Memoir: Turning Yourself into a Character
The memoir used to be a large and weighty book, often written by a man of power, once he had stepped out of the limelight (or been cast out of it). Presidents and prime ministers wrote memoirs; the common people did not.
Flash-forward to the present. People have discovered that they had and still have lives worth writing about. The classic memoir was about the exercise of power in times of crisis. The current memoir is often about a period of time during which the writer learned something about themselves. Which should make all of us potential memoirists.
The form contains a number of moral traps and rough spots. How much fiction can you put in a memoir? What happens when you forget something, or misremember? How much can you reveal about yourself and others before you cross a line you might regret?
We’ll look at several examples of memoir, from Harry Crews to Kyo Maclear and others. With Crews, his story begins before his birth; is that still memoir? Mark Abley’s travel story is clearly designed to tell as little as possible about its author. In sociologist mode, Daniel Allen Cox brings in a slew of outside sources to bolster his self-inquiry. Where do we want to situate ourselves?
That, of course, will depend on our inquiries. A memoir can be about someone else – how you did or did not live with that person. Memoirs can spring from a mystery – but not always. All of them involve the writer wanting to achieve greater self-understanding, which means we have to turn ourselves into a character to do it.
The workshop will be a mixture of reading one another’s projects and proposals, and considering excerpts from other books. Participants are free to submit material a week or two before the first workshop. This material will be part of class discussions. Please submit to David.Homel@concordia.ca. For the first submission, please do not go beyond 5 or 10 standard pages. See you there!
David Homel wrote 13 works of fiction – historical novels, murder mysteries and domestic fiction – before his first memoir in 2020, and he has gone on to work in that form since. The experience as a memoirist continues to bear upon his novel-writing, enriching and expanding it. The moral aspects of the art of memory and disclosure continue to attract him, along with the paradox of turning himself into a character in order to get at the truths of his past lives. He has also worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker, both assets for memoir writing,