Archive for April, 2011
Don’t tell anyone but I’ve been faking it. This isn’t a recent thing. I’ve been faking it for five years.
What happened five years ago? I started writing memoirs, creative nonfiction. Molly, my oldest, was going off to college and I was a wreck. So I took to writing instead of drinking, although I did some of that, too. I became obsessed with writing about my feelings of loss and sadness. I knew I was acting irrational. Molly was doing what a normal, healthy 18-year-old did; they left.
Writing is an act of discovery. Here’s what I discovered: Molly was my first love and her leaving felt like an abandonment. I discovered my voice by writing the memoir, and readers responded to this voice in ways they didn’t with my fiction. When I wrote short stories and novels, I felt I was hiding my real life behind “created” characters, plots that reflected my life but other people in the stories were living them. With writing memoirs, I felt I was being honest. I felt like I was inviting people into my life. “Come with me, won’t you?” And I hoped by writing the truth, my truth, people would discover something about their own lives.
Which leads me to my comment about faking it. Another memoir has brought into question the authenticity of memoirs. Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” has come under siege over the “facts” shared in his memoir of starting schools, especially for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Did he really stumble into a village in a weakened state to discover 84 students writing in the dirt with sticks? It looks like the answer might be “no.” Like James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” before him, it seems Mortenson exaggerated or made up entirely some of the most poignant and harrowing events in the memoir.
Why’d Mortenson do it? Money? Attention to a cause he believes in? Fame? I don’t know. Maybe the truth is at first it was about getting donations and attention to building schools for girls in parts of the world where women are second class citizens. Maybe what happened is once he did start getting money and raising awareness, it was like a train that had gotten away. Frey acknowledged to Oprah this is what happened with his memoir. He’d tried to publish “his story” as fiction but no one was buying it. Then someone recommended he turn it into a memoir, and voila the rest is history. 
A debate rages on about the significance of memoirs as the truth and as art. Lately two writers, Steve Almond and Lorrie Moore, have “faced off” on the fight. Almond believes memoirs are about truth and not facts. He also believes the publishing industry has insisted these regular ol’ people be heroes. Would people have read “Three Cups of Tea,” if the story wasn’t harrowing and instead read like a textbook? Probably not. Lorrie Moore, a novelist and short story writer, takes Neil Genzlinger’s take on the memoir. The genre is full of nobody’s regurgitating a story about their ho-hum lives.
Here’s what I (and Mary Karr and Pam Houston) think about memoirs: They are stories from the writer’s memory and they are that writer’s truth. It’s about truth and art and telling a good story. Here’s a fact from my memoir: I was in labor for days with Jack. Really, I was in labor for twelve hours; it just felt like days. When trying to blend my family, I split myself in two. Did I literally split myself in two? No, of course not. It just felt like it when dealing with the two males and two females in my family. I have to say though I haven’t exaggerated or made up “facts” to tell my story of the emptying nest and now of trying to blend a family. I am one of those ordinary people with a story to tell. Ultimately that’s what fiction and creative fiction are, they are stories. Does it matter how it’s told as long it’s the “truth” and it’s a good story?
I don’t think so, and that’s a fact.
What do you think?
I think of my life as my years with the magnolia tree and without the magnolia tree. That’s not to say my forty plus years couldn’t be cut in numerous other ways. After college. Before or after divorce. With or without children. But for this story, it’s the magnolia tree that sat in the front yard of our house in Pacific Beach that’s important.
When Dad finished his four years as a Navy pilot, he moved me, my sister, and my mom from Florida back home to San Diego. I was five and Marcia, fourteen months younger than me. My parents bought a mustard-colored house of 1200 feet in Pacific Beach. From the outside, the house appeared simple. But when you walked in the front door, there was nothing simple about it. The floor was a mosaic of scrap wood in the entry and hallway, linoleum in the kitchen, parquet floor in the family room and rust shag carpet in the bedrooms and living room.
