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Upon joining the Association of Personal Historians, a growing organization of professionals committed to helping anyone who wants to preserve their life and family stories, I thought I’d check out some of the recommended resources on memoir writing to hone my craft. I started with Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away.
Goldberg is a poet, an author, and a writing teacher. She inspires and encourages writing, in general, and writing memoirs, more specifically, with beautiful language, thoughtful advice, and practical exercises. But she’s also a disciplinarian, a stickler for details. She won’t accept excuses, although she’d be pleased if you wrote about them.
Goldberg rounds up the usual subjects that you can cover in a memoir – grade school, driving lessons, favorite holidays, and places called home. And then there’s the unusual – your mother’s shoes, your father’s dresser, your brother’s bicycle. Regardless, her exercises always have a point: she wants you to get in the practice of writing. As she observes, “There are no prescriptions in writing, no one way that will get you there forever. A little jig, a waltz, the cha cha, the lindy, a polka – it’s good to know a lot of moves, so when it’s your time, which is right now, you can dance your ass off.”
If you’re writing a life history, Goldberg also wants you to get in the routine of remembering. “Memory doesn’t work so directly,” she advises. “You need to wake up different angles.” Often her directive following her ruminations on a topic is: “Go. Ten minutes.” On this particular subject it’s to spend time on the phrase “I remember.”
As imaginative as some of Goldberg’s suggestions are, not everyone will willingly go where she leads. Clients might not feel like jotting down their thoughts about sex or money. Thinking about “the road not taken” or describing a winter funeral once attended might be deemed counterproductive to the task at hand. However, her sentiments are heart-felt and wise.
I recommend Old Friend From Far Away to anyone who wants to step through the looking glass into a seemingly distant world. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, especially if you practice.
© 2015 Susan Marg – All Rights Reserved
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It might have been branding, but I always thought Bette Midler was divine. I bought “It’s The Girls,” her first studio album in eight years, as soon as I learned of it. I knew almost every song on her tribute to classic girl groups, which included the Shirelles, the Shangri-Las, the Chiffons, and the Supremes. Reaching back to the thirties and forties, Midler also included hits by the Andrew Sisters and the Boswell Sisters.
When asked how she made her selection, Midler, now 69 years old, replied, “The bulk of it is the sixties because it was such happy music. You have very fond memories of the music you grow up with. In fact, really, it’s the music you know the best. It’s the time of your life where you have the most time to listen.”
Ah, to have time to listen to the music and dance. So, make time.
© 2015 Susan Marg – All Rights Reserved
One of the things that struck me when reading Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life was the music that was always playing in the background.
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In his memoir, Wolff tells of his itinerant childhood in the 1950s. At the beginning of his story Wolff, about eleven years old, and his mother ran from her abusive boyfriend in Florida. Arriving in Salt Lake City, but finding no work, they drove on. Wolff writes, “As we drove, we sang – Irish ballads, folk songs, big-band blue. I was hooked on ‘Mood Indigo.’ Again and again I world-wearily crooned, ‘You ain’t been blue, no, no, no’ while my mother eyed the temperature gauge and babied the engine. Then my throat dried up on me and left me croaking.”
Settling in Seattle his mother remarried. Following a Thanksgiving dinner with his rather dysfunctional family, they sang. “We sang ‘Harvest Moon,’ ‘Side by Side,’ ‘Moonlight Bay,’ ‘Birmingham Jail,’ and ‘High above Cayuga’s Waters,’” Wolff recalled, adding, “I got compliments for knowing all the words.”
Wolff’s stepfather, Dwight Hansen, was determined to teach the rebellious boy some life lessons, believing no pain, no gain. Relating a particularly ugly argument whereby Dwight beat him up, Wolff notes, “I learned a couple of lessons. I learned that a punch in the throat does not always stop the other fellow. And I learned that it’s a bad idea to curse when you’re in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.”
At the end of the story, Wolff looks back to a time when he was sixteen years old, riding around with his friend Chuck Bolger, who had just found out that he wouldn’t be sent to jail. “Finally he turned off the radio, and we sang Buddy Holly songs for a while. When we got tired of those, we sang hymns. First we sang ‘I Walk to the Garden Alone’ and ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ and a few other quiet ones, just to find our range and get in the spirit. Then we sang the roofraisers. We sang them with respect and we sang them hard, swaying from side to side and dipping our shoulders in counterpoint. Between hymns we drank from the bottle. Our voices were strong,” he recounts. “It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.”
Are you writing your memoir or life history? What music rocks your world?
© 2015 Susan Marg – All Rights Reserved
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Eighty-six year old Betty Halbreich tells her life story in I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist. From beginning to end, although there’s no end in sight, she fills us in on her upbringing as an only child in a well-to-do home in Chicago during the Great Depression, marrying into a wealthy New York family in which she felt out of touch and all alone, bearing two children who she loved and loved to dress up, divorcing her alcoholic playboy husband, and having a nervous breakdown from which she recovered by going to work.
Betty’s work saved her, just as her fashion advice and general counsel rescued those who found their way to her door, down a long, isolated corridor on the third floor of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue, where she worked as the original personal shopper. I truly enjoyed getting to know Betty. She’s a name-dropper to be sure, but she filled her book with candid observations of those she has dressed. Since 1976 movie stars, Broadway actresses, and society ladies have sought her guidance, as have fashion designers, such as Geoffrey Beene, Michael Kors, and Isaac Mizrahi.
Betty always loved clothes, the cut of a garment, the feel of the material, and adding just the right brooch or other accessory. As a girl she played dress-up, secluding herself on weekly visits in her grandmother’s closet filled with “slinky, silky things” and her mother’s closets, two enormous walk-ins, when her parents were out for an evening. In her book she related her purchase of her first little black dress when she was nineteen years old and later acquiring a two-piece Givenchy dress in a “deep blue-gray animal-like print that buttoned down the front in a low neck, small-sleeved jacket and tight skirt,” as a young matron.
What details Betty went into, which got me thinking. Clothes might make the man — or woman, but they also reflect on our culture — from poodle skirts and pedal pushers in the fifties, bell bottoms and miniskirts in the sixties, to pantsuits, if you weren’t wearing jeans and boots, in the seventies. You get the idea.
Clothes also tell a story — about growing up, fitting in, or finding your own personal style. If you’re writing your life or family history, be sure to include your memories of a favorite piece of clothing from decades past. Why did you buy it? Where did you wear it? How did it make you feel? Did you have to earn money to pay for it or did your allowance cover it? If you can find a photograph of yourself in a tailored jacket with shoulder pads from the eighties, so much the better.
© 2015 Susan Marg – All Rights Reserved
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