Backtalk & Backlash

I’m including here, in its entirety, this essay about memoir, from Remembering the Alchemists:

BACKTALK AND BACKLASH: The Aims, Impact, and Value of Memoir

“To employ a textual structure which cracks wide open the whole literary convention of an age seems in more than one case to be the only means by which truth and literature can be reconciled.”

                                    — Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller

            Remembering, questioning, and wondering about the past is an elemental human act. We look for meaning in our experience, and our cultures provide the categories of discourse we use. From binary choices to the complexities of our mother tongue, the making of meaning is thus mediated by precedent and permission. The shaping of memory into a work of literature is an act of faith in the possibility of meaning. I believe that keeping that possibility alive, granting that permission, is the essential work of the memoirist. Mnemosyne, Memory, was, is, and ever shall be mother of all the muses.

            It may be that the ascendance of memoir since the 1990’s stems from the overload experienced by writers faced with a torrent of propaganda that aims to shape consensus through our pervasive media. In this situation, a growing number of writers have come to feel they can only trust the frail first-person narrator sifting and weighing memories to affirm the existence of a reality beyond the one described so loudly and incessantly not by human beings, but by talking money. Their telling, their honesty and willingness to stand by their words, is a kind of backtalk, a refusal of the lies that a culture derived from profit-seeking uses to numb, subdue, and trap us into a politically de-fanged and spiritually neutered consensus, a Plato’s cave of touchscreens, clickbait, instant thrills.

            In other words, the rise of memoir that began at the close of “the American century” might best be understood as a corrective to the sheer amount of fictional distortion that has accumulated in a society whose history has been plundered and commodified and staged. Memoirs may be our ongoing “truth and reconciliation hearings,” life by life and book by book. It’s no wonder that this makes some uncomfortable: after all, there can be no truthful account without an accounting. The poet Lucille Clifton put it succinctly; here in its entirety is her poem, “why some people be mad at me sometimes”:

they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember

their memories

and I keep on remembering

mine

            The desire for amnesty can become a costly amnesia. We tend to most want amnesty when we are exhausted and the hope of justice, of setting things right again, is lost. To the extent that memoirists refuse this comfortable despair, their work can be seen as carrying political, even revolutionary, meaning.

            “The struggle of the people against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” and those involved in that work are more than narcissists for sale, licking their wounds in public, as threatened power, wielding a sneer, often seeks to portray them. Faced with disinformation, the cynical cultivation of profitable compulsions, history as theme park, and lives increasingly defined by a pop-culture grid and nudged this way and that by algorithms, the memoirist beats a tactical retreat to real, necessarily subjective experience, as a starting point for reclaiming an authentic relation to the world.

            Kundera, in exile, called the communist president of Czechoslovakia “The President of Forgetting”. Here, in the 1980’s, during the dark advent of the great, empty pseudo-culture of consumerism, brought to us through every tinny speaker in every fast-food restaurant ceiling, through megaplex theatres and cable TV, on the cover of every slick and content-free magazine clogging the shelves, we had an amnesiac actor in the White House. After he left, we were told that for some time he had been suffering from dementia.

            It is easier than ever to lie. New media have made it much easier to repeat a lie over and over until it becomes the truth. This has always been a fundamental stratagem of the propagandist, but it used to take a lot longer to lodge untruths in the public mind. Each new untruth is easier to lodge there now because it is congruent with its predecessors, and the most recent bits of disinformation, many iterations now from fact, need not even be plausible. Memoirists, those who are honest, who take their work in the form seriously, are at the very least grit in this machinery manufacturing mass reality. As such, they seem to incite backlash from captious cultural gatekeepers who may or may not be aware of the political dimension of their reactionary disapproval.

            For a time, and to an extent still, memoirists have served as handy scapegoats. Never mind that we are being lied to by media, by advertisers, by government, 24/7, 365 days a year. People play along, shrug, take the attitude, “What can you expect?” But let a memoirist misremember the color of the dress she was wearing or the weather on the weekend of the big game, and she is a liar.

