Week 5: Exploring the Genre of Memoirs

In “Nothing but the Truth?: On Lying and Memoir-Writing,” Maddie Crum writes “[t]here is, after all, a fluidity between who we were to other people, who we thought we were, who we think we were, and who we think we are now.”  On first glance, this sentence stopped me up and made me a bit dizzy.  It was only after I had re-read it a couple of times that I was able to unpack it.  It is really a profound angle from which to consider one’s own life.  This concept refers to the many facets of the self.  I think the fluidity between all of these selves is everything that influences them, the conflicts, the communication (or lack thereof), the growth.  The fluidity is how we trace out our own path to who we are, it is reconciling the differences between these selves.  There is a conflict that lies within the difference of who we were to other people at a particular point in our past and who we thought we were at that time.  If we choose to recognize and address that conflict in writing, and work our way through it, there is a lot of self-growth and understanding to be gained.

I have not read many memoirs but of the ones I have read, my favorite is probably “The Glass Castle,” by Jeanette Walls.  This memoir recounts Walls’ youth with her erratic and often unstable parents, through nomadic moves across the country and self-inflicted poverty.

Dad started telling us about all the exciting things we were going to do and how we were going to get rich once we reached the new place where we were going to live.

“Where are we going, Dad?” I asked.

“Wherever we end up,” he said. (Walls 18)

This nomadic lifestyle drives a large part of Walls’ memoir until the family settles near her father’s heretofore estranged family in West Virginia.  There, in West Virginia, they live in impoverished conditions as both her mother’s manic behavior and her father’s drinking worsen.  However, this memoir also captures a deep love for family and a realized understanding and acceptance.  Despite the adversity of her youth, Walls cultivates a successful career and financial freedom, however, even this turns out to be part of the conflict for her.  There is a realization for Walls that her need for success and financial stability are a manifestation of her traumatic youth.

In the months that followed, I found myself always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was.  If I was at work, I’d wish I were at home.  If I was in the apartment, I couldn’t wait to get out of it.  If a taxi I had hailed was stuck in traffic for over a minute, I got out and walked. . . . A year after Dad died, I left Eric. . . . And Park Avenue was not where I belonged.  (Walls 280)

The catharsis of this memoir was palpable for me because the deep emotional connections of the family and the desperately good intentions of Walls’ father to battle his demons and do right by his family came across so clearly in her writing.  To be honest, I spent a good deal of this book in tears.

“The Glass Castle” is a great example of the fluidity Crum refers to as it deals almost entirely with Walls’ attempts to understand who she was, both to herself and in relation to her parents and the influence of that history on who she is when the book begins as well as when it ends.

I’m not sure that this memoir would translate well into a blog.  The many specific memories could easily become the basis for separate blogs in their own right, however, the catharsis of that constant fluidity connectedness would be fractured.

Work Cited:

Crum, Maddie. “Nothing But the Truth?: On Lying and Memoir-Writing.” Huffpost, 28 Sep. 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/memoir-writing-facts_us_56044f0be4b08820d91c2132

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle. Scribner, 2005