Our Memoirs Are Unlimited Variations on a Theme

They are as variable as we are, infinite and precious. With each telling, they uncover another dimension

The certainty of stories

We have been telling stories about ourselves from the beginning of time. They tell us who we are. They connect us to others. They entertain, inform and comfort us. They tell us we are not alone.

Personal stories extend from the walls of caves to memoirs about how the author du jour became an outstanding human being in less than three days.

Millions of people open their massive collection of memoirs every Sunday as they revisit the “familiar” stories of miserable Job as he bitches and moans about his feeling of abandonment, or Jesus, who despairs that his best friends would fall asleep during his most trying hours.

These stories aren’t only about our ancestors, way back then. They touch us right now. Who hasn’t felt like the world has just permanently dumped on them or that the people we love the most, often attend to us least.

No matter when or where, these are stories that last because they embrace the array of human experiences we wrestle with in our lives. The words may vary, the voice may sound different, but the undercurrents of their stories are memoirs. And generations of readers pick up the threads of these stories and carry them along in very different lives.

The science of development helps us understand who we are

Our findings about development help as to understand the factors that combine to make us who we are, as our unique personalities interact with specific events, often difficult.

We are creatures of rhythm, of cycles, of consistency. Our personalities are a weaving of threads. Some of them are unusual. Some have unique color, texture and strength. And then there are the common threads that occur again throughout the course of our lives.

They repeat even though we see them at work in retrospect. It may take a lifetime to understand. Think of the in-utero infant. There are genetics that influence the colors of personality. One of the biggest determinants of our “colors and textures” is that they repeat. It is a major component of the people we are temperament.

They, at most basic, define who we are. Until we interact with the world around us. Think of a five-year-old who “loses it” whenever there is too much action, too much noise. This child will often have a history from infancy of being irritable, frightened and reactive.

That’s the name of the game for this child.

It is up to adults in his life to make adjustments to a kinder environment. As the child grows, he can be helped to become more resilient, to change his environment and his reactivity to it. In that way, the red threads and the blue threads will combine to make his life a continual theme that will arise throughout his life as he confronts new situations. And all of the unique threads will make his development fascinating.

What is really unique?

Some of what we want to read about is so goddamn unusual that the subject screams for one-shot attention. “I was Taylor Swift’s Best Friend,” “I fought off a cougar with my bare hands.” “I have the highest IQ in creation.” I was once that captivated when I bought two memoirs, just for their titles. Thank God I Have Cancer and A Match to the Heart- the recounting by a woman who was hit by lightning, not once, but twice.

It is easy to accept the fact that the information, “objective” subjects demand requires constant revision. The advances in knowledge, changes in the cultural milieu, the expertise of the authors, or the needs of the readership conspire to create a constant hunger.

We are less likely to celebrate the first chapters of our lives like David Copperfield, beginning, “I am born.” Only the most narcissistic will proclaim that the indiscriminate details of their lives deserve automatic serialization. “My Life: Volume One” (of 80) is typically less a great literary contribution and more, a lot of fluff.

We all have our stories, and our stories within stories. And while their forms may vary, their themes recur and deserve to be told again.

Memoirs don’t need to be written in recent time to have value. They can go way back.

As we age, we are often blessed with wisdom and compassion. The contexts in which we live our lives has changed. Cruel experience has made us brittle or smoothed us around the edges. Unexpected joy kindly turns our expectation of the future and forgives the past for its meanness. A new memoir on the same theme as one written twenty years before may yield a continuity of surprising insights, for the writer and the reader.

Because I am taking a memoir vacation, I have prevailed upon my brother, whose life is, in so many ways, close to mine.

When language fails: The “Cicada Diaries”

When my brother, John, was 15, my family moved from New York to rural Maryland, where he was enrolled in a boys’ Catholic school after the term had begun. He had been a fast-talking hot shot at his previous school, but now he was a pariah.

I still marvel at the way adolescents must stay up every night, devising new forms of cruelty. Have they so often suffered it at the hands of their parents or “friends?”

Boys made fun of his accent and his long hair. One guy tried to count the freckles on his face with a pen. They tripped him in his bell bottom pants, stole his money and made him feel like crap. He begged my parents for forbearance but felt like they had no understanding. Then the Christian Brothers piled on and made his life doubly miserable.

His first memoir was written for my mother. He called it a plaintive, “Do You Know How I Feel?” The sentences were short and choppy. He enumerated the insults like he recited a police report. The tone was hopeless. Every other word was spelled wrong. But it was a story, told with brutal, aching honesty. It was a long tirade that my mother read but ignored. Nothing changed.

Cicadas triumph

That year brought the seven-year cycle of the cicada. For dramatic effect, I prefer the term, “locusts.” But it isn’t my story. They were disgusting, large zooming bugs that came out in force like those nightmares in the old movie, The Birds.

On a bulletin board at his school, a Call to Action recruited contestants in a “Live Cicada Eating Contest.” There was a brief description of the rules (how to determine “live,” the forbidden use of swallowing with liquids, the cadre of judges and the big bad news: parental permission.) My brother made an error he would never make again. He actually asked for it.

My mother was an extremely articulate woman with whom it was difficult to get a word in. Knowing this, my brother wrote another story of his experience, his desperate need to participate, and his certainty that it would be a cure for his abject isolation. This one was titled, “I know I choke on green beans, but I think I could do this.”

My mother shrugged and figured, “OK, what's one cicada going to do?” My brother hid the fact that he didn't plan to eat just one. He vowed to blow his classmates out of the water and eat 25.

This was an unintended, but funnier rendition of his same sorrowful story, with some satisfaction. He got over on the school, the kids and his own mother. He knew no one would top his bid.

