A memoir is neither an autobiography nor a biography. A memoir is not the story of your whole life; it is how you remember a specific event, experience or particular period of your life and the impact on you and others. You might then think: my life is so boring, who would be interested in it? Nine out of ten people lead normal and seemingly mundane lives but underneath it all, there are struggles as they try to find meaning out of their existence.
In a Reader's Digest article, writer Jeannette Walls describes a memoir as "handing over your life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it. It's honestly sharing what you think, feel, and have gone through. If you can do that effectively, then somebody gets the wisdom and benefit of your experience without having to live it." William Zinsser, in his essay on memoir-writing, calls writers 'custodians of memory', and he goes on to say, "That's what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into."
I am a fan of memoirs and they fill up a few of my bookshelves. What do I look for in a memoir? Writing style, of course; an endearing story; and wit. One memoir that fits the bill is Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, in which he relates the difficulties of his childhood in Ireland. The book was published in 1996 and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, an American award for achievements in journalism, literature and musical composition. McCourt writes in the present tense, which gives the book immediacy, and through the eyes of a boy. One paragraph goes like this: "The rest of the dressing is easy, the shirt I wore to bed is the shirt I wear to school. I wear it day in day out. It's the shirt for football, for climbing walls, for robbing orchards. I go to Mass and the Confraternity in that shirt and people sniff the air and move away."
If you like watching BBC's natural history programmes, you would know of Sir David Attenborough, a naturalist and broadcaster who has been to almost every nook and cranny of the earth. He tells of his many exploits and adventures in Life on Air, first published in 2002 and written in a style that's charming and rather funny. Of a trip to Borneo in September 1957, he describes the jeep that he and his group were to travel in: "It was an elderly machine and had had an eventful life. The voltmeter on its dashboard, according to the name on the dial, had started its ife as part of an air-conditioning plant. There were strange improvised wires snaking around its cylinder head. The horn was sounded by touching a place on the shaft of the steering wheel, specially scraped clean of paint, with the bare end of a piece of flex. The process not only startled those ahead but also shocked the driver - literally though mildly."
Imagine a secret book club held at the writer's house, where she and seven former students would gather once a week to discuss forbidden books. The house was in Tehran and the writer was then teaching at the University of Tehran. First published in 2003, Reading Lolita in Tehran is not only about novels read by the group of young women, it is also about their personal stories and that of the writer, Azar Nafisi. Set within the context of Iranian politics, the book provides us glimpses into life in Iran in the 1990s and earlier.
What they did was against the law and at the beginning of the book, the writer reveals, "I often teasingly reminded my students of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and asked, Which one of you will finally betray me? For I am a pessimist by nature and I was sure at least one would turn against me. Nassrin once responded mischievously, You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers..."
At one of the Big Bad Wolf sales, as I was trawling through the rows and piles of books, I noticed one that looked interesting. That it was first published in 1942 intrigued me and I was further attracted by the description of the author, Beryl Markham, as someone who had spent much of her life in East Africa, who had been a horse breeder and trainer before she turned to aviation. In September 1936, she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Her book, West With The Night, is a memoir of her life in an Africa that no longer exists and of her flying adventures. It is a beautifully written book and full of humour.
She writes of the roads leading out of Nairobi in the 1930s: "On a map they look sturdy and incapable of deceit, but to have ventured from Nairobi south toward Machakos or Magadi in anything less formidable than a moderately powered John Deers tractor was optimistic to the point of sheer whimsey, and the road to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, north and west through Naivasha, called 'practicable' in the dry season, had, when I last used it after a mild rain, an adhesive quality equal to that of the most prized black treacle."
Blogging about your life, the people around you and the events happening about you, is a form of memoir-writing. In 2003, Wan A Hulaimi started a blog about his days of growing up in Terengganu under his pen name Awang Goneng. His nostalgic look at those 'yesteryears' attracted a large following, prompting a publisher to put his collection of memories into print. The book came out in 2007 and has been enjoying good sales. Awang Goneng has a new blog Kecek-Kecek.
The details in his writing lead you into the scene, making you feel as if you're right there as it unfolds. In a passage about Ayoh Wang, who makes brassware, Awang Goneng tells us: "This was hot work that made your shirt cling to your body in a glue of sweat, but when the temperature reached that height, Ayoh Wang would pull off his white top and issue directions dressed only in his batik. He'd have slung on his shoulder, by then, a long piece of east coast regulatory wear, the batik lepas, of hand-painted local cloth that made a head gear or body wrap on a rainy day, or simply just a handy bit of all-purpose material."
So write a blog; one day it could become a book!
Thank you for sharing. I felt conscious about trying to write a proper memoir. Seems to come with so many responsibilities and expectations. But writing simple and honest memories and sharing them, that comes easy when the mood strikes.
ReplyDeleteOf course that means dispensing with good writing style or much planning, just spilling out the memories...
You're welcome. The memories are the important bits. When Awang Goneng wrote his blog, I don't think he was aiming for it to become a book. He just wrote his stories to share them with others. But a publisher thought it worthwhile to put the stories into a book to reach another audience. Just write your stories, Noorshin, and not to worry about other things.
ReplyDelete