One man tells his story

 

My hyacinth grape vine, having straggled through the summer,
is now blooming more than I've ever seen it. The friend from whom I got seeds
is afraid this year the seeds will be too late if they even show up.
Fingers crossed, please.

Maybe I move in a feminist world, but I am always hearing that women need to tell their stories. We need to hear from women—not Taylor Swift (bless her!) or Beyonce or even Hilary, but women like you and me. Ordinary stories. We’ve been silenced too long. Well, what I’m realizing with the book I’m reading is that undiscovered men have stories to tell too, stories that give us model for living life as it should be. Forget the politicians and football players whose stories make instant bestsellers. Let’s hear from our next-door neighbor who struggles with career or family issues or bill payments or all the little stuff of life that we all do. And sometimes some added burdens.

I’m reading The One-Armed Soldier, an autobiography by Wayne Bizer, an osteopathic ophthalmologist (try saying that three times fast). The book is far too long for an autobiography, and I agreed to read it only at the behest of a good friend. I admit I dragged my heels, but then I found myself engaged in the story and charmed by the author.

The child of Jewish European immigrants, Bizer grew up afflicted with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), dyslexia, and a dysfunctional family background. Nobody paid attention to those afflictions when he was young, and he didn’t even recognize them until well into adulthood. He scraped through school, was a college drop-out, and showed every sign of being a failure for life. But he had ambition. Instead of failing, he earned a medical degree and certification in a specialty (ophthalmology), married an apparently wonderful woman, raised two sons, and made a great success of his career in medicine.

I’m not going to tell you this is a Horatio Alger success story about a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Time after time, Bizer hit rock bottom. He was on the edge of seeing his dreams collapse, but he was always saved at the last minute—childhood accidents that nearly cost his life, a near miss from the Vietnam draft, rejection by two medical schools, only to find his niche at the third. Every time he was given another chance, Bizer vowed to make it work—and he did with a combination of determination and perseverance. And, until he married, without much encouragement from family. Finding forgiveness and reconciling with his once-alcoholic mother is yet another part of his story. So is the faith of his childhood—though dyslexia caused him to barely skate through his bar mitzvah. Grown, he brings whatever family together that he can for Shabbat every Friday night. Although ADHD and dyslexia are mentioned, they don’t play a huge part in this story. It’s as though Bizer used them as steppingstones on which to climb to his future.

Bizer tells his story in a conversational, friendly manner, without preaching but with lots of humor and nice touches of honesty about himself and the many times he goofed. As he says at one point, his life story was always about “when I grow up.” If most lives are lived in straight lines, he says his is a bowl of scrambled spaghetti. There’s not a lot of introspection here, just casual comments offhand, no wallowing. What there is, though, is the magic of storytelling, be it childhood adventures, scary episodes in school, or patient stories from his practice. Bizer is a man who seems to love life and what he has made of his own. His is an inspirational story of a life well lived. And having never met him, I like this man a lot.

Ever thought about telling your story?

The elusive memoir

 

For some time now, as in years not months, I’ve been stewing over writing a memoir. There are several memoirists in my favorite small, online writing group, and I think if they can do it, so can I. Some friends tell me I’ve had such an interesting life, that I should chronicle it.

A couple of roadblocks: one is the distinction between memoir and autobiography. The latter covers your entire life, from birth to the moment of writing and, as someone said, is like an unfinished symphony. How will it end? Unfortunately you (or I) won’t be around to add that ending. And unless you’re a brilliant stylist, autobiography can get boring.

Memoir on the other hand either recounts a specific time or event in your life or traces a theme that has been present for your whole life. I’ve toyed with all those ideas and come up empty. Sometimes I think these blogs will provide material—and they might if, for instance, I ever took the time to weed out all the ones about writing. Or all the ones about family. I’ve started several times and gotten bogged down each time.

Today, I happened across a review of a book titled Fast-Draft Your Memoir. At this point in my life, with over a hundred books on my list, both fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults, and with several nice awards won, I have long ago left “how-to” write books behind. If I don’t know how to do it by this point, I better quit—and there are days I feel that way. But today it was the fast draft part of the title that caught my attention—the book was cheap, so I ordered it.

And the author’s captivating style drew me in. She clarified that distinction between autobiography and memoir. Clearly, she favors the latter (and teaches courses on it at Stanford, not a tiny recommendation). I devoured her examples and then sat at thought about my life and what theme I would craft a memoir around.

I’ve often thought of writing a book about dogs I have loved, and that still might work, but is that really the part of my life I want folks to remember? If you ask me what the most important thing I have done in my life is, I would without hesitation answer raising four beautiful, wonderful people as a single parent. But another theme that grows increasingly important in my life is cooking.