            A memoir is a representation of the author’s encounter with memory. It is a compromise with the demands of narrative and of that medium we call a book. It is less a record of the past than the record of a sustained questioning, a reflective authorial inquiry. Although a memoirist agrees (or certainly should) to respect the facts as they can be known and not to deliberately change them, the memoir is not a photo, it is more a drawing or a painting or a poem, necessarily impressionistic, subjective. In other words, it is art.

            In 1996, just after I’d published the memoir Half the House, David Samuels, in Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, took aim at the increase in first-person nonfiction in an essay tellingly entitled “Mad About Me.” After acknowledging the genius of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Samuels began the sophomoric sneering that his title heralds. “Oprah Winfrey and Montel Williams, beware! Stories of alcoholism and recovery, of addiction to sex, of incestuous fathers and other childhood traumas too numerous to mention, have broken free from the talk-show circuit and are arriving by the truckload at a bookstore near you.” In the face of such baiting, a memoirist might ask if Samuels would also agree that novels that tell of interlocking painful relationships, betrayals, indecision, infidelities, struggle, have broken free from the daytime soaps and are headed to a bookstore near you? Novels like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Wings of the Dove, Absalom, Absalom. Of course he wouldn’t.

            Samuels’ essay illustrated for me the difficulty one encounters beginning from the wrong assumptions. I do not know what a memoir is. I don’t find most definitions very helpful. On the other hand, I don’t know what a novel is, either, and still believe that its very name suggests that it will remain a healthy genre only so long as it continues to elude the captivity of a definition. In any case, the difference between the two is certainly not as pat as “fiction lies; autobiography tells the truth,” the straw man Samuels goes on to knock down in his essay. Most memoirists are frank in allowing that their works are re-creations, products of what artistry they have been able to bring to bear in searching for a narrative shape. The larger question has to do with the relation between memory and imagination: in a memoir, the imagination serves memory; in fiction, it is most often the other way around, with memory indentured to imagination. Both can be ways of speaking the truth. Both can be ways of lying.

            But Samuels was by no means the only dog barking at the caravan. Articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and elsewhere all seemed to agree that memoir is a third rate genre written by victims licking their unseemly wounds in public. Mostly this turn of the century backlash was driven by the media’s unceasing appetite for controversy, for removing complexity and replacing context with contest. For example, I recall an NPR program in which the host interviewed his guests, Frank Conroy and James Salter, by way of a factitious argument that somehow memoirists were a threat to novelists. Of course it didn’t come off since Conroy and Salter both hold dual citizenships in the countries of fiction and memoir. In fact, at one point in the program, it appeared the game was over when the interviewer lobbed his serve out of bounds by asking Conroy if the memoir was to blame for the death of the novel. Conroy, clearly taken aback, answered of course that the novel is not dead.

            At another point in that program, the host asked his guests about the literary value of unsavory personal details like alcoholism, violence, and perversion. He seemed unaware that one might need to treat those subjects explicitly in order to make sense of the rest of the story, that one can’t arrive at anything like the truth by placing certain aspects of one’s life, one’s story, off-limits. Worse, he seemed unaware that in asking whether such things should be included in a work of literature he had drifted from a discussion of how those subjects might best be treated and was talking instead about what was, in fact, censorship, even if it was couched as bourgeois distaste: This is why we can’t have nice things.

            The aesthete and the reactionary both deny the reality that the private and public spheres are twin arenas where the same ethical and political battles take place. We are all children not only of our families, but of our communities, our country, our culture, our historical moment. This may be a truism, but it is one, it seems, that the present zeitgeist wants us to forget.

            When my father, who had grown up in the depression, returned from the butchery to which he was exposed at the age of nineteen, he was told he was one of the good guys, one of those who had saved the world from tyranny. Like so many others, all he wanted in the aftermath of horror was a private life, the illusion of an escape from history.