Pacific Beach
On the left wall of the entryway, my mom had painted three flowers and a butterfly done in the favored colors of the seventies, avocado green and harvest gold. I remember Dad practically jammed the paintbrush in her hand and holding it as if she were a preschooler. Both my parents, my mother in particular, tried to fit in to the hippie vibe of the late sixties and early seventies of PB. Both Mom and Dad had been brought up as middle-class Catholics with a strong work ethic and a love of alcohol. In my dad’s case, the alcohol won out.
The kitchen was small and yellow. What I remember most about it is that my mom had framed a couple of my paintings from kindergarten and displayed them on the kitchen wall. There was a TV room with a small color television and a surfboard that served as the top of the bar. Behind it, I’m sure there was liquor but what fascinated me most was the huge jar of pennies on top of the bar next to my dad’s coin and stamp collection and the draft beer equipment that never got used. We had a concrete backyard. Above our garage was a one-bedroom apartment my parents rented out. And behind the garage, my dad stored his 1956 Mercedes Benz 190 SL, a heap of a convertible with potential that even my five-year-old eyes could see.
In front of the house, stood a large magnolia tree that took over the whole front lawn, forever shadowing our house from the rising sun. The leaves of the tree were as long as my forearm and the ivory colored blossoms as big as my head. From one of the branches hung a rope swing, which didn’t last long after Natalie, our neighbor, fell off and broke her leg.
None of our neighbors had a tree as magnificent as our magnolia tree. No other neighbor had a blocked view of the street. No other neighbor had a tree which prevented one from seeing inside, with the exception of old Mr. Bernard who had a forest of pine trees, really probably just three or four, but it seemed like more.
We lived on Promontory Street. And for all I knew, our street was just that, a promontory, a high ridge of land. At five, my block was my world. Eighteen similar looking tract homes in various shades of white, gold, green and rust gathered around the street that sliced through our block, stopped by two other streets on either end.
Things I remember about PB—the smell of salt and something fishy off the ocean breeze and the feel of the moist air and eternal sunshine. And even back then PB was full of eclectic people, the kind of people who are drawn to the beach–hippies, vagabonds, artists, college kids. Gretchen, who lived down the street, gave me my first taste of zucchini cake with rich, cream cheese frosting. My best friend, Damon, lived across from me. On the first day of kindergarten, our teacher separated us for talking too much.
When I turned thirteen, my family, including my eight-year-old brother, moved to Alpine. Our magnolia tree was replaced by a scrub pine and manzanita. Beige carpet ran throughout our ranch house. I never saw a hippie and no one offered me zucchini cake. There were no traffic signals in Alpine. There were horses and bus rides to and from school. And a kind of quiet that could be deafening to a kid who grew up with the sounds of sirens, cars, and yells down the block and in my house.
Alpine, CA
Sometimes I drive by my “old” house in PB. It remains the same, the magnolia tree standing guard in the front yard. It’s about the only thing on the block that’s the same. Most of the neighbors have moved. The colors of the houses have changed. Some of the front yards look aged, weathered with dry grass and untended flower beds. But when I see the magnolia, I’m five-years-old again when life was both chaotic and new.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.~ William Shakespeare
Kelly (in red) and her friends
Last Friday was Kelly’s nineteenth birthday. She had five of her closest friends from her high school days over to dinner at the house and then they took a limo to dessert and the beach. I was the cook and waitress. This allowed me to hear their conversation while they ate macaroni and cheese, garlic bread, chicken and Caesar salad, comfort foods for the girl who doesn’t want to grow up but is anyway. What struck me was their easy banter, the way they had each others’ back. This reminded me of a time long ago when I’d graduated from the same high school as Kelly had, and my friends Rhonda, Kimberly, Danielle, Kristin, Kelly and Suzy, I’d graduated with.