That’s when it hit me: I have already written a memoir. Wrote it back in 2009. Title? Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and Books. It’s a cookbook/memoir, not an unusual combination these days. I divided my life into four periods (I’d add a fifth now, but that’s another story):  A Meat-and-Potatoes Household; Marriage and Two New Worlds of Food; The Casserole Years; Living Alone and Liking It—Well, Most of the Time.

The first section chronicles my Chicago childhood in a meat-and-potatoes household, where my dad’s British tastes set the tone for the daily menus, though Mom slipped in some of her German heritage (she hated sauerkraut and I never tasted it until I was grown). That section is also a tribute to Mom who was a patient guide in the kitchen and let me make messes because she saw that as part of the learning process. To this day I clean the kitchen as I go along. I can’t stand a messy kitchen with piles of dirty dishes. Whatever joy my cooking brings me and others is due to my mom.

When I married and moved to Texas, I was introduced to two new food cultures: the Jewish food of my new husband’s background and the Mexican foods and barbecue of Texas. For this section and the next one, I queried my four children for dishes that they particularly remembered and got responses of everything from green noodles to my signature recipe for Doris’ Casserole. The casserole years were when the kids were teens with voracious appetites and the budget was short. But all four knew that if you weren’t working (and they all had after-school jobs by the time they were sixteen), you’d better be home and at the dinner table by six. And you never missed Sunday dinner when there were often fifteen or more at the table. And finally there were the years of living alone, when I entertained with frequent dinner parties and an annual big Christmas parties for seventy or more and loved every minute of it.

The book was published by State House Press. When it came out, it had a picture of Jacob on the cover, because his nursery school had put him in a chef’s toque and jacket for some occasion, and it was too cute to resist. It caused a furor among the parents of my other grands and had an unfortunate marketing consequence—people thought it was a children’s cookbook—it is not. Want to check it out? It’s on Amazon: Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and Books (Stars of Texas Series): Alter PhD, Dr. Judy: 9781933337333: Amazon.com: Books

So there you have it: the memoir I forgot I’d written. It’s about cooking, but it’s also so much about raising my family. Should I do another? I don’t know. I’m debating about themes. Any suggestions are welcome.

 

Some thoughts on memoir

Being a foodie, 
I enjoyed this memoir

From time to time, I think of writing a memoir. I’ve even made sporadic attempts, to the point that I have a fairly good-sized collection of sketches, but they don’t hang together (I’m not sure they have to). The small online group of women writers I belong to counts several memoirists among our ten or twelve active voices, so I always feel a bit lacking because I’m not in that club. A friend in that group and I have been having an email conversation about what memoir is and isn’t and whether it’s wise to dig up every bit of your past.

Memoir is not autobiography, as I’ve only recently figured out. One woman has written her memoir and then announced she’s writing another. I thought, “Wait! Is is going to be repetitious?” But it’s not. You can write several, totally different memoirs. Autobiography is your full life story; memoir takes one thread from your life—career, family, a hobby—and tells that story. So you can indeed have several biographies. Turns out I’ve already written one, a memoir/cookbook titled Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and books (I’ve hawked it here before).

The friend I’m corresponding with wrote what she thought was a memoir many years ago and asked an editor friend to read it and tell her if what she had was any good. The editor told her, “Nobody’s life is 800 pages worth of interesting.” Since then, my friend has been picking threads out of that gargantuan work and using them in countless different ways. For her, the advantage is she has the material all written and ready to use.

There’s the question of audience. Who is interested? Who will read your memoir? Perhaps it’s a mistake to throw it out there and expect thousands of readers to clamor for a copy. No rule says everything one writes has to be published. Maybe it’s something for family or a few selected friends. Maybe it’s for a niche audience—I should, for instance, have done more to push my cookbook memoir on foodie sites (my plea: I was too busy at the time, still working). If I write a memoir, I’ll consider audience carefully and may still publish on Kindle with the expectation it will interest a limited audience.

For me, the question is what thread do I want to pull out of my life? I’ve considered many—my life as an adoptive parent, my career in Texas letters, the shaping influence of my parents and my ancestry. One Idea I’ve about abandoned is to explore my lifelong fight with anxiety. My anxiety is fairly low these days, and I’m of the philosophy that says let sleeping dogs lie. As mystery author Susan Wittig Albert said to me, “Working through past problems is valley work. If you’re on a hill, and you have a fairly good view, you don’t need to do it.”

My blogs may provide the material of memoir. Last night in my prowling, I found that six years ago when I was recovering from surgery to repair a disintegrated hip joint (not just broken, but gone), I blogged every night—about recovery. Just before the surgery I was in a bad place—exhausting pain, over medicated, not at all myself. I didn’t realize until last night that my kids seriously entertained the possibility that I could be dying. That’s a subject for another night, but it’s also a memoir thread, perhaps part of my life as an adoptive parent.