            Those of us who grew up during the postwar years (as opposed to the ahistorical fiction called “the 50’s”, a time of peace and plenty which did not include the Korean War, McCarthyism, or the constant terrifying threat of atomic attack) were born into some version of a shell-shock ward. It was a tile and chrome world of survivors who heard, with understandable relief and a tragic credulity, the gospel of forgetfulness and were happy to believe it: you must put the past behind you; you mustn’t dwell on the past; that was then, this is now. We, their children, had no history, but we lived in the aftermath of war, in the emotional rubble of our parents’ rages and sorrow. As we came of age in the era of “the balance of terror,” and “Mutually Assured Destruction” and learned what had happened only years before in Europe and Asia, we were enjoined to forget it. The gospel of forgetfulness is alive and well, and in the literary realm it informs much of the clucking and sneering at memoir that continues today.

            If we cannot forget the atrocities of recent history, the least we can do is deny we’ve been affected by them: all those pesky wars, mass murders, inequities, genocides, threats of planetary death. In this project we will be abetted by psychology and self-help texts that treat the individual as either well- or maladapted, and the family as if it existed under a bell jar. What meanings are encouraged, celebrated, sanctioned as truth will be those expressed in comfortably apolitical psychological terms; i.e. it’s all in your head.

            Memoir’s ascendance as a genre is more or less concurrent with the rise of trauma studies and an appreciation of the long lasting, even multigenerational, consequences of atrocity, whether personal or political.

            And the backlash to trauma studies was similar to that against memoir in its character (denial) and its virulence (a sneering disdain) during the turn of the century; both comprised what’s been called “the memory wars.” In both cases an established order, a way of seeing things, was being called into question by unwelcome information. It hardly bears going into here, but it’s worth pointing to Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Assault on Truth as a book that incited ferocious resistance. In it, he unveils the fact that Freud himself caved to the professional backlash he met when he bore witness to the suffering and symptoms of his patients. Masson met a backlash of his own in the person of journalist Janet Malcolm who attacked him in the pages of The New York Review of Books and later in her book In the Freud Archives.

            Suffice to say a great deal has been written and fought over about memory ever since, and those who were writing memoir found themselves in the thick of the battle. Today, however, now that certain undeniable truths have surfaced — about the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, the Magdalen laundries, the Indian schools, and on and on — we can see clearly that most of what was called repressed memory on the part of survivors of violence, especially childhood sexual violence was, in fact, memory suppressed by institutional power and control. This suppression of the truth not only creates gaps in the record, it discourages truth telling. The drama of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at the confirmation hearing for justice Brett Kavanaugh offers a case in point: the futility of the truth in the face of patriarchal power’s tantrums abets a silence that radiates across the country from its truthless capital, dissolving most questions of accountability in the digestive juices of “Why bother?”

            Historical silences, whatever unspeakable trauma has engendered them, are referred to by trauma therapists as “present absences.” The presence of a signifier without a referent, the presence of an absence of story, of memory, in the individual psyche and in the historical record (with its obvious impact on our culture, now almost completely given over to entertaining distractions) creates certain dead zones in consciousness and redactions in the historical record that require various detours and work-arounds. Perhaps the most important discovery of trauma researchers is that these silences, placeholders for things unspeakable, persist across generations, even after their subject is forgotten, and that these psychic voids are heritable, epigenetically, filially, culturally.

            Psychoanalyst Galit Atlas, in her book Emotional Inheritance, writes about her client Noah, who had “an incessant preoccupation with death.” Later, she discovered that he was named after a brother who had died at eight months old, just before Noah was born. His parents never told him because they felt he should not have to carry that weight. Obviously, he carried it anyway — and without the means — the requisite understanding — to come to terms with it. This is what’s meant by “the presence of the absence.” Elizabeth Rosner, in her book, Survivor Café, which considers the many and varied ways that trauma is passed down through generations, points us to a phrase in Spanish, “la teta asustada” that refers to inherited grief — literally, the teat of sorrow, the breast of sadness, the milk of grief.

