Memoir’s Prologue

When I decided many years ago now to sit down and write a story about a series of traumatic events in my family—armed with notes from memoir courses I had taken during graduate school from Vivian Gornick—I kept the first venture, a distinct piece of memoir writing, to a manageable 2000-3000 words. Once that one was published, in Creative Nonfiction, I wrote another and published it in a fabulous Salon section, now defunct, called “Mothers Who Think.” A third piece went to Fourth Genre. A wrote another and yet another, also published. I reveled in my good fortune in finding homes for those brief memoirs, and got a little cocky about possibilities for a book. I thought I’d just weave the stand-alone pieces together, this strand tucked under that one, and there it would be, my book-length memoir all stitched together.

Five years later, with a whole bunch of failed attempts for said book stacked on my desk, I knew I needed help in understanding the long form. I got that help via several routes, one of which was a much closer study of the classics in the memoir canon, including those I’d read years before in those rigorous Vivian Gornick courses. What I was seeking was an element I hadn’t quite reckoned with yet, the “persona of the narrator” (which is Gornick’s term). This is the essential voice in memoir that I’ve come to also call the narrator-looking-back, the voice of person who has lived through the experiences but realizes at some point that she must revisit the past with more honesty, self-curiosity, and willingness to acknowledge agency.

I discovered in re-reading these books that the writer often uses a prologue—sometimes called an introduction, sometimes part of the first chapter—to introduce the “remembering self” (a term brought up by AWP co-panelist Dan Raeburn), and also to suggest the impetus for the journey back into the past. The necessity for a new relationship/reconciliation with past events often comes upon some of these narrators suddenly—something occurs (and that something is often, on its face, quite innocuous) that convinces them that it’s absolutely time to break apart certain calcified memories and to at least attempt to inch toward a new form of self-awareness.

For instance, this passage in the “Savages” chapter of Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time: “It is two o’clock in the morning. I lie in bed watching the back of my wife’s neck. She sleeps, she is part of the night. The baby wakes at seven, her sleep is for both of them. Sleep is everywhere. I am like a bather at the edge of a pool. My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually.”—skipping ahead a few lines—”My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly if I am alive. I know I’m not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life. I find someone moving. Is it me? My chest tightens.”

Conroy decided, at some point in writing, Stop-Time, to evoke the person in crisis, the “I” who must comb through the past to discover his own role in a larger family and societal dynamic that as a boy he was barely managed to survive. Readers understand that the voice of the “bather at the edge of the pool’s” voice is not the voice of the boy Frank. Instead this is the voice of the man who will, for the next 300 pages, recount the boy’s experience, the adult who has lived through those experiences, yet in the middle of a particular haunted night realizes that the past is not finished. It isn’t done with him, nor is he done with it.

This nod to the narrator’s present day life shows up only now and then through the rest of Conroy’s book, often in swift parenthetical phrases—we don’t get to know the wife mentioned here or the child or the life that the “I” lives now, except that he drives suicidally fast through London and vomits in fountains. But we have met “the persona of the narrator,” that Gornick term again, the person who’ll take us on a journey through the boy’s bumpy life so Conroy the adult can view the past with more honesty, clarity, and, as I mentioned earlier, more agency. That is, time to meet himself again and to come away with hard-won knowledge of intentions and motivations he’d previously hidden from himself.

Because we’ve met the narrator-looking-back in these early pages, we are assured that the voice will stay consistent throughout, all the way to the end. Except for brief passages of dialogue, the narrative does not get turned over to the boy. Every insight is delivered to the reader through the filter of the older self.

This is often the mode established in memoir’s prologue: the narrator is introduced, rooted, we hear his/her voice, and a sense of urgency about revisiting the past rises from the text. Also, the sensory details provided in these early pages, the very shape of the initial scene, establishes an emotional tenor that prepares the reader for what’s ahead.