But what fool of a fifteen-year-old who was desperate, lonely and weird goes to his lengths? Because this was his theme. It defined him. He kept a journal of his practice progress — from zero ingestions to 25. He used surrogates like dried grass, cracked pecans and the occasional grasshopper.

This was not a lark on his part. He had to save himself. I fought with this brother 75% of our lives together, and these chapters were amusing, but also concerning. I feared that he could bomb and be held in even worse contempt than he was already.

Cicadas du jour

In the showdown, my brother only had to consume only more than one cicada to win. His win was celebrated by several boys who had had nothing to do with him before. John could be quite the boisterous storyteller about his victories.

Before the contest, he made a detailed list of how his life would be before and after his quest. His imagined triumph didn’t match the outcome. His blow by blow at the dinner table sounded like it should have been flatly titled, “Five steps in eating a cicada- alive and whole.” Just the facts. There was no real joy. Just a flat, “Yeah, I said I’d to it. I did it. It’s over and my life is the same.”

And he was right to be reserved. While he was no longer kicked around by the other boys, neither was he accepted. His triumph lingered with grudging respect from the mean boys. He kept his mouth shut until the family dinner table when he unloaded his anger, with a wide swath of vulnerability. My mother encouraged him to keep writing about it, but he refused. Writing was worthless. He was worthless.

The story looked like it had met its final chapter. It was a done deal which did not deserve further memorialization.

A two-year memoir hiatus

Two years later, a month before senior year ended, students were required to write an extended personal essay, “My life in school: The most important thing that happened to me.” It was billed as a writing contest but was really expected to be a love letter to the faculty members about how well they had molded them into good Catholic young men.

My brother had one foot out the door. His college acceptance was in the bag. He never had less to lose.

He wrote about his initial entry, in sophomore year. His descriptions were sharp and more painful than he had described them when they happened. The endless anecdotes were stunning in their likeness to the kind of dangerous bullying that I read in social media. The faculty was implicated by name.

It was much more than “this bad thing happened and then this thing.” It was a self-portrait of what can happen to a boisterous spirit in the right (wrong) circumstances. His spelling still sucked. His handwriting was hieroglyphic. But his vocabulary in the language of suffering was more powerful in its present iteration than the past when it was going on. His siblings agreed. We readers and writers know that “last words”, or final chapters never really close the file on a variety of subjects.

His story has never left me. I thought it was an amazing read.

But the faculty was appalled at his rendition of razor-sharp cruelty and the indictment of the students who had perpetrated it. They squirmed at the implications of their culpability.

Freed from their control, his writing was raw, honest…and deemed “totally unacceptable.” John was called on the carpet and given an ultimatum — “show the writing to your parents for their approval, rewrite the essay, or run the risk of not graduating.”

He presented the essay to my mother. It was titled, “The most important thing was cruelty and how no one stopped it.”

My mother gave him a look that said, “Oh John, can’t you just move on? Do what they want. It won’t kill you.”

Then she read it. She started off by wincing at his frequent grammatical assaults with frowns and sighs. But then she took more time with each page. Her shoulders slumped. She put down her cigarette. Her eyes glistened. John was certain that he was dead meat.

My mother finished with a long inhale and exhale. She grabbed a pen and began to write. John was pale. He knew he could write a substitute kiss ass letter, but he would refuse, and then throw a wrench into graduation.

He watched her write. She always had perfect penmanship which looked good but was so damn slow in its execution. What did she think? Did she understand the power of his writing more than she had before? She read her words over several times. Then she handed the note to her anxious son.

She entered his memoir with her own creative writing:

“Dear Faculty of Saint Dominic Savio High School,” “My husband and I are so pleased with John’s writing progress this year. Thank you so much for your contribution. We are so looking forward to graduation. Very sincere regards,” Mary Louise Manning

John didn’t fully understand my mother’s manipulative finesse in writing on his behalf. All he knew was that her words saved him from an impossible dilemma. His words were finally understood, and they finally pushed my mother into action.

Another chapter

Twenty years later, he contributed to his church’s anthology, labeled “Fathers and Sons.” His title was, “You can always come to me,” It moved the victims of cruelty. It impacted the men who had been bullies. It was a cautionary tale to his peers.

And it was a recounting of cruelty and loneliness, told with raw honesty, with empathy for himself and an admiration of managing two years of agony that seemed like two centuries. It was sure to embarrass his four-year-old son when he hit adolescence. But there is no shelf life on compassion and wisdom, especially when they are remembered and practiced as our stories unfold.

The themes in our lives that are sharp enough to pierce the skin will reprise over time in our writing. In an emotional excavation we may see that the titles may change, the mood and form may be different, but in its essence, the same story is always the root, considerably deeper and resilient than we may have seen in a surface read.

When we stretch to tell our stories, there is no finish line. If it was important to tell once, it probably merits a reprise down the road. We are full of stories, and they find their essence in a basic list of concerns and motivations.

Several years ago, I came upon a poem, “facts of life,” by Irish writer Padraig O Tuoma, with one such list. I can’t tell you how to consume a cicada, but I can offer some of his items instead. They anchor me in my memoir writing, especially when I am sitting with a still pen wondering, “What the hell am I really writing about?”

The facts of memoirs

That you were born and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.

That you will lie if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn from the situations you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.

That you will live that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who once were strangers and may well still be.

That life isn't fair.

That life is sometimes good

and sometimes even better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That you will probably be okay.

The above poem lists the “stops along the way” that all of we ordinary people encounter as we journey through our lives and the stories that embrace them. Against the template of the most basic weavings that make us unique, we will never want for stories.