            There is a role for forgetting, of course, but suppression of memory and hiding the truth is not forgetting. And there is a time for forgetting as well, and it is always after an event has been understood and integrated into a narrative (personal, familial, or societal;) i.e. after it has ceased to have unwanted consequences.

            In a country founded on the largest act of genocide in history, a country built by kidnapping people from their homes and trafficking them as commodities, as labor and as wombs for future labor, as “resources,” we are so far from the truth, so habitually deflective, inattentive, and ahistorical that it’s as if a gag once placed over an ancestor’s mouth has become a ubiquitous fashion accessory and much of what is celebrated in our art and literature is the elegance of the latest gag’s design. In any case, the aggregate of these many silences, things deemed unspeakable, is a great weight on successive generations.

            America is not of course alone in the manufacture of silence, but America is my country, one where it seems privacy is only valued when it is protecting the secret transgressions of the powerful.

            The memoirs I cherish are those that work to name those silences, that defy the injunction to go along to get along, that enact that search for the truth that is the closest thing we have to the truth. Meaning derives from that pursuit, a search driven by the increasingly desperate need for a course correction.

            I believe that by now I have heard all the arguments against memoir, including the unreliability of memory, the many distortions involved in constructing a narrative, and the necessarily biased view of even the most credible storyteller. There is even an argument that holds that experience itself is, of course, chaos, and that as soon as you attach language to it you have falsified it. In this view, everything is fiction as soon as it turns into language. But that’s like saying that the air we breathe is changed in our lungs — of course it is, and that change, that exchange, keeps us alive. The same goes for storytelling, the primary way that human beings make meaning, noting consequences, chains of events, patterns we call true. Story sustains us. It is the way we integrate experience and claim it as our own. Finally, it is not a question of whether some objective truth can be known, since even in the world of particle physics, we now know that the observer is always part of the event. Or, as the poet Terrance Hayes has written,

Not even two eyes in the same head see the same things.

                                                            “Self-Portrait As the Mind of a Camera”

— it is a question of honesty; not a matter of truth but of truthfulness.
            We have a strange idea that the truth is simple, that it is something you blurt out. No artist or scientist would ever agree with that formulation! The truth is always something you arrive at after painstaking investigation, and the truth of our own lives is no exception. The memoir is governed by a radical honesty that accepts the facts as they are known and as they may be further discovered in the process of remembering, researching, and writing. Writing doesn’t come from knowing. Knowing comes from writing. Writing comes from unknowing.

            The aesthete’s nearly theological idea of art for art’s sake depends at least in part on writing for posterity, but it’s hard to sell the concept of posterity to those raised in the shadow of Hiroshima, and the twin state-terrorisms of the Cold War, not to mention the generations following, faced with ecological catastrophe. Those who know we have been and are still only half a step from a real, not mythic Armageddon, aren’t buying it. Memoirists ask, in the aftermath of upheaval — and what has the last century been but a series of upheavals, disruptions, breakages? — how could this have happened? And by extension, how does this keep on happening?

            Some years ago, frustrated by the ahistorical education my graduate students had received, I developed a course called “The Twentieth Century in the First Person: Memoir as the Literature of Witness.” The students were bright and ambitious, verbal virtuosos; one of them asked me if it was true that Stalin was a communist.

            The course was predicated on the idea that writers are, beyond all else, witnesses to their time, and that memoirists can often provide a more palpable sense of the impact and consequence of events than a historian’s necessarily academic perspective. Memoirs can offer the felt experience of the past, the view from below, as it were, not only the dates and stats and documents, not only the facts, but also the hopes, fears, beliefs, regrets, and desires that animate the facts. If my students were to become the poets, the novelists, the essayists and memoirists of the future (and many of them have) I wanted them to be able to situate themselves in relation to the past, to the ways it informs the present and requires us to bear witness to the ongoing challenges that have come tumbling down to us from upstream.

            Beginning with Robert Graves’ serio-comic recollections of trench warfare in WWI in Goodbye to All That, we moved through Nadezdha Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope; Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz; Zhu Xiao Di’s 30 Years in a Red House about his childhood during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. We read, back to back, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy about his childhood under apartheid and Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her Afrikaans family Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. We moved chronologically toward the near past, asking how these writers had wrested significance from their experience of their times, and looking for ways to adapt their methods to finding the shape of our own narratives.

            Three memoirs were student favorites year after year, and all three are accounts not of their authors’ first-hand experience, but of their quest to understand the world they’d been bequeathed, the legacies of their parents and grandparents. Peter Balakian, in Black Dog of Fate, only wants to understand the eccentricities of his beloved grandmother, but as he proceeds, hand over hand, question after question, he uncovers the truth of the impact of events half a world and half a century away: the Armenian Genocide (which has remained his major focus in a long and celebrated career.) In her remarkable Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Mimi Schwartz, author also of When History Is Personal (which eloquently speaks to my point here) returns to her father’s village in Germany to try to verify his tales of righteous Christians who hid their Jewish townsmen from the Nazis. And After Long Silence, in which Helen Fremont, after discovering her own Jewish identity, hidden from her by her parents, reassembles the truth of her parents’ wartime story, and in the process is restored to the truth of her identity, even to the extent of being reunited with family who survived the Shoah.

             In all three of these works, the search for the truth is the story. In all three it is artfully told, and in all three the bespoke form of the book is itself the arrival, after great investigative effort, of meaning. To tell a story from your life, invulnerable to discovery, is to turn life into ink; to contend with the questions the writing raises, by research, soul-searching, and considering the accounts of others, and find the formal grace that makes it all a story is to turn life into art.

            “True stories have no end,” Charles Fish tells us in his masterful 1995 memoir, In Good Hands: the Keeping of a Family Farm, “but a storyteller must find boundaries, or else from three small sentences in a diary he could be drawn to the beginning of the world.”

            The beginning of the world. In his essay, “My Caedmon: Thinking about Poetic Vocation,” Allen Grossman reminds us that the first poet in English, called upon by his fellows to sing a song, something familiar, as they sat before the fireplace, declined, having no song to sing. Later, “Caedmon was commanded by someone in a dream to sing something. Confessing himself unable to think what or how to sing, he was directed to sing, in his dream, the beginning of the creatures. And he did so. Upon awaking, in the presence of persons of authority in the monastery (Whitby) where he worked, Caedmon remade, again on demand, his poetic text.”

            Memoirists, regarded for the time being as poets (and many of them are), can be viewed as singers who found no other song to sing and sang the beginning of the world, this world; i.e. how this world became the particular shape of this consciousness. Mary Karr, Mark Doty, Tracy K. Smith, David Mura, Natasha Trethewey, Gregory Orr, R. Dwayne Betts — all have written exquisitely about becoming known to themselves, about the ways the past and present conjugate to become the future.

            If it is true that history cannot be understood without psychology, nor an individual’s psychology be understood without situating that person in history (and clearly I believe so) then the coming-of-age story, the kind of memoir the critic Richard Coe calls “The Childhood,” is also a kind of backtalk. One of the chief ways we are uprooted from our histories is the creation of a generic, sentimentalized idea of childhood, and the best memoirs disallow such a caricature. Children are cute, there’s no arguing with that, but none of us ever thought of ourselves as cute, especially back when we were suffering the daily puzzlements and injustices of childhood. In reality, as children we contend, for the first time, with the superstructure of adult untruth; we encounter the world without explanations, expectations, and excuses. But we also experience moments of respite from all of that when we know, wordlessly, who we are, what we are, what it all means, although it can take a lifetime to even begin to articulate that understanding. Childhood is a time of grave confusion and painful realizations — “It’s not fair!” Our emotions are volatile and fierce. All too often it is the site of atrocity and abiding suffering. And yet, it is also the temple of the sublime.

