Category Archives: memory

framing the past

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The summer I was thirteen I flew by myself to Vermont for seven weeks of camp. Somebody in our cabin had brought a record player, and it was there in the woods that I first heard the music of James Taylor and Carole King. After I got back home, I bought their albums. I still have them–although they now hang on a wall.

On Thursday night in Atlanta I heard Carole King and James Taylor live as part of their Troubadour Reunion. This round stage that rotates slowly was created specifically for the tour, with small tables for two around it–an attempt at recreating within an arena the nightclub atmosphere that King and Taylor played to in Los Angeles at the Troubadour.

The concert started a little late, around 8:15, but they were on stage almost 3 hours–until after 11–with only a 15 minute intermission. They played So Far Away, Smackwater Jack, Sweet Baby James, Country Road, Fire and Rain, Natural Woman, Up on the Roof, You’ve Got a Friend, I Feel the Earth Move….

from the first half

I’ve seen James Taylor in concert many times, and he was as wonderfully mellow as ever. I’d never seen Carole King before. She didn’t seem quite as comfortable, but the audience loved her. She’s small and wore stiletto-heeled boots the first half. She sang, played the piano and the guitar, and jumped around all over the stage. She sounds the same as ever–and Tapestry came out almost 40 years ago.

from the second half

There was something about seeing the two of them together that really took me back, that made me realize just how long ago (and far away) that cabin in Vermont was.

And speaking of years, Carole King is now 68 and I now have a new vision of what it means to be 68. James Taylor is a mere 62. And together they can rock the house down.

It’s not too late to see them in concert. Here are the remaining dates for the Troubadour Reunion. And look for them on The Today Show on June 18th.

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the music room

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IMG_2413The Music Room by Dennis McFarland was published in 1990. I read it the first time in 1991, and then again at the beginning of August–eighteen years later. I enjoyed it just as much. Here, McFarland could be describing his own writing, instead of a feeling:

“I liked the simple clarity of the feeling. It had the appeal of a primary color; it promised a range of complementary hues to come.”

Over the years I have often remembered how much I enjoyed reading The Music Room. Then in March, at Sirenland, I was hiking up to eat lunch in this great little trattoria, when the person I was hiking with mentioned that her brother-in-law had published several books. Like what, I asked. Well, probably the most famous is The Music Room.

See how he takes these five concrete details and bundles them into a memory:

“The points on the star of this recollection were the red leather of the sofa, its bright gold buttons, the sound of my father’s shoes, his approach in uniform, and the brief, biting taste of suffocation.”

When I got back home, I moved The Music Room from my regular shelf to my little stack of books to reread. There it joined The Heart of the Matter, The Half-Life of Happiness, Beloved, The Rest of Life, and Remembering the Bone House.

Read how he pulls rage out of words:

“You want to know why he didn’t leave a note? Because even to say goodbye is to acknowledge a person.”

Before I could get to it, my friend who reads everything I read plus more asked if she could read it. Yes, she said, it’s still good. And she promptly ordered everything Dennis McFarland has written since then. They’re all great, she reported last week. More books for me to add to my growing list.

Here he turns plain words into poetry:

“In the john, I had a bad case of the shakes, but the roar and rumble of the jet engines saturated me, resonated with my poor jittery cells, which felt like a kind of sympathy.”

Yesterday, I happened upon this blog, which had reprinted this excellent article, “Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader.” (Yes, I’m saying you should actually click away from here to read it. Really.)

IMG_2412“How odd that in this musical family one of my earliest longings is for deafness: the silencing not only of the nocturnal creakings of the Colonial mansion but of the regular jagged peal of breaking glass, of the grownups’ zingers and spