On Memoirs ... and Quakers

What haikus, images, memories of the past could you share?

Memoirs are in the air these days from Ben Yagoda's book to Sarah Palin's memoir to classes in memoir writing. The Quaker Writing group I was part of in Maryland coalesced around memoirs.

Memoirs, as Yagoda apparently notes (I haven't read his book) are interchangeable with autobiography. Even if they purport to be about someone famous, they are inevitably, in part, the story of the writer.

Most often, however, people tell their own stories in memoirs.

We get interested in memoir writing when we're old enough to realize that a world we thought was timeless and unchanging was in fact bound to a certain time and place. Things that seemed permanent--natural--the order of being--surprise us by changing. We see that the seemingly eternal is ephemeral. Hence, we realize we our identity is more fragile than we once believed, bound as it is to a world in flux. And as we reflect on that change, we want to capture and communicate some of what once seemed fixed and solid before it dissolves and before we dissolve with it. In that way, memoir is much like photography--never objective, sometimes arranged, but always meant to capture, somehow, a slice of reality, to hold it, freeze it, keep it. Not a random reality but an iconic reality that contains meaning, that traps the elusive feeling of a time or place. We want people who did not live in that time or place to know a little of the flavor of what we experienced, and to know--although they won't--that what they see as fixed in their own lives is similarly prone to flux. Most of all, we want to reassure ourselves that what we remember really did happen. Sometimes we think we might have imagined it and hence that we might be the butterfly dreaming of being a human, that our own identity may be in question ... so when we write it down, as when we take a snapshot, we bring it to the safety of a common space, hedged by the certainty of words and punctuation and the tangible affirmation of other people's eyes on the page. Memoir brings us into community and hence into life.

I first became interested in what I will call, with not a little irony, the drama of my own life, when I entered my mid-thirties, and it became clear that the world had altered in strange ways since my childhood. This was brought home to me through having children of my own by this time and recognizing that their childhood would be different from mine. While I did not have what might be called an ideal childhood, there was much about it that was good and that I wished my own children could experience: going out to play without play-dates or adult-organized activities, the now-dissolved but then-intact ethnic community we used to visit in New York City, with it's own language, food and customs, walking to school with friends, playing endless games of jacks and pick-up sticks and later on, Monopoly, the thrill of unsupervised (and sometimes illicit) friend-making, the time to dream with friends ...

On a larger level, my family lived, albeit unwillingly, through such "social movements" as white flight out of Baltimore City, and I have as well memories of the sixties and the then sense of imminent upheaval and all the odd details of social change--my teacher wearing a paper dress to school (disposable dresses were to be the new thing)-- a pink paisley shift that made her anxious all day, she said, that it would tear. Not two years later, we were concerned with "pollution" (such as too many paper products) and participated in the first Earth day, trooping out as a class to the baseball field watch colorful balloons (yes, balloons, those enemies to birds and other living things) drift into the sky to commemorate the moment. How cutting edge we thought we were!

Of course, in what we choose to write, the details we remember, the way we frame events or understand people, we reveal ourselves. That leads me to my one rule for memoirs: Be generous to those you write about. There's nothing more chilling, for me, than reading of a person long dead, or simply not around, unable to defend himself or herself, who is knived in someone's story. I always imagine a person tied to a chair, mouth duct-taped shut, hit by blow after blow.

Quakers, as we know, focus on the spiritual autobiography, a form of memoir in which interiority is given form and substance. Writing becomes our icon, our cross, our bread and wine, our faith made incarnate and tangible, our symbolic and yet real participation in the flesh of earthly creation. It's interesting that early Quakers rejected other forms of representation--music, painting, etc.--but not writing. Perhaps this goes back to the gospel of John and Word made flesh. It connects us, in some ways, to Judaism and Islam, and to Eastern Orthodoxy, where the icons are understood not as representations but as words.

I wonder though, why memoirs are so popular today. Any thoughts? Any thoughts on what we might be writing about in these times? How important is it to capture history through our personal lenses?

Dorothy Day

I'm reading "The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day," edited by Robert Ellsberg. I have long been interested in the Catholicism and social justice leadings that led Day to publish the Catholic Worker and join in the struggle for worker's rights, so I am glad to have this book in hand. Can you think of people who are contemporary incarnations of Day? Who would you list?

In the book's introduction, Ellsberg quotes Day on writing, a timely contribution to the debate on blogging:

"Writing is an act of community. It is a letter, it is comforting, consoling, helping, advising on our part, as well as asking it [advice] on yours. It is part of our human association with each other. It's an expression of our love and concern for each other."

True?