            Sometimes I think that because it is so difficult to reconcile the wonder and horror of childhood, people make a choice to remember only one or the other. It is very nearly impossible to write a whole book that one-dimensional, at least not one that anyone would want to read. Thinking of my own boyhood: when it wasn’t horrible it was wonderful; when it wasn’t wonderful, it was horrible. Sometimes, but not often, it was neither wonderful nor horrible, and, particularly as I got older, there were times when although it was horrible it was also wonderful, or when it was wonderful and at the same time horrible.

            To balance or offset corruption, violence, ignorance, I was given the smell of greenhouse soil, the wonder of staring fish, the laughter of grownups, the songs of my mother, the cool shade under a wooden bridge, the smell of a baseball mitt, the feel of a nightcrawler as you tug it from the wet ground, the trellises loaded down to crooked near-collapse by roses, the wedding cake rosettes of colored paint on a housepainter’s spattered shoes. It was enough.

            Would I go through such a childhood again? The question is academic. I have. I will. Again and again. And everything I am, it goes without saying, has grown from that time before time, that brief time when time was giving and not yet taking. Time and again I am moved by the flash of sunlight on rippling water and the cold fire of reflections licking the trunks of a riverbank’s trees. I am what I have kept of time’s presents. I don’t recall ever choosing what to keep. Perhaps I am what’s chosen me.

            Writing a memoir becomes, eventually, like turning over a circuit board and seeing how the connections have been made. Or going down below street-level, checking on the worn-out, maybe dangerous plumbing and wiring, learning how things really work — and finding that little has been “built to code.” This is more than recalling events and stringing them like beads. This is a do or die existential command from deep in a dream. Those who merely “play the market” with a “hot” story are impostors, pretenders, and worse. The memories that animate the memoirist are not the same ones as those that animate the raconteur. Memoirists are driven by perplexity, by shock at their own ignorance of how time has unspooled and become history. The acronym WTF? about sums it up.

            I don’t believe most people know how to read this genre. Popular culture seems to recognize curiosity and entertainment as the only two possible motives for reading about another’s experience. Indeed, these are the memoirs publishers seek, the ones that sell. All books in our consumer culture exist within this strange tension: is a book a commodity or a mode of discourse?

            In any case, to set out to appeal — one might as well say pander — to readers’ expectations seems to me to forfeit the potential insight and understanding that await writers who conduct a deep and honest inquiry, which includes an appreciation of the fallibility of memory and an understanding that putting experience into words, particularly written words, is a kind of translation. Memoirists and their readers should never forget that a memoir is a complex representation — a re-presentation — of remembering; an exercise in subjectivity, in honesty, in art.

            I realize I am staking out the high ground here. So be it. There is power verging on prophecy in the genre. Honest memoirists discover their destiny: not their destiny hereafter, not some soothsayer’s fortune, but what causes and effects, influences and resistances, circumstances and compulsions have been, mostly unnoticed, at work in their lives. They discover what subjects, predicates, objects, and modifiers have sentenced them. They come to understand what the future was.

            Maybe this engenders a similar process in readers. Some of these readers are also writers. Maybe that’s enough to explain the popularity of memoir. But I suspect the current runs much deeper than that.

            According to Plotinus, who enriched and humanized the Rome of his day by re-membering the body of Hellenic knowledge that had been sundered, or dis-membered, by imperialism and war, “Memory is for those who have forgotten.”

            Now, you can read that sentence to mean, merely, that you have no need to remember unless you have first forgotten, a reading that seems both obvious and true. It seems so because this is the way we usually understand memory; i.e., that faculty which allows us to recapture something that we once had, or at least almost had, before it slipped into unavailability like a dropped pop-up, or a fish hooked tenuously and lost, or a scene glimpsed from the window of a moving train.

            But I understand that statement a bit differently. I choose to think of this neo-Platonist’s shimmering, ambiguous remark as a description of the artist’s vocation, one that grounds that calling in social responsibility, in justice; one that believes in the power of the art it produces. In other words, Memory is for the sake of those who have forgotten. For the love of, for the health of, for the sustenance of those who have forgotten.

