NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

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

Steven Harvey

Steven Harvey is the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir about coming to terms with the suicide of his mother published by Ovenbird Books as part of the “Judith Kitchen Select” series.   A section of the memoir appeared in The Best American Essays 2013 selected by Cheryl Strayed.  He is also the author of three books of personal essays. A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove and edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood.    He is a professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Young Harris College, a member of the nonfiction faculty in the Ashland University MFA program in creative writing, a senior editor for River Teeth magazine, and the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website designed to promote literary nonfiction.  He lives in the north Georgia mountains.  You can learn more about Steve and his work at his web site:  www.steven-harvey-author.com .
Sonya Huber
Joe Mackall
Steven Church
Tarn Wilson

Steve Harvey
Something New to Say

Most of the reasons we give for turning an essay into a memoir are terrible.  I know, I have tried them all.  Memoir sounds sexier than essays, I might have said one afternoon when I had grown weary of that essayistic voice that natters on in my head pretty constantly, that self-deprecating, ingratiating, thoughtful voice from a cluttered mind.  But just because memoir sounds exotic is not a good reason to write one.  Here’s another bad reason: Publishers are looking for memoirs.  I know I have said to myself and others, but guess what?  They’re not—well, not necessarily.  One agent who turned down my manuscript confessed that she had sworn off memoir: “I don’t want to read another sad story,” she complained, and I think she has company.  No sooner did I finish my memoir than I found that a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, was on the best seller’s list and that essays were back.  Believe me, you can’t time this market—and the popularity of the form is a lousy reason to write a memoir anyway.

But the most seductive bad reason for turning an essay into a memoir is that the essay is good.  That’s the one I fell for the hardest.  I wrote an essay called “The Book of Knowledge” which was about a subject that mattered to me:  the suicide of my mother when I was eleven.  It was a story I had avoided for nearly fifty years.  The impetus for writing it at last was that I read more than four-hundred letters that my mother had written to my grandmother which described her life from the time she met my father to her death.  While reading the letters, the essay took shape in my head and seemed to organize itself in a way that was intuitive and right.  River Teeth magazine published it and later it was selected for The Best American Essays anthology.   This was the best work I had done in my entire life, I thought.

That’s when I asked the wrong question:  Why not turn it into a book?

Here is the problem:  a good essay has earned the right to be a good essay and nothing more.  The theme of the original essay was that by writing about my mother I had in a sense recreated her and, for the first time since her death, I could have feelings for her again.  My sadness was a victory.  I decided that I would begin the memoir with the original essay, slightly reworked, using the rest of the book to tell the events of my mother’s life in chronological order as revealed in the letters.  The result, in retrospect, was entirely predictable.  The story became a plodding narrative, especially the part before I was born, and much of the intuitive shaping that had marked the original essay had become stiff and wooden.  There were moments that reminded me of the original piece, but they were awash in events that seemed to serve little purpose.  As the story grew, I had drifted away from the idea of the original essay and had not discovered what the larger story meant.  These were important signs:  the book was a mess.

Now I don’t know what the rest of you do when you sense that a piece you are working on is in trouble.  The way I handle it is to just keep writing more stuff in the hopes of finding a way out.  For me, writing is a heuristical enterprise—we teach ourselves what to do by doing it over and over.  It is really a kind of listening—writing down the many events, stories, and anecdotes until the real story begins to make itself heard.  I also showed the manuscript to my generous friends who helped me see where the real story was.  Slowly I began to find a way out.

The first discovery was that I should not abandon the theme of the original essay, the essayistic kernel out of which the memoir grew.  The book was still about emotion recaptured, but as I expanded it I had to focus not on the events that led up to the suicide, but on something less tangible that Tom Larson, a writer and friend who read the manuscript, noticed:  the power of awakening memory.  The letters, he suggested, allowed me to “unbury” my childhood.  As long as I kept my focus there, on the drama of that awakening, my book would take me to the heart of the story.  In fact, this emotional intensity deepened as the memoir continued and that deepening was a sign that I was on the right track.  Now events from my past—from the time that my family watched Mary Martin in Peter Pan on television to the day that my mother, bother, and I conducted burials at sea by the toilet bowl for our tropical fish—were about the “lost boy” in me reclaiming a share of what he had left behind.  The most ordinary and trivial of events shimmered with meaning.
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But this insight from Tom led to another which became the final discovery of the memoir for me.  Tom wrote this:  “I am most taken of your mother’s story and your growing interaction with her letters in memory. If anything, I think this NOW is the core of the book.”  The word “now” is written in caps, and as I read it I realized that it, including the events after my mother’s death leading up to now, was the missing link, the ingredient that needed to be in the book.  I started writing about events since my mother’s death in which I was clearly and intentionally wiping away her memory, replacing it with music, art, and words.  Here is one typical passage:
When did I finally peel off her image from the scrapbook of memory and turn her into a ghost? A featureless muse? There were all of those hours playing guitar alone in my room, sublimating her, turning her from a real person into the vapor of song, the darkened sound hole of my mahogany guitar transforming the scrapings of my fingers into notes with depth and resonance. That is part of what I did to back away from her memory, I believe now, during those crucial months after her death, the guitar a surrogate for a real embrace, the resonating wood a displaced moan, the strummed sounds drifting off and away like a brunette wave. (164-165)
It was this intentional destruction of memory at the gentle hands of art itself that I needed to take on with the one tool I had left—the writer’s art.  I realized that the final, vital, and living connection between myself and my mother was the very book we were collaborating on.  That we were recreating ourselves by creating it together and that this undertaking, which she had started with the letters, was mine to finish.  I describe the process in a passage near the end of the memoir:
She wrote letters as the line of coherence in her life deteriorated, and when she stopped writing them her life came crashing down. Picking up the unraveling ends, I wove the frayed strands together, repairing them, and creating from our common tale a new, more complex whole that stretches from our past into the future […] The hands of my collaborator in this story do not rest upon mine—I will never feel their presence as palpable again, any more than I can hear her whisper in my ear or feel her touch on my cheek. No, her hands are in mine […] stitched into the fabric and webbing of my DNA. Her words mingle with mine as I write so that we have, at last, the conversation we need. Our two languages stitched together with quotation marks, blurred by paraphrase, and hung aloft on the hooks of my interrogations find the point of support that allows me to arrange the shattered mosaic lying neglected on the floor, and lift it into the sky. (198-199)
In the process of going from essay to memoir the name changed from “The Book of Knowledge” to The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, and the addition is telling.  It is this—the drama of this collaboration to recover lost time—that became wondrous to me as I wrote the memoir.  I really leaned two lessons when my book went from essay to memoir.  The first was that I needed to stay true to the spirit of the original piece.  I could not simply supply more background information to the story; I had to go more deeply into that story, and the memoir gave me the space to do that.  But I also learned that it helps to discover along the way that you have something new to say as well.

Hydra-Headed Memoir, Continued

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
Sonya Huber
​Flip-Floppers Finding the Center
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