There are other blog entries—a chronicle of my wonderful trip to Scotland with two of my children, much about cooking and even more about the craft of writing, some accounts of special people, including a couple of special     men who came along after my divorce. I’ve had a full and most happy life, and it may be time to capture it on paper.

Interested in memoir? Here are a few titles you might look into: My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life: A Cookbook, by Ruth Reichl, her account of the year following the devasting shutdown of Gourmet Magazine where she was editor—the text is all handwritten and charming; Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, by Susan Tweit, a chronicle of the last year of her husband’s life as a glioblastoma slowly killed him; The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion—an honest and compelling account of a marriage; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle, an account of living in a small town in the Rhộne Valley and particularly of the cuisine; The Liars Club, by Mary Carr, her account of a wild Texas childhood; Good Smoke, Bad Smoke, by John Erickson, a Texan’s view of wildfire; and Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert, one woman’s exploration of her own nature.

Trees, flowers, and memoirs

    

My flowers and Jordan's Little Red Riding Hood basket

The neighbors behind my cottage are adding a screened porch to their house, a pool, and a cabana/guest house. Behind me is close—the cabana will maybe be ten or twelve feet from the wall of my cottage. These neighbors are good, responsible citizens, and they have bent over backwards to assure I am not disturbed. I am not. The only time noise would bother me is when I want to sleep in the afternoon, and my bedroom is pretty much like a cave.

 But there is one noise that sounds worse than scratching on a blackboard to me, and that’s the saw that tree trimmers use. So this afternoon, just as I lay down to nap, someone started to take out a whole tree. Have you ever tried to sleep with that high-pitched whining? I closed the bedroom doors, confining Sophie with me. That worked for about two seconds, and then she protested. I think she must be claustrophobic, because when I opened the sliding door into the kitchen and told her she could do what she wanted, she settled down and slept next to my bed. Serendipitously, the whining noise stopped, and I did get a nap.

Jordan made up for my interrupted nap by bringing me flowers. She stopped at Central Market for the feta I need tomorrow. After declaring she didn’t want to run around looking for a lot of things, she confessed she overbought—including flowers, Cotswald cheddar, a new flavor of yogurt, and other delicacies.

She was cooking dinner tonight since I wanted to attend a six o’clock Zoom meeting, but all the ingredients for supper—chicken/pesto pasta—were in my fridge. So she loaded up a basket and announced, “I am Little Red Riding Hood.” The picture above combines her basket and the flowers she brought me.

The Zoom meeting tonight, sponsored by Story Circle Network, featured two authors—one a novelist, the other a memoirist, talking about the requirements, advantages, and drawbacks of each genre. I have, as I’ve mentioned, been interested in memoir in a sort of distant way. I always thought a memoir was the story of your life. My first novel, After Pa Was Shot, was fiction based on a memoir by the mother of a friend. The woman, probably in her eighties in the fifties or sixties, sat down at a typewriter, wrote “The Story of My Life,” and created a fascinating manuscript. But these days some people are writing several memoirs. The thought today is that memoir covers one episode, say three to five years. I can’t wrap my head about that. I want to look at the whole of my life put together. One author tonight said if you write about your life, as Michele Obama has done, it’s biography—I would correct that to autobiography. But the difference to me is that autobiography recites the facts; memoir invests those facts with emotion.

Both authors have written books about adoption, which should have hit home to me—but didn’t, because their experiences were so different. Julie McGue’s memoir, Twice a Daughter, is about her experience as an adoptee seeking information about her birth family so that she might have some family health history. The Sound Between the Notes, by Barbara Lynn Probst, is a novel based on her experiences with her adopted daughter and the daughter’s affinity for music and the health history that intervened. One great line: “You can’t create music when you are angry.”

But both are about searches for birth parents, and that’s foreign to me. My four children have never expressed any desire to search, even in the face of such health concerns as epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and possible effects of maternal drug use. I suppose the two authors wouldn’t understand my feelings—Probst, for instance, knows her daughter’s birth mother. For me, I am more than content that my children are mine. I am grateful to their birth parents, aware of the sacrifice they made for the child’s sake, but I see no need to share them. We are an unusually close and happy family—no small trick with four adopted children and a mostly single mom.

Memoir to me would involve what one author tonight called “working through stuff.” I would want to recall my life, to figure out its patterns. I’m not fooling myself that the world is waiting breathlessly for this story. If I write it, it would be for me—and perhaps for my children.

Enough. I’m going to read a mystery and forget the thornier problems of life in general or writing in particular.