Your Least Obvious Perspective is Memoir's Most Important POV
Are You Neglecting Your Memoir's Third I?
Make the two people, I now, and I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. —Virginia Woolf
Happy 4th, Loreates,
To be honest, I’m having a hard time celebrating this country’s anniversary under the current regime, so I’m just going to move right past it to this week’s writing concern.
In our last Take-5 workshop, we had a spirited conversation about the importance of the Third I in memoir. In our test case, as in many, a mature narrator was needed to reassure the reader that the author did see the obvious Truth that was hidden from both the younger “remembering” self and the “remembered” child self. But no mature narrator was visible on the page, so how to make her perspective known? That was the nature of the conversation, which I thought I’d expand in this post by bringing in some samples from the MFA workshop I used to teach on The Third I.
Read on!
Aimee
Memoir Requires Three I’s
Memory is something that you do; it is not something that you have.—Tobias Wolff
What perspective do you bring to your subject? How you answer this critical question will determine whether your readers trust and believe you. It will shape your voice on the page and your narrative engagement with the story. And it will largely define the meaning that emerges through your prose.
The question of perspective applies, of course, to all literary writing, but it’s especially critical in memoir writing, which hinges on the reader’s belief that the memoirist is telling the truth. Truth not just as in, what literally happened back when, but much more importantly, what was going on beneath the surface of literal events and, ultimately, why is all that relevant and meaningful now?
Memoir is not diary, chronicle, or therapy
What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.—Vivian Gornick
You can use a journal to get your feelings down on paper. You can keep a diary to record the events of your life. You can narrate your dreams and memories to a therapist to exorcise your trauma and tell your version of what happened. All of those practices can help prepare you to write a memoir, but none, in and of itself, qualifies as memoir.
The mission of memoir is insight. Experience is the subject. Meaning is the theme. And a complete, ruthlessly honest and true understanding of the experience is the end goal.
It’s virtually impossible to understand the whole truth of an experience while you’re going through it. Insight often remains elusive for decades and might not dawn until the memoir is in its final draft. So, what then? Do memoirists simply write blind until the bell of insight rings, and then start the whole process over? Yes, and no.
Challenges of perspective in memoir
All your life you’ve had these truths in your head, and the truth lies elsewhere. —Luc Sante
