NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

Hydra-Headed Memoirs & Well-Connected Essays:
​Negotiating Your Book-length, NonFiction Thing​

Sonya Huber

​Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody (2008) and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers (2011). She teaches at Fairfield University and directs Fairfield’s Low-Residency MFA Program. More info at www.sonyahuber.com. 
Steven Church
Tarn Wilson
Joe Mackall
Steven Harvey

Sonya Huber
​Flip-Floppers Finding the Center

​We are memoir/essay flip-floppers. We moan to each other about taking a collection of chunks and turning them into a coherent whole with a narrative through-line. Sometimes even the phrase “narrative through-line” gives me shivers. But we all bit off this large challenge.
 
We often talk about the finished product of a book, but we rarely talk about the life-span of a writing project as it evolves. So often we are writing without knowing anything about the size of the object we are aiming for. I’m interested in what it has meant for me to live in the back and forth space between memoir and essay collection, to consider those not discrete containers but fluid categories.  We are also influenced by current ideas about “what might sell.” You can be immersed in conventional knowledge that the essay collection won’t sell, so you destroy essays to write a memoir, and then you emerge from that fever dream with 27 versions of your book on your hard drive to learn that the essay is back in fashion.
 
I’ve written 3 memoirs, each with a subject-area focus. Each of these beasts started as chunks of essays. The publication pressure of being an academic and also a competitive person led me to want to publish short stand-alone selections in literary journals. Each stand alone chunk, either an essayistic wander or a mini-memoir, has its own internal structure. One of the questions is what happens when you break apart these containers to try and find a larger logic.
 
I could only see the outline of the shape of each book by casting as far outward toward its edges as possible. I accumulated pieces, then traced them back inward to find the beating heart or essential question.
 
The essay provides wonderful room to sprawl out and reflect. Weirdly enough, once I tried to put essays together into a linked book, that sprawling had to be contracted and knit all together as connective tissue. If you’ve turned a collection of essays on a subject into a book-length essay or essayistic memoir, you’ll understand the technical term for this exercise: an effing nightmare.
 
In fact, I think it’s hilarious that memoir is seen as low-brow when the practice of knitting essays into a thematic and structural whole—a book-length essay with narrative propulsion, thematic cohesion, and consistency of voice—is by far the most rigorous intellectual work I have ever done. And lots of deep thoughts got cut out, along with some smart-sounding bullshit. Or maybe a few good insights got crystalized or pushed underground.
 
Writing essays as a short-term goal gave me freedom to approach huge issues from new directions. Essays allowed me the space to “drill down” and to look away from larger narratives in order to find meaning in peripheral vision and also in emotional experiences.
 
Then when I put them together, there was all this story-telling that had to be put back in, and it is very easy to let this story telling take over. It wants to take over because narrative is such a known experience for readers. But there are all these insights and tangents. Where do they go? And in cutting them, are you cutting the best parts? And then when you despair and re-essay the thing, have you been left with a kind of mush that has been stripped of its internal structure?
 
My second book was conceived from the beginning as a series of chronological chapters. But then, because I was at the stage in my career where I needed publications, I polished the chunks more. I wanted to be an essayist like the published essayists I admired, but I leaned in the direction of narrative because I was trying to be accessible. So I published these accessible narrative-driven essays, and then I found MORE trouble trying to weave them back together. Now I regret the lack of essaying I could have done about the subject. But that’s the bind: seeing how much essaying a narrative arc will hold. At that time in my career, I didn’t yet have confidence in my essaying voice. I didn’t think that how I said something would be enough to carry a book. I thought the events would have to.
 
What I have tended to produce so far has been a hybrid essayistic memoir. Thank god for university presses.
 
My third book, which was about addiction, was constructed through individual snapshots with a large question in mind, sort of core samples taken all over my landscape. Many possibilities were tested, half-written, and discarded. I tried the manuscript of collected essays out on two trusted readers, and they both said: the life narrative is submerged here, and that feels like you’re hiding something. In retrospect, I was. I was hoping that my essays—rich with abstraction, metaphor, and outside research—would present a smarter, Rebecca-Solnit version of my story, and that I wouldn’t have to get personal. But the unresolved personal story and my unwillingness to tell it was the shape hiding behind my pages.
 
In that book, the essay was an intermediate stage. And quite frankly, my essays got more real and more concrete when I put them into life’s timeline, and the story needed that structure of time to reveal itself. Without the challenge of memoir—tell the story as it happened—I wasn’t going deep enough to tell the truth. So I went narrative. And then in the last draft I wrapped the whole thing up in a voice-driven experiment to increase both the opportunity for essaying and the cohesion, sort of a memoir/essay turducken that will be titled Publisher’s Nightmare.
 
What’s funny is that a little over a year ago I gave a talk on this topic with Steve and Jill Christman, who couldn’t be here, and I declared myself firmly a memoirist because of my allegiance to narrative as a necessary challenge: I needed a story line to look at the gaps and to prompt myself to examine what I wasn’t saying or seeing.
 
Then in the past year, I went and wrote an essay collection on the topic of chronic pain. Once I had found my way into that collection and set up my assignments for each of those essays, they were easy. Really. I’m never ever going to make that a narrative. It shouldn’t be a narrative, and it was so much easier than an essayistic memoir.
 
For me, the problem of essay vs. memoir is the problem of voice. Each essay has its own, and if you want to push an essay back into becoming part of a larger being, you have to break its spirit and transform it into something else.
 
As I have gone about squishing essay into narrative, I have felt shame about the waste of my essayistic departures, and I think my job at that point is NOT to cut those chunks and remove them but to squish our insights down into sentences that remain like jewels, to turn a bunch of pollen into honey. Every sentence of Scott Russell Sanders is a jewel for this reason, and so many of his paragraphs are essays in and of themselves.  
 
All I can say is that the members of Team Essayistic Memoir are the long-distance runners of the writing world. Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. In an ideal world, I think we’d get to publish our books as memoirs and as essay collections in box sets, kind of like live and studio albums, and readers would get to decide which ones they liked best.  

Hydra-Headed Memoir, Continued.

Steven Harvey
Something New to Say
Steven Church
How to Make a Cake out of Cupcakes:
​or How to Turn Your Essays into a Book
Joe Mackall
Of Rats, Whiskey Priests and Half-Crazed Grandfathers
Tarn Wilson
Finding Form
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