Maybe no prologue does this more effectively than Geoffrey Wolff’s in Duke of Deception, except for perhaps Michael Ondaatje’s prologue in Running in the Family. Wolff presents—again evoking the narrator who will, a few pages from now, plunge into the depths of the past—a narrator who’s lounging on the porch, unyoked from the cares of the world and yet not, as we know from the first line of the book: “On a sunny day in a sunny humor I could think of death as mere gossip, the ugly rumor behind that locked door over there.” The setting forth of that reflective voice, of utmost importance to establishing the launch of the book, convinces the reader that Wolff’s “sunny day” will suddenly, jarringly, go bad. The reader witnesses the unfolding of events from the narrator’s perspective, which the character of Geoffrey, the man with the “icy feel of the glass against my chest,” could not have conceived in that moment on the porch. Only the narrator-looking-back, artfully and persuasively, can achieve an essential distance from the self. It’s the narrator-looking-back who shows herself/himself swiftly in a moment that is both rooted and in some ways uprooted (by that I mean a narrator who realizes he must come to terms with a particular version of his own younger self or else live in a sort of troubling fog of self-deception).

From the first word of Duke we know who is telling the story, and by the end of the prologue, we know why. “The words did not then strike a blow above my heart,” he writes, concerning his response to news of his father’s death (which was to blurt out, “Thank God.”), “but later they did, and there was no calling them back, there is no calling them back now. All I can do is try to tell what they meant.”

I’ve found that the prologue is often used in book-length memoir to create the impetus, the trigger, while setting forth the voice that will remain consistent throughout the book. The questions Wolff poses for himself in these early pages resonate through the rest of the pages to remind us, again and again, that the book is about the adult Geoffrey, who recalls with curiosity (rather than defensiveness) his younger self. The book is not about the larger-than-life Duke, easy as it would have been to let Duke take over. Duke’s central job as a character in this book is to reveal the character of Geoffrey to the reader—and he does that very well. By coming to know Geoffrey’s various reactions and responses to his father’s behavior—how these reactions shape the boy into a man—we come to know Geoffrey’s “two halves of the self in conflict,” which is imperative in memoir.

In my study of prologues from memoir, I found similar approaches (establish the narrator’s voice, set the emotional tenor, suggest the impetus for revisiting the past) in such books as Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Kim Barnes’ In the Wilderness, Elizabeth Kendall’s American Daughter, Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz, Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. Also, Jane Bernstein’s wonderful memoir, Bereft, in which the narrator “I” realizes she must go back and discover the hidden story about her sister’s murder, and in the process unburden herself of long held self-delusion. Her prologue ends with these lines: “What an odd thing, to be a spectral figure wafting near the ceiling of this apartment, to look down on this story I cannot change. . .I want symmetry, a happy ending, a story where all the clues will add up. Let me forget again, I think, when I awake. But Laura’s voice stays with me: Tell the story, she says. It’s the least you can do. i mean i am your sister.”

And a final example from Mark Doty’s Firebird, the end lines of his prologue which, again, I feel prepare the reader for the journey ahead and establish the voice, as well as the urgency for combing through certain dimensions of the past: “The book he’s reading configures this space: house and mother, sister and closet and father, endless hallway, tumult of wings. His book angles and skews them by artifice, and then tries to use artifice to set them right.”

As for me, once I understood the work that a prologue can do to spark the journey that will take place over the rest of the book, I decided to write one myself, and I settled on an episode that occurred nearly a decade after the trauma in my family had, I thought, been solved. In this prologue, the person called “I” sits next to a girl on a city bus—a girl who’s clearly in a bad state. She enrages me, disgusts me, an emotional uproar that soon strikes me as far too visceral for such an encounter. I remembered how upset I was by her, and realized this was a moment I could elevate to scene, use to explore the ways the past wasn’t yet finished. The monumental task ahead meant a return to painful events, memories, and the willingness to see myself back there, faint as that presence was at times, to muck around until I got at least a glimpse of who I was then, to better know who I am now.

The play is called Other Desert Cities, and I saw it with my husband on a recent quick trip to New York. The production we most wanted to get to, Richard III with Kevin Spacey as the tormented king, was sold out—no chance of picking up a couple of Saturday night seats at BAM. A friend told us he could find tickets for Other Desert Cities, though he whispered under his breath that he himself had found the story “soap opera-y.” That should have put the skids on our plans right there, but he’d seen the play early on, and the New York Times review I looked up assured me that the acting had gelled, the pacing improved, and the overall production was more mature. So I talked my husband into heading into the psychedelic madhouse of Times Square—where we were nearly smashed by a gang of tourists rushing past us with their phones snapping photos of a giant projection of Justin Bieber—to watch Rachel Griffiths (who I loved to hate in Six Feet Under), Stockard Channing (what could go wrong if she’s on stage?), and Stacey Keach, among others, gyrate through a nasty Christmas-time family squabble.

