In his chapter “To Remember,” Edmundson discusses the benefit and beauty of the memoir genre. Generally, people have the desire to put their lives in narrative form, to create structure and meaning, and the best time to do this, he says, is in old age. He argues against the idea that writing about your life with a narrative arch is fabricated, saying that plot has been around for centuries. Memoirs help us become better people. It doesn't matter if people care to read your story or if it gets published; writing your memoir is important for yourself. For the first time in his book, he opens up writing to be a kind of “every man’s” hobby, saying that not all musicians make music to be recorded, therefore not all writers have to write to be published. Writing is a right held by everyone. Memoirs look back so that we know ourselves better and come to understand our future. The memoirist adds depth and meaning to the everyday parts of life, which gives us a clearer picture of life and the human experience. Writing helps us remember, and memory helps us write. They aid and strengthen each other.
Memories and the way a person recalls her memories shape her perception of identity— not only the person’s past self but also the way she sees herself in the present and who she expects to be in the future. Because identity is so rooted in memory, it makes sense that humans would feel the pull to write memories down and add a narrative structure to them. We want to believe, and some of us more than others, that x, y, and z molded our world view and made us who were are today. We want to add order and purpose to the chaos of life’s events. Edmundson says that people generally want “to learn from the messes… and to improve” (226). Edmundson suggests that the best time to do this is later in life, when someone in retirement can gather up decades of memories and write them as a story. As a young person reading this, though, I think, what better time to start writing down a collection of memories than right now? Having lived less life, recalling the smaller memories might be easier, the little moments that reflect truth of a person’s character. Remembering for the sake of remembering, remembering just for the joy or sadness of it, sure, but also remembering to learn, as Edmundson says, and to grow. Remembering for wisdom. And there is certainly benefit in doing that as an older person, but why should we wait until we’re older for wisdom when we could start collecting pieces of it now? Looking back on journals written in high school and college, remembering those times and attaching a narrative arch to them can add to a person’s self-awareness, help him realize his own tendencies and weaknesses and strengths. And at sixty, when a man sits down to write a memoir, and he has interpretations of his life from his twenty year old self, how much richer would that man’s narrative be? I think every stage in life is the perfect time for writing to remember. I want to know myself better so that I can become better, to myself and other people, and I want to continue this throughout my whole life.
Recently, I was asked to speak to a group of middle school and high school girls at a weekend retreat about identity. I prepared for my talk by sitting down with my laptop and typing out moments in college that taught me about myself and shaped how I view my identity. Writing this small narrative to share with the girls helped me remember what I learned in college, and I was encouraged. Twenty-one year Sarah wrote a tiny memoir to share with a tiny group of people, and I’m better for it. I absolutely agree with Edmundson’s sentiment that anyone who has the desire to write a memoir should write it, but I want to emphasize that there’s is no better age to write than the age you are right now. Twenty, thirty, forty, or seventy— put pieces together, track your growth, write your story. Personal memoirs benefit all ages because we all could use more wisdom and awareness.
While Edmundson focuses his chapter solely on the genre of memoir, memory holds just as much importance to fiction writing as it does to writing memoirs; memory manifests itself differently in a collection of short stories or a novel. Personal memory is the heart of fiction. That small moment in the wildest fantasy novel when a character has an honest conversation with her friend— the way the author describes the movement of her hands hits a place of familiarity in our hearts because it reminds us of our best friend in high school, and so even though the book takes place outside of our reality, we believe it and we connect with it. Memory connects us with the human experience. I like to write shorts stories, and I remember one in particular that I wrote for a creative writing fiction class as junior in college. It wasn’t an especially good story, but the professor told me the narrator’s flashbacks of memory were strong and poignant. I had written those memories based off small memories of my own: one of my best friends singing loudly with a grin on his face, then later, resting his head on the curve of his guitar, a story from another friend about a boy in his high school gym class who bought a tattoo gun off eBay and got an infection from giving himself a tattoo. These aren’t massive, life-changing events for me, but they’re pieces of my life that struck me as special or interesting in the moment, and I wanted to remember them. Now, they’re tucked away for me in a short story. But also, the stories added a believable aspect to my writing and helped me connect with people who read my work.
For me, being able to connect to art of any kind is one of the most important reasons for creating. When asked what makes a book or story your favorite, one of my classmates said being able to connect with the story. Tim O’Brien author of the pinnacle Vietnam war text, The Things They Carried, would agree. In a video interview with Big Think, O’Brien says he writes to preserve the human spirit and so that people would feel less alone (“Tim O’Brien Tells”). I was excited when I happened upon this interview because I can see this is true about O’Brien in his short story collection The Things They Carried, even though it’s been over twenty years since he wrote the book and he says himself it almost feels like he didn’t write it because he’s changed so much in that time and kind of taken on a life of its own. Twenty years later, the same purpose is still there. Part of preserving the human spirit is incorporating memory into writing, and O’Brien is a pro at this. He uses his own experience and learned truth as a springboard for his fiction writing. He isn’t afraid to manipulate these memories in whatever ways benefit the story best, but the essence of the memory is present in a book like The Things They Carried, which is why a twenty-one year old who has never been to combat can read those stories and say, “Yes, I understand.”
In her essay called “Create Dangerously,” Edwidge Danticat writes about the importance of story-telling for people who are oppressed, and she cites a speech from Toni Morrison about how people try to silence writers because they make people remember the hard stuff. Morrison puts this philosophy into practice beautifully in her writing by not shying away from what is difficult. As a creators of culture, Americans like to romanticize remembering. Nostalgia is deceiving, and I’m guilty of falling into the trap of remembering things being better than they actually were. But Morrison urges us to remember the ugliest parts of life. For people of color, that looks like remembering oppression in a lot of cases. For white people, that looks like remembering being the oppressor, and we hate to do that. We’d rather remember the stuff that makes us look good. I think, though, the difficult remembering is the most important kind of remembering because when we stop remembering oppression, it’s easy to oppress again. When we stop remembering abuse, it’s easy to continue the cycle of treating people as less than human. When we stop remembering, we stop the healing that can come from it.
Writing to remember. Memoirs is a great place to start, and I agree with Edmundson about their importance to the individual. Remembering runs deeper than personal narrative, though. It’s the backbone of believable fiction writing. Remembering connects art to actual people, and the implications of that are endless.
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