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.