Other Desert Cities enticed me most of all because Griffiths plays a writer, a fortyish woman (one of my many problems with the play—the ages of the characters are nearly impossible to sort out) with one successful novel in her past and a new book—a memoir—punchy enough that the New Yorker plans to run an excerpt.

About twenty minutes into the show—and our friend had secured us seats that offered a perfect view of the stage—I started to wonder if playwright Jon Robin Baitz had actually ever read a memoir. Because from the get-go, Brooke Wyeth (Griffiths’ character), comes off as an entitled brat regarding her precious manuscript, that thick collection of pages she brought with her from Long Island, that years-of-work collection of pages that she’d made copies of for everyone to read right then, right there. It was Brooke’s whining, a low drone that increased in volume and intensity in the first act, that caused me to sink lower and lower in my seat.

Why won’t you read my book? [Stomps feet] Why don’t you drop everything and pay attention to me, me, me? [Stomp, stomp]

The family has a rotten old secret, one the parents—so Republican that they have “Nancy” over for tea (the play is set in 2004, before Nancy’s demise)—have spent half a lifetime hiding like so much Gollum stink in a deep underground cave. The secret is so damning and dangerous that even the couple’s grown children know only about half of it. The half she does know is the plot of Brooke’s grating book (I know it’s grating because she read part of it aloud. Ick.). She makes it clear that the fat bunch of pages she thrusts toward her hugely disappointed mother (and you know that those two hundred fifty pieces of paper are going to find themselves mid-air, flung by angry Brooke, before the last act) is nothing but a castigation of the right-wing parents—their politics, their hypocrisy, their failures as mother and father to their creative, darling children.

Those bad, bad people over there have done harm to good, good me.

Haven’t we had enough of these litanies-of-complaint? These are the books, upon which some publishing/marketing person has slapped the label of “memoir,” that I despise, even as they keep getting published. And the Booth Theatre audience some weeks back left convinced, I’m convinced, that this is what memoir does: attacks, blames, pitches a fit. Griffiths’ character insists, over and over, that it is her “right” to expose her family for what it is (at least, what she has come to believe it is), with nary a single gesture toward her own agency, her own role in the dynamic, the self-excavation (a Vivian Gornick term) that is at the heart of memoir writing.

Years ago I heard the great Phillip Lopate say that the aim of memoir is self-awareness. A small flinch—because life’s lessons come that incrementally—in the direction of knowing yourself a bit better. Maybe the narrator in the epilogue of Stop-Time is still a wild-eyed and self-destructive maniac who might just drive his car into a wall, but because we’ve been with Frank Conroy through a series of fiercely honest and revealing episodes from the past—because we’re convinced as readers that he has faced most of the most hidden parts of himself—we know that he has inched toward seeing himself more clearly by the end of the book.

But, as I said, it doesn’t seem that Baitz read Stop-Time, or Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, or the Brothers Wolff, or, more recently, Darrin Strauss’ amazing Half A Life, Jane Bernstein’s Bereft, or Mark Spragg’s Where Rivers Change Direction. If he did read these books, or any of the hundreds of others every bit as moving, honest, and riveting, then he failed to recognize just where the power of memoir lies. Not in the blaming (including blame of self) and despising, not in the defensiveness that emanates from Brooke-the-writer, but in the vulnerable, honest search for one’s own role in a larger dynamic. “We are in the presence of a mind puzzling through its own shadows,” writes Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story, yet another book I wish Baitz had studied before presenting the story of a memoirist to eager audiences, night after night, under the glittering lights of Broadway.

On this first day of the new year, I am working on a class I’ll lead at the Pacific University MFA in Writing Residency in Seaside, Oregon, (excited to get there–to see in person the wonderful writers I’ve been working with this past semester, to reconnect with students, faculty, and to meet new MFA students). The class is a discussion of Revision, the elements of which have seemed perhaps overly obvious as I’ve compiled my notes–

Let the first draft go its own way, keeping those itchy editor fingers away from the prose as much as possible–

Go into revision with the true intent to “see again” and find the precise language, the sensory detail, the elevation of a few select episodes into scene in order to best reveal that which the piece is trying to say/the heart of its meaning.

Don’t mistake copy editing or proofreading for deep-down revision.

