Memoir IS History

This summer, I had the fabulous opportunity to teach two classes connecting Memoir and History. While we wound up talking more about the fundamentals of Memoir over those three weeks than about History per se, we grounded our conversations in History, and how Memoir is intimately connected to the Past (all Past, not just your Past).

Some of you may be aware this is a bit of a hang-up of mine. I rely heavily on memoir and autobiography, as well as snippets of everyday life in journals and postcards and letters, to do my own historical work. Formal documents and evidence are all well and good, but personal stories and micro-histories are fantastic! Too often, however, memoir and other personal accounts by “everyday” people are siloed away from “real history.” This bothers me to no end.

One of my goals as a coach and editor is to help writers close that gap and embrace their historical value. Your story matters, not just to you, but to everyone who reads that story today, next week, and fifty years from now. You are sharing something profoundly valuable to you, but have you ever thought of the insight you are sharing into life as someone actually lived it to a reader in the future?

You are not a statistic, so your story defies and deepens the dominant narrative. How important and impressive is that! Write your story!

I bring all this up because, fresh off working with some excellent writers this Summer, I’ve had two random encounters that led me back to this one important fact:

Memoir is History.

Memoir and History are inseparable. And the sooner everyone sorts that out, the better. So, let’s get to it.

Encounter 1.

I got an email from a Historian looking for my insight on memoirs by historians. Like me, he is interested in the connections between memoir and history. But his angle was to approach Memoir-as-History explicitly through historians who have written memoirs.

While there are plenty of great memoirs written by historians (I enthusiastically recommend Fireweed by the indomitable Gerda Lerner, with whom I had the honor of working in grad school), I had to wonder why being a historian would make any difference at all to the historical value of a memoir. Other than perhaps enlightening the reader to the life of a historian (as one of any number of arbitrary careers), it certainly shouldn’t lend the memoir greater value. In fact, the privileging of such memoirs would only continue the privileging of certain “professional” histories, which... just, ugh!

Listen to me, writers: All memoir matters to History! All memoir is History!

It’s the democratic nature of memoir (anyone – yes, even you – can write one) that lends itself so well to historical work. Moreover, it is often because memoirists are not thinking of themselves as located at a particular moment in history when they write that allows the nuance of everyday life to shine through. Your story is intimate, familiar, personal. That is life. That is memoir. That is history. Write it!

Encounter 2.

Just a few weeks ago, the fantastic Courtney Maum included a reflection on “Memoir Plus” in her newsletter. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard the term before.

It seems that “memoir plus” is a term coined by author and critic Leigh Stein to describe memoir that incorporates other forms of writing: history, reporting, deeper research, etc. Maum questions why it needs to be separated out from the more familiar concept of “hybrid memoir.” My question, echoing Maum’s, is why does journalistic style or historical investigation need to be carved away from “traditional” memoir at all?

The way I understand it, hybrid memoir is a stylistic descriptor. It refers to memoirs that play with form, like Carmen Maria Machado’s haunting In the Dream House or Mira Jacobs’ recent and groundbreaking Good Talk. Memoirs in essay, or graphic form. I would even go so far as to describe Natasha Tretheway’s lyrical Memorial Drive as a hybrid because it is so fundamentally poetic in nature. On the other hand, works like Gerda Lerner’s above, or more recent memoirs like Mikel Jollett’s Hollywood Park follow a more traditional narrative format, i.e. younger to older life in a general semblance of chronological order.

In all of these examples, and endlessly more, there is research (even something so simple as to confirm a recollection); there is insight gleaned from memory as well as from experience; there is a critical response to and careful description of the environment and context of the story.

So what is Memoir Plus, then? Why would we need to break memoir into categories that include or exclude journalistic reporting, cultural criticism, etc.? Stein suggests the answer is publishability, that the current market doesn’t want more traditional self-reflective narratives any more.

In many ways, she is correct. But I disagree with her limitations.

Quite simply, any memoir that does not (consciously or subconsciously) involve a historical frame is likely not going to get published. Not because it is not “plus” something, but because without a historical lens, without research, you have nothing more than a boringly self-centered autobiographical list. It’s a chronology of events with no meaning, a catalogue of experiences with no foothold for empathy. Such a stack of pages is unpublishable simply because it cannot engage in any meaningful way with the reader.

Thus adding history or historical-mindedness to memoir is not memoir plus anything. It is solid, true, readable, publishable memoir. Memoir-as-History.

All good memoir is also good history because it enlightens the reader about a particular lived experience. We talk about memoirs needing to tap into a “universal value,” but another way to think about it is that a good memoir gives us a window into someone who actually lived. It taps into our common humanity.

To take an example from a memoir I’ve enjoyed recently, consider Toni Jensen’s Carry. This is stylistically a hybrid memoir, as it is a memoir in essays. The thread connecting each essay is the intersection of gun violence and the history of violence against indigenous communities in America. The narrative is powerfully personal, and relies on historical framework and cultural awareness to fully deliver Jensen’s message that life in the 21st century as an indigenous woman is complex and complicated.

Moreover, engaging with the nexus of indigenous violence and guns is in and of itself a reflection of a specific historical moment where such a conversation can take place. Think about trying to write a book like this 25 or 50 years ago. There was no language around it because there was not yet any historical context in which these issues could intersect and be heard in such a public sphere. In 2022, Jensen can put words to her pain and identity, and unpack it. To read this book with a historical lens, we get insight into these complicated issues as a lived experience, and also something deeper that reflects a broader consciousness of the era.

Another memoir I absolutely loved recently was Mikel Jollett’s Hollywood Park. Stylistically, it is certainly a more standard format. And Jollett does one thing that so many memoirists are discouraged from doing: he begins at the age of five! (If you write memoir, hopefully someone has told you that it is rarely a good idea to go that far back in your history.) For Jollett, beginning so far in the Past is necessary because it marks the moment he first became aware of difference: the moment his mother, an unfamiliar figure, arrives to rescue him from the cult in which they were living.

In many ways, Jollett’s book is a memoir of what it means to have a radically different experience of boyhood. It is also an account of living in the shadow of a cult and healing generational trauma. From a historical perspective, we might take from it a first-hand account of leaving a cult. But I would push a step further and suggest that Jollett’s experience of being a young man in the beginning of the 20th century, bi-coastally pulled between two parents with deep flaws that Jollett so lovingly reveals, is an insight into what life can be like in general at this moment in time. What were the norms that Jollett did not fit into? What about the complications of his youth illuminate the complications of societal expectations at the time? His book enlightens the reader about 20th-century life beyond the story itself.

It is the very tension between Jollett’s and the reader’s more familiar childhoods that is so fascinating and compelling. Jollett’s “universal value” is that families are complex, and generational trauma even more so. We learn about Jollett, and we learn from Jollett as well.

This isn’t memoir plus anything. This is memoir-as-history.

And it’s not memoir-as-history because of Jollett’s or Jensen’s status or career. They merely needed the authority of their own experience and the confidence to write it to contribute to the greater historical narrative.

Because Memoir is History. Yours is, too.

Write it.

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Starting October 2!

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Whether you’re working on a draft or just thinking about that book you’ve always wanted to write, this is for you.

All genres welcome!

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