            This way of looking at Plotinus’ statement also bears in mind the fact that Mnemosyne, or Memory, is the mother of all the muses. Hers is the power of continuity that, shaped by the arts, brings forth from the past not monsters but recognizable, unique variations of her pattern. For those who have forgotten.

            Ultimately, the commingling of past and present includes the dead as well as the living, our forbears as well as our children. The memoirist’s disciplined practice includes an openness to grief, regret, and remorse in order to see reality clearly. This extrication from lies, shame, and silence, this liberation, is the result of many individual acts of truth-telling performed by choosing this word or phrase over that, by honoring the integrity of each event as opposed to modifying its contours to fit, by the quest to understand how time, along with place, race, class, and culture, has unfolded character and determined history.

            Anamnesis, the remembering of the dismembered past, is a sustained stance toward the world, a political commitment as well as a literary and spiritual undertaking. As Elie Weisel has said, “Memory is not only a victory over time, it is a triumph over injustice.” If forgetfulness, amnesia, is a kind of death, then the kind of restoration and reintegration of experience or history is not only life-affirming for the practitioner, but also confers, in the hands of a skillful artist, a kind of new life on those who would have otherwise disappeared.

            Sometime during the years I was at work on the memoir Half the House, a friend asked me if writing it was healing for me. Oh, brother, I thought. Here we go again. I found it exasperating that people continually made the assumption that one writes memoir for chiefly therapeutic reasons.

            But I hid my frustration so as not to give offense; the question had been asked in good faith. I offered an answer designed to allow her to reinterpret the pained look on my face as a search for the right word. “I would say… that… that it’s helping me.” She looked a little bit stung, no doubt picking up on my reaction. So I continued. “It helps me integrate some themes that persist in my life. So I guess, in that sense, I’d have to say yes. Yes, it is healing for me.” She smiled, searched my eyes, and nodded. I felt like an ass. Why had I behaved so defensively?

            My friend didn’t realize the challenge her question represented. I am glad she asked it though, because it allowed me to see that my bristly attitude was largely a reaction to the way the literary world had used that word “healing” to dismiss the genre. I had been trapped in a cartoonish definition of healing; and I had been imagining and feeling the sneer of a composite ghost, part English Department, part New York Times Book Review, part The Paris Review. As is often the case, it was an encounter with an actual reader, and not with the phantom of high modernism, that meager inheritance, that tipped me into a real answer.

            In fact, to write memoir is to reenact the process of becoming, to tap into that dynamic dimension of yourself, to try not only to describe past experience, but to feel it again and understand that feeling as power, your own continuing power, in the present. Besides, if people feel the need to heal from their childhoods, doesn’t that raise serious questions about our social and political life?

            When I teach writing, as I have now for decades, I encourage my students to make a list of the questions that keep them up at night. Now this is really asking for it, in every sense of that phrase. It is an invitation to them and a great responsibility for their teacher. I encourage them to find the question that continues to engender further questions, and then, as they proceed, I urge them to keep writing these further questions in the margins, to be taken up later. I quote Vivian Gornick’s remark to the effect that the quality of first person nonfiction is measured by the depth of its inquiry.

            Among my students have been: a young Bosnian woman who narrowly, miraculously, escaped the Serb militia who killed her parents and several of her neighbors at a roadside checkpoint; and a young woman writing about her researches into the underworld murders of her parents in a motel when she was three; a young man just home from combat in Afghanistan; a young woman who stepped out for groceries and returned to find her sister dead on the kitchen floor, her throat cut. Countless stories of abuse, eating disorders, rapes, hospitalizations, overdoses.