More, much more, but instead of going on about revising, I’ll offer this Richard Bausch quote that rather says it all:

“You touch one part of it and the whole thing shivers, from one end to the other. It’s such a delicate thing, revision, and revision is where the artistry is; and so you have to be ruthless, and put away anything–even parts you like the sound of, even the matters that speak from your secret self to who you hope you are–put away anything that does not contribute to the whole thing. And God damn, it is hard.”  –Richard Bausch

Even if the process of revision sounds straightforward and simple, it can be excruciatingly difficult at times (as any writer well knows). If the first draft pumps endorphins, spins the mind with delight and possibility, the work required on subsequent drafts can cause the brain to ache, and can cause one’s confidence to plummet. I have definitely hit some dark times during revision–serious doubts about my abilities. How will these passages ever work? Sometimes the effort cannot succeed, no matter the hours put in, and the piece is, rightfully so, abandoned. Sometimes the right word, phrase, image comes along and I sense a marvelous cohesion that I couldn’t have predicted or pushed for. There it is, from some deep recess of my mind, precisely what was needed, appearing right in front of me. And of course that’s the payoff, the gift, of revision.

While musing on revision, I thought many times of William Stafford’s book You Must Revise Your Life, and that led me to dig around on my poetry shelf for the right volume so I could reread my favorite Stafford poem. For many years I kept a copy of this poem folded up in my wallet. I can’t really say why, except that I had an uncanny knack of pulling it out and reading it at exactly the right times, when the lines would speak to me–and it spoke in different ways, new and fresh and insightful, at each reading.

Here it is, “Ask Me.” I wonder how many times it was revised.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

–William Stafford

Here’s how he explains their first home as a married couple in his book, My First Eighty Years: 

“On the second day of May, 1917, we arrived at Salmon, Lemhi County, Idaho. . .I asked a businessman in Salmon if there were any ranch jobs available and he pointed to a small man walking down the street and said, ‘That’s Pete McKinney and he is superintendent of a lot of ranches and hires a lot of men.’ I caught up with him and asked him about a job. He wanted to know what I could do and I told him I could do anything to be done on a ranch. How wrong I was. He wanted to know about my wife and wanted to meet her. We went up to the hotel and I introduced him to Mrs. Gwartney. He wanted to know if she could cook and she said she had never cooked for a crew of men, but had done some home cooking. ‘OK, there will be a man and wife drive into the livery barn today about noon in a buckboard. You load up your trunks and drive up the Lemhi nine miles and you will come to a place with a lot of cottonwood trees. Go in and tell the Sweed foreman that I hired you.’

We got out to the ranch about five o’clock, introduced ourselves to the foreman, who pointed out the kitchen to Mrs. Gwartney and said there will be fourteen for supper. Wow! I had been around working men and ranch crews and had some knowledge of cooking for ranch hands. We found a quarter of a beef in the cooler, a sack of potatoes and there was plenty of bread, so I started cutting beef, Mrs. Gwartney peeling spuds. There was cucumbers and onions. We had steak, fried potatoes, beefsteak gravey and cucumbers with sliced onions in vinegar. No one went away hungry. So much for the first meal. ”

I believe her photo, a rare one with her hair down, was taken out at this ranch, where they stayed (and worked) for some years. 

And here are the daughters–these photos taken (thank you, Pete H for the help) at Finn Rock, Oregon, in Hazel-like poses:

I look forward to hearing from anyone who has a comment on these thoughts.

Last week was Thanksgiving Day–as everyone is well aware, especially those about to (a little guiltily) throw the last remnants of the turkey in the garbage, and those still trying to work off the extra gravy and mashed potatoes (me on both accounts).

The traditional holiday is noted with some stir of nostalgia here because my first child, my first daughter, was born on Thanksgiving Day, the moment I became an impossibly young  mother. Not impossible, obviously, though I’m stunned at how young I was, 21, though at the time I believed I was appropriately old and mature, since I’d been born when my parents were considerably younger.

Anyway, I was in labor all day, and by that I mean all day, morning to night, overly anxious and no doubt obnoxious to everyone in the “birthing center” (regular old hospital room with a couple of comfy chairs and better magazines). It turns out that when I’m in that kind of pain, I go silent, so when the endless parades of cheerful hospital workers came in waving plates of turkey dinner or a big slice of pumpkin pie in my face, all I could do was glare. Since I’d been vomiting into a plastic bedpan next to my face for several hours, I most definitely did not want to see, smell, or even hear about Thanksgiving feasts.