Last night I went over to Kimberly’s new house. Over the thirty years since we all graduated from high school we try to go to dinner once a month, come rain or shine, and there has been a lot of both. We have supported each other through breast cancer and skin cancer, through siblings and spouses who were (are) alcoholics and addicts, through the loss of mothers and fathers, through struggles with our kids who have lied, gotten into trouble with the law or dropped out of school. We have held each other through divorces, miscarriages, and other disappointments. We’ve shared joys, too, our marriages and remarriages, the birth of our children, Kimberly’s surprise pregnancy with twin girls when she’d had to have IVF for her first two children, and the successes of our children despite our parenting and the big world feeling too big at times.
It wasn’t always like this. There were growing pains, when something was too painful for the group to handle, when we were younger and didn’t trust each other with our real selves, we’d retreat, go into our cave, circle our wagons and emerge stronger, closer to sharing the good, the bad and the ugly. We now can call each other on our shit. Call each other damn republicans or democrats, elephants or donkeys. Some of us are Christians, some don’t believe.
We are all in the middle of our lives, and when you’ve been through as much as we have you let go of the shit that just doesn’t matter anymore. Kelly has a long way to go with her friends, thirty years and hopefully more. She has a long way to go before raising a glass of wine (or not) and toasting to being together, to the quiet, to all that’s gone before and to this, to this moment.
Can a woman be a good mom and wife with a successful career?
Two recent memoirs explore this question.
Amy Finley won the third season of the Next Food Network Star, and her career was launched. She won her own national TV cooking show, The Gourmet Next Door. Finley had fulfilled her dream of bringing American families together with accessible recipes from her show. But what she was doing for other families, she was failing to do for her own. Greg, her husband, never wanted Amy to try out for competition in the first place, and now she that she had her own show he told Amy he would leave her and take their two young children if she didn’t come home.
What did Amy do? She walked away from her television show, not without regret. In Amy’s memoir, HOW TO EAT A SMALL COUNTRY: A Family’s Pursuit of Happiness, One Meal at a Time, she tells of her journey of moving with Greg and their children to France to work on her marriage and save her family. For six months, the family live and travel around rural France, the place where Amy and Greg met and fell in love and where the act of cooking and eating reconnected the family.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir, HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING, tells her story of leaving her husband and two small sons in 2001 to interview the Hiroshima survivors of the atomic bomb. Rahna, who is half-Japanese searches for a deeper understanding of her own heritage. At first her husband encouraged her to spend the six months finding her answers, but quickly became disenchanted by her absence.
Rahna is exhilarated by her first solo adventure. However, initially her interviews with the survivors are stilted. Then the attacks on September 11th happened, causing the atomic bomb survivors to relive their experiences and open up in ways they hadn’t before. This sharing awakens Rahna and causes her to look at her own life. What she discovers is she can no longer ignore her ambivalent feelings about being a wife and mother. She comes back to the States, divorces her husband and moves out of the family home.
In a recent interview on The View, Rahna said, “I never wanted to be a mother. My ex wanted children. He said he would be the caretaker.”
“Do your children know they were not wanted? That you didn’t love them?” Barbara Walters asked. (What is with this woman and the need to make people cry?)
“I love my children,” she said. “They know I never wanted to be a mother.”
Amy chose family and Rahna chose her career. Both decisions had consequences. For Amy, at times she feels swallowed up by her family’s needs and misses her career. Rahna has received death threats for her choice.
I wonder if these women had it easy by choosing one path. As a working mom, I struggle every day with trying to juggle my family and career. I make daily (hourly?) decisions of work or family. How can I make it in time to Jack’s soccer game when my boss has asked to meet with me? How do I get squeeze three hours of work into one so I can go home and make dinner? Often I dream of a simpler life where I’d quit my job, move to Taos with the family, raise chickens (only for eggs) and grow zucchini and tomatoes. What would it be like? Would I lose myself? Would I feel resentful? But this is just a fantasy. I have to work. I have children in schools they love, surrounded by friends and extended family. I have a mortgage with equity. I have retirement tied to my current career. I can’t quit now.
These memoirs remind me how difficult, if not impossible, it is to have it all.
Can you?