            At night I’d lay awake thinking of my student, then nine years old, lying beneath her parents’ bodies in a pit until she heard the soldiers’ drunken laughter stop and the trucks depart. Or of any number of the workshop manuscripts on my desk. These were bright, beautiful young people trying to tell the truth in their writing, trying to come to terms with their experience, their suffering. What’s more, I teach graduate courses in a college of the arts, and these were serious young artists committed to fashioning something beautiful and important from that pain.

            Discussions with colleagues about the pedagogy of teaching nonfiction writing would invariably lead to someone blurting out, “I’m not a therapist!” I said it myself, used it as a flimsy protection, a pretext for not engaging too deeply with my students’ suffering.

            And yet, it depends what you mean by that term. There is certainly an opportunity, as well as the means — if we believe what we say about the power of the written word — to reconstitute, to reintegrate lives shattered by the last quarter century or so, which happens to have been their one and only youth. It seems to me the responsibility of adults to embrace that opportunity.

            I have my own history of trauma and I had been leaning hard on that experience to fashion my responses to students’ efforts, not to mention orchestrating a workshop, trying to keep it safe for everyone. I was exhausted. And so, I spoke with a friend who is a therapist, asking for a referral; not for my students, for me.

            He asked me what kind of support I had for the work I was doing. He asked me point blank, “Who’s got your back?” and went on to explain that people in clinical practice always have supervision, preferably group supervision, where they can discuss difficult cases and rely on the advice and support of other practitioners. “Yes, but,” I said, “I’m not in clinical practice.” And I said it: “I am not a therapist.” I raised other objections. I was not trying to fix my students. “Good,”“ he said, “because you can’t. I don’t try to fix my patients either.”

            “I’m trying to teach them to make art.”

            “In other words,” he said, “to make something coherent of what’s happened to them?”

            We talked about the probable origin of the word “therapist.” I suspect he knew that as a writer, a poet, this etymological approach would really get me. In the ancient Asklepian tradition, he said, somewhat older but largely concurrent with the Hippocratic tradition of healing, the distressed came to the temple to heal themselves by performing certain rites. During their time in the temple, they were surrounded by statuary and paintings; plays were performed, stories were told, poetry recited. They remained there until the night they had the dream that would heal them of their malaise, their disempowerment. Then they painted, or wrote a play or a story or a poem to leave behind them at the temple. According to my therapist friend, those who attended them, who helped in the creation of the work they would leave behind, work which would become a part of the temple’s rites going forward, were called the therapeutiae.

            Stories that are read and loved and kept as our own can begin as extremely personal explorations, containing the kind of knowledge and experience that until now would have been censored by government, or publishers, or, via shame, by the authors themselves (indeed preventing many from authoring their “lives” at all, the internal censor is so strong.)

The backtalk I’ve been writing about here is born from indignation at corruption, dishonesty, vulgarity; at a world in which consumer capitalism has undermined the idea of personhood more completely and tragically than any collectivist ideology has ever managed to do. I’m writing in defense of the genre, but mainly against a simplistic definition of it, whether by scornful critics, hungry publishers, naive readers, or those writers who are always telling me they have a great story and that one day they will “write it down.”

I believe that the story you know is either the story you’ve been told, or the one you’ve been telling yourself. That’s fine, but the only reason to spend years spinning a story from your own guts is that the story you’ve held onto no longer suffices. The process of writing a memoir is an attempt at discovery: how did I get to be the person who finds myself needing to write this story? What forces have been at work, unseen, since before I was born? How do I inhabit history? How does history inhabit and shape me? Inhibit or propel me? It’s not about telling your reader what happened or teaching your reader anything you think you know; it’s about making an inquiry into the mystery of your life that goes deep enough to be about the reader’s life as well.

            That’s the ultimate purpose of memoir: to illumine the life of the reader, and perhaps to inspire the kind of inquiry that leads to a personal emancipation from shame and silence and the layers of untruth — lies, false assumptions, outworn tropes — under which we’ve all been buried. As such, writing memoir, and reading it, can have a profoundly healing power, a revolutionary power that takes place one book, one reader — one mind, one heart — at a time.