Looking Back at Life

I've been reading memoirs--one book and two manuscripts. The book, The $64 Tomato, by William Alexander, is a charming, gracefully written, wry account of how one man's vegetable garden--albeit a huge one--took over his life. Alexander recounts battles with fungi and his slip and slide down the hill away from his dream of organic gardening, his battles with animals, including deer and a groundhog he eventually named SuperChuck. Not content to grow beefsteak or other common varieties of tomatoes, he grew antique varieties, such as Brandywine--and you guess it, when he totalled up his expenses, he figured one tomato cost him $64. A herniated disc--and possibly just general disenchantment after years of backbreaking labor--eventually put an end to his career as a major gardener. The book is both amusing and a cautionary tale--and that's what memoirs should be.
At TCU Press, my usual reaction when a memoir is submitted is to reassure the writer that I know he or she has had an interesing life and explain as gently as possible that memoirs by persons without fame are a drug on the market. I usually suggest self-publishing on the internet for family and friends. Yet occasionally a manuscrpt rises above that, mostly because it has a special hook. The first manuscript I read was "Lost in Austin," wherein the author, a minister, uses the sense of dislocation prompted by a move from the Pacific Northwest to Austin as a metaphor for the dislocation that many of us feel in our daily lives--I dare say all of us if we're at all introspective. I had expected heavy concentration on the spiritual life, but there is none--he was at the time of writing a non-practicing minister and the book is firmly grounded in Austin. It's a good candidate for our press, because of the Texas angle and because it's cleverly written, but the author has written under a pseudonym, and I will have to convince him to change that. How can he promote a book anonymously?
The second memoir, "Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp," is by a woman minister in her fifties who, tired of being assistant minister in a large city church, answered a call to be the only minister at a small church in Dewey, Arizona. This one has much more reflection on the spiritual life as the author tries to figure out her beliefs, her relationship to God, what she believes and what she can say to her congregation. Woven into the narrative are strains of infidelity (her husband had an affair) and death (several parishoners die, and finally, her husband succumbs to leukemia).
But what struck me about this memoir has to do with adoption. The author has apparently carried through life a sense of failure because she was barren; her two children are adopted, and her relationship with her daughter, a Native American, has been anything but good. As a teen, the girl was a runaway, involved with drugs, all your nightmares. Yet late in the book they seem to have reconciled and recognized how they value each other.
As the mother of four adopted children and as a woman who also apprently could not get pregnant, I identified with this part of her story . . . sort of. I have those four wonderful children, with beautiful personalities as adults, and seven grandchildren--how could I possibly feel barren? Honestly my failure to give birth rarely gets a second thought--and when it does, it's usually gratitude that I got my kids the easy way. One of my children is of mixed race, but he, like his siblings, has never shown the desperate need to find his birth family that the memoir writer's daughter felt. Since my son travels often to Hong Kong, the city of his birth mother, I once asked if he liked to meet her and his family. His reply? He'd like to see them from a distance, but he doesn't really want to meet them
Memoir writing is a fine art--and only few can do it successfully. I've written a memoir cookbook, to be published next fall, but that didn't quite require me to come to grips with my life. Sometimes I think I should try--I have not only the story of the happy side of adoption to tell, but that of a lifelong battle with an axiety disorder, the joys and tribulations of a single parent, a career as author and publisher that while it hasn't made me rich and famous has given me great rewards other than monetary. (My friend Bobbie, whom the kids said "always told it like it was," once said to me, "Have you considered that you've had more success than most writers and you ought to be content with that?"--a good thought to ponder.) I may try that memoir--I've made notes about it--but maybe I'm afraid some publisher would say to me, "Why don't you self-publish for family and friends, dear?"