concerned, a read that feels very accurately like being dropped directly into someone’s consciousness. In sections that consider her relation to her husband and her widowed father, Kephart contemplates how these relationships have contributed to her life and development. Often, the result is unflinching. Uncomfortable questions are posed; self-doubt and questions remain as much as answers are found. There is little continuity in form from one section to the next and often, following the thread of Kephart’s thoughts requires a fair amount of effort. There are whole sections told in dialogue, lyrical passages brimming with visceral details, short, pointed revelations that sometimes feel apropos of nothing. As I said, it reads, perhaps, similar to how the mind functions: circuitry firing away, colors and light, flashes of a life.

 

The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham, is a memoir centered around the suicide committed by the author’s father. She recounts memories and attempts to make some sense of this incomprehensible loss. This searing look at a particular brand of grief is touching, contemplative, and strikes universal chords about love and loss.

 

Would you like more reading suggestions in this vein? Check out this recent Lithub post, "7 Autobiographies and Memoirs That Remind Us of the Messiness of Memory."

And watch this space for information about my summer reading project for 2021. Regular readers may recall that each summer, I choose a theme and build a reading list around it. Last summer, I read books tied together by association with France, and in 2019, I learned an awful lot about trees. Here's a hint about the focus of my reading for this summer, in the form of a quote from the first book I'll read:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are suppose, by some, to dream."

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Life in Moments

When my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was dying, she was in and out of consciousness, not always lucid, and she often confused my mother for other people from her past: her own mother, a cousin, one of her sisters. She said things that must have come from memories and had no place in the present. And although sometimes my mother seemed hurt when she wasn’t properly recognized, I found my grandmother’s jumbled mental state—a series of moments, people and places, in no determined order—well, I found it to be of some comfort. It’s what's meant by “her life flashed before her eyes,” the most indelible moments rising up to illustrate who you have been.

 

Long ago, I had a wall hanging that said “Life is not lived in hours, days, or years, but in moments.” And I thought that to be a very deep concept, and I still do. Think about when you meet someone at a party. You don’t sit down and begin a linear introduction: Hello, my name is Mary and I was born in Los Angeles…. What organically happens with people is that we find things in common and we tell stories about our lives. For almost two decades I have been friends with a certain woman who recently told me something about herself I had never known, something that seemed so fundamental I couldn’t believe we had never discussed it. Such are life, and people, and the ways we can know them or never will know them.

 

I’m telling you all of this in a roundabout way of talking about Bellflower, my “novel-in-moments,” which will be published next month, and to perhaps give you some help if you decide to get a copy of the book (thank you!) and might be perplexed by its form. These musings about life and its moments (among other things) pointed me towards the method of the novel. But let me give you an illustration of what I mean.

 

Let’s say I want to tell you about a character, a person. I’m making him up now, as I type this. His name is David Price. I will tell you five brief things about him, five moments from his life. 

1.      When David was 41, he had a nervous breakdown. He was out of work for two months, and along with therapy and medicine, he took up woodworking. He made beautiful wall-to-ceiling bookshelves for the den in his house.

 

2.      David’s mother often tells the story of when he was four years old, and she came into his room to find him arranging his picture books into straight columns and rows on his carpeted floor. He explained the ordering of them, which had something to do with animals and also, children with and without both parents.

 

(Now, I’ll take a pause here to ask whether you are already drawing some inferences from these facts? Perhaps that David was an orderly sort of guy and maybe his breakdown had something to do with his sense of order, or perhaps from missing a father? This is the way our mind works, filling in the white space when we are given clues.)

 

3.      For David’s 70^th birthday, his three children threw him a surprise party. He’d been quite antisocial for many months after the loss of his wife of 41 years; he hadn’t been in his wood workshop, or reading, or going to the gym regularly as he had most of his life, and they hoped to cheer him up.

 

(Are you thinking: Oh, good, he had a nice wife and a full life, despite that breakdown? Or did he? How did the wife handle his mental state? And were books a big part of David’s life?)

 

4.      When David was 54, his book about Vietnam was published by a university press. They threw a launch party for him but he was unable to attend when he developed a bad stomachache. David’s father had died in the war, and David had majored in history, eventually became a history teacher, because of this fact most likely.

 

(And now we have a timeframe, and can fill in some details about when David was born, etc. We can start thinking about what it meant to grow up without a father, the breadth of this loss.)

 

5.      David met his wife, Jeanette, at a faculty party, when he was 28. She was a science teacher, environmental. He brought her a glass of wine and told her about his mother’s recent marriage to a pastor. She asked if David believed and he said he’d have to think about it.

 

(Ah, this Jeanette. A scientific sort of person, serious and straight to the point. How did they counteract each other? And the mother remarried—how did this affect him?) 

