A Theme Takes Shape
How I Wrote a Memoir: Part III
Early Snippets from College Heartbreak Become Integral to Future Work
My UCI Extension Creative Writing workshop in 2007 provided early practice for my nonexistent memoir, but it would be another seven years before I would say, “I’m writing a book.” At this stage, I didn’t believe I was capable, nor did I know what kind of book I wanted to write. But a decade after my college boyfriend broke up with me, I was still trying to piece together why, which is why I was compelled to write a vignette about him for Lesson 7 during this online class, a few details of which were later expanded into scenes and included in my manuscript; a few details of which I had forgotten until rereading them recently; and a few details I discarded when I later crafted my experiences into a cohesive whole. In this early piece, the first sentence isn’t true:
“He liked it when I was mad.” No, he didn’t. When I wrote that, I was trying to find a way into a complicated story I didn’t fully comprehend, and I was speculating about his thoughts and emotions, which were still unclear. In 2017, when I was working with an editor, he’d say something to this effect: “It doesn’t matter why he did the things he did; it only matters he did them.” This realization would have an enduring influence on my writing.
For several years, however, I would focus on the men with whom I have interacted more than I’d analyze myself, and I would always get the same workshop note: “We want to hear more about you.” Lesson 7 was no exception, but I find a few sections of that short piece striking, not because of the exact words I wrote, but how they’d become important to my later work:
For instance, “by the time his sunken skeleton stepped off the plane at LAX after a semester in Amsterdam, the red haze had become a permanent fixture in his glassy eyes. His hollow self had officially taken over.”
The Seeds That Grow
Putting aside revision at the line level, those two sentences became a seed that would grow into a published essay and more than one scene in my manuscript. I would eventually write the LAX scene, and I would write about the young, naïve woman who didn’t anticipate soon being crushed and how that would affect her future romantic decisions.
I see now how, as a burgeoning nonfiction writer, I played with snippets of ideas and segments of a larger narrative I had yet to form, like here:
“The thief could never undo removing my heart from its flimsy chain in the parking lot at Diedrich Coffee, turning it into confetti on the asphalt . . .”
This sentence screams to be fleshed out. What happened in the parking lot? What did we say to each other? What led to this very public, very unexpected breakup? How did it affect me in the grand scheme? I didn’t write the coffeehouse breakup scene for another decade, after I’d written an essay collection and was now turning those separate essays into a memoir. Why did it take so long? It doesn’t matter; the process takes as long as it takes, and it can’t be forced, which is why I think many authors’ first traditionally published books are better than their second ones. They often don’t have a deadline yet.
Forgotten Dialogue
Then there is the forgotten dialogue that takes me aback and makes me wonder if I should tweak my manuscript again. (I am determined to call it until I have another editor, but I’ve said that before.) After my college love and I were no longer together, he briefly dated his teaching assistant, an older graduate student, and she dumped him a few months into their courtship. For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me about it while it was happening:
“Remember what it was like when we were first together? That’s how it is with her.”
I recently wrote, “Oh god!” in the margin when I rediscovered this, one of the most painful things anyone has ever said to me. I had totally blocked it. One of the reasons writing a memoir is so difficult is because of our faulty memories. I often wonder how much of my past my brain has erased or stored in some inaccessible place. (So much!) I also wonder what I misremember. (So much!) I recently found an old piece I wrote about talking to a psychic at a Halloween party, a scene I included in the last chapter of my manuscript after rewriting the ending at least five times. I would have sworn when I walked into the room, the psychic said, “Do you always think this much?” but that’s not how it went down. (In this case, I did update my manuscript to reflect the more accurate version.)
In many instances, I’m grateful when I have the wherewithal to record dialogue immediately after it occurs, even if I have no idea when or if I will ever use it. That I am predisposed to do so facilitated writing more complete scenes when I was ready to write a memoir, but happening upon lines like the cruel one above, I speculate about the propensity of a memoirist to torture herself. I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering him comparing what I thought was unique and magical with a fling he had after me.
Jotting It Down in Real Time
The positive flipside of writing everything down in real time—an act I did when my life was more turbulent—is sometimes I find gems like what was scrawled on the communal whiteboard of my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in dry erase marker before cell phones the day I dropped off the mail that was forwarded to my house when he was overseas:
“Your mom wants to know where her real son is because she found you in a basket on the doorstep.”
I took solace knowing his mom was on my side, and that landline message still appears in my manuscript. What I cut post-Lesson 7, however, was the last phone call she and I ever had soon after that terrible night at the coffeehouse. We were both crying when she said, “I wish you would have stayed together. I really thought you’d get married.” While an important phone call, it didn’t fit into the manuscript. Determining what to include and what to leave out in a memoir is key—and not easy. I was unable to cram all the important events of my life into one book, nor should I have. Writing a memoir is like writing fiction in terms of structure and a narrative arc, and I was nowhere near that stage the first time I tried to write this story.
Sequence of Events and Alternate Endings
Whenever I read a memoir that follows the “then this happened, then this happened, then this happened” format without showing the deeper significance of these events and why they are strung together in this specific sequence, I want to throw it against a wall because the writer failed to make choices. Writing a memoir often requires asking, “Who cares?” I’m still not sure if I made all the right decisions about what to include in my manuscript, but I at least made them thoughtfully.
The effect of the breakup with my college boyfriend was profound, and I express so in the final paragraph of this assignment by sharing an event that happened five years later, a scene I considered expanding but never did, as it didn’t add anything new on an emotional subtext level that wasn’t already articulated in my eventual manuscript. I ultimately wrote a sufficient ending to this story; I didn’t need another one.
The alternate ending went like this: My ex was living with a new girlfriend in San Francisco, and one night my roommate and I had dinner with him in the early 2000s when we were on a road trip. He appeared content and healthy, didn’t stay long, and reopened the giant wound in my chest just by walking through the door of the restaurant:
“A few hours later, I gasped silent sobs in the bottom bunk of a woodsy Sausalito hostel, trying not to wake the woman snoring in the bed next to me. ‘Nothing will ever be okay again,’ I thought.”
Despite how untrue and bleak that thought was, in the moment I believed it. The one night I ever stayed in a hostel, I never slept. Lying in that uncomfortable bed, my roommate above me on the top bunk, I didn’t think I’d ever get over my second boyfriend. I did, of course, and in November this year I finally received the elusive closure I never expected and wrote about it for Brevity.
What the Teacher Said
My UCI Extension instructor said this about Lesson 7: “At the start of the piece you say . . . you’re angry, but the piece doesn’t feel angry, nor do I read of angry outbursts, so I’m wondering about that. Some of the metaphors and similes contrast each other, so you could probably just eliminate a few.”
I added those “angry outbursts” later and, thankfully, eliminated so many needless metaphors and similes. While this piece is a microcosm of what’s to come, a theme is already taking shape. I was working toward finding the voice that would tell this story in a more extensive, introspective way only time affords.