After Amanda was born at about 10:30 that night–a hard snow falling out the window in Spokane–I could have eaten the proverbial horse. I was cleaned up and back in my room with this astonishing new person, swaddled tight, asleep next to me, when my mother’s cousin, and a hero for life, snuck into the strict Catholic hospital with a turkey sandwich and a cold glass of milk. I can still almost feel that meal, hearty and nourishing, the crisp lettuce and the thick turkey and the chilly milk, in my belly. It was if I’d consumed the earth itself, at least a taste of all the elements, I felt so abundantly fed, exhausted beyond belief, yet capable of anything.

And then the next day the hospital released me. Plopped me, along with my young husband, out on the sidewalk with our baby. We’d taken those popular breathing classes, preparing for labor once a week with all the other earnest young parents, but no one had mentioned anything about the after labor part of things. No one mentioned the going home with a baby and figuring everything out side of this pact. Thank goodness, my mother and grandmother were waiting for us at our house, and they spent that first day creating what was then my favorite dinner while I stared at the ceiling trying to sort out if I was up to this. (It’s when they left a few days later that I practically pressed my face against the living room window, watching their car pull away, about to break down with terror: do they realize what they are doing, these crazy women? Leaving me, who knows nothing, with an actual human child?)

Oddly, I have not cooked up this dinner myself in subsequent years. I’ve preferred leaving it in their domain, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Prefer leaving it to the memory of this first day at home with the first child and my first tremulous notions of motherhood. A plate of utterly tender chunks of roast beef in a fairly delicate sauce–this is not boeuf bourguignon or even a stroganoff, but simple peasant food–over noodles, and on the side, lacking in nutrition though it is, sliced iceberg lettuce, with finely chopped avocado and cauliflower, tossed in a buttermilk dressing.

I ate this sumptuous meal, so exactly right in its flavors, its textures, its warmth and snap, and then sat down on the soft sofa to nurse my fussing two-day-old daughter, yowling myself when she “latched,” which I wouldn’t get used to for at least another week (even nipples, it turns out, must work up to the callus).

Once she was asleep again, I went into the kitchen to help with the clean up. That’s when I noticed the pan the meat had cooked in all day–a pan that was a wedding present but that I’d never used because it came with a note warning about the lengthy process necessary to remove the potentially harmful and definitely toxic coating on the surface. My grandmother had ranged around in the cupboard and found this gorgeous cookware still in its box–how was she to know why it shouldn’t have been touched, let alone heated to release its hazards?

Without explaining to either of them, I ran to the bathroom and stuck my finger down my throat, forcing myself to throw up dinner, but even then knowing that I was too late–I’d already passed poison on to my baby through my breast milk. I was shouting at my husband to call the doctor, to tell him we had to get to the hospital to pump her stomach. My grandmother and mother by now were standing in the hallway, frightened, confused, hands wringing, hands thrown bewildered in the air. My husband handed me the phone, our calm and ever reassuring doctor on the other end, and this man told me to sit down, take a breath, maybe even sip a glass of wine, and get over myself. Everyone was going to survive, he promised me. Not enough chemicals from the pan’s coating could make it from my belly to hers to cause any problem. I might have a stomach ache later. She might, too. That was all.

I did sit, calm down, weep a little in the aftermath of adrenalin ache–and spent the entire night wide awake thinking about the fragility of this small human who would now be in my care. In my care. Good God. How would I manage to protect her for decades ahead, when the first danger she confronted in her ever-so-brief life came straight from me?

Turns out I did cause her more pain, more heartache and difficulty, though I never meant to. The angry, bitter times between us have largely been tempered by love and a mutual desire to find our way back to each other no matter what. She’s now a mother herself–and she seems to me much more capable than I was back then, though of course not without her own challenges. Who gets to do this parenting thing without challenges?

Amanda Mae, born on a day when the smell of roasted meat wafted through the hospital corridors and plates of gooey dessert with canned whipped cream were passed from visitor to visitor, is also the finest cook I know–to eat at her table is a privilege and the food is, every time, fresh, real, imaginative, unforgettable.

So now I’m going to ask her to concoct a recipe for the tender beef on noodles dish–and what of the iceberg lettuce salad?–her version of the meal that set in me the first of many startling recognitions of the cliff’s edge of motherhood.

Recipes to come!