Five moments and somehow, a pretty full sketch, at least, of David Price. And this is the method of Bellflower, which tells stories from the lives of three main characters and the family and friends in their orbit. The moments and stories can range from a few paragraphs to many pages. You may read the chapters, and the sections within them, in any order. And there is white space, plenty of it, and sometimes the characters reach across it to touch each other. I hope, if you decide to give the novel a go, you’ll let me know how you decided to read it and of course, what you thought.

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In Praise of Stories and the Graying of Genre

This year, like many, many other viewers, I’ve been taken with NBC’s new series, This is Us. I binge-watched the first ten episodes, and now have to watch and wait, week by week, for the rest. The show’s taken some ribbing for stringing along tragedy and its tendency to induce ugly crying, but fans can’t get enough. And I’ve been thinking about the structure of the show and trying to decide what we would call it, in book form.

For those who don’t pull up every week with a box of tissue and glass of something white or red, This is Us follows the story, past and present, of the Pearson family: mom and dad, and a set of untraditional triplets. Untraditional because one is adopted, while the other two are surviving twins, I guess, from a traditional set of triplets. Anyway, a current-day, linear narrative follows everyone’s lives when the triplets are 36 years old and this narrative is interspersed with stories from the past. Most prominently at first, events from the year 1980, when the parents were expecting, and immediately after the birth; but also, a smattering of stories that can catch the siblings at any point of their childhood, from young kids to adolescents and beyond. These anecdotes are woven through and follow no particular linear path. We may have a story from the year the Pearson brood was seven and the following week, a vignette about one of them as a teen. There is, of course, the current-day narrative binding everything and chugging forward, but some episodes include little or no sight of this train.

So what would we call this form, I wondered, if it were a book? Novel? Short stories? Novel-in-stories? And I was thinking about how, if you ask even avid readers about short stories, most will say they don’t read them. Either because they don’t like them, or they just don’t think about it. This is a generalization based on personal inquiry. Many, many readers appreciate stories of the more brief variety. But I wouldn’t say it’s a popular practice, the regular reading of short stories. Some readers will tell you it’s because they want the more satisfying, deeper experience of reading a novel, the finality of a complete, longer story and the answers they get at its conclusion. And yet, countless television viewers are perfectly content to wait, week by week, for the same answers from a drama like This is Us or many others.

It would seem that short stories or novel-in-stories are forms that follow most closely the way humans interact. Imagine two women at a public park, watching their kids and striking up a conversation. Oh, hello, one might say. My name is ___, and how are you? Which child is yours? Where are you from? Oh, I’ve been there many times. Once, I visited ___ and my plane was delayed and I spent three hours at the very famous ___. Oh, you have? That’s amazing. Etc. etc.

This conversation, mostly likely would not be: Oh, hello, my name is ___ and I was born in ____. My family lived for many years in ____ and as a young child, I was shy and pale, but I enjoyed reading and riding horses. At the age of five, I ____. Etc. etc.

Think about people you’ve known for a long time and yet, are still learning new things about. You can know someone ten years before you hear the story of how they spent their eighth summer in a body cast, or had an affair with that exchange student at nineteen.

Of course, all novels aren’t start-to-finish narratives. Most include things like backstory and foreshadowing, and all sorts of clues hopefully meted out in a way that’s pleasing for the reader. But when you’re dealing with short stories, or a novel-in-stories, you expect each memory, each vignette or moment (each episode!), to have a shiny, finished quality. To be satisfying in its own right, all by itself. So that you can finish a chapter and feel—at least somewhat—full. So that you can turn off the television and feel—at least somewhat—ready to wait a whole week for more.

And so, to those of you who think you don’t like short stories, or maybe even have no patience for something called a novel-in-stories, may I suggest the following, mind-opening reading experiences that might blur your notions of genre (all taken from my own personal list because this is, of course, my blog)? I’m including the genre label for each one, as determined by publisher, for reference only and so later, you can realize how hazy some of these distinctions are.

First, there are some flagships:
 

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (novel, 1919)

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (novel, 1959)

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (novel/stories/memoir??, 1990)

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (stories, 2008)


And some recent reads I’d recommend:


We the Animals by Justin Torres (novel, 2011)

The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham (stories, 2012)

See How Small by Scott Blackwood (novel, 2015)

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg (novel, 2015)

Another Place You’ve Never Been by Rebecca Kauffman (novel-in-stories, 2016)


I find myself reading in this genre-gray area quite a bit these days, seeking out books that have something to say in a different sort of way, in a way that seems most true-to-life, at least for me. There are many ways to tell a story and to make sense of the stories that, in effect, comprise our lives. I’d love to hear your suggestions for books that gray genre in a good way, and stories that took hold of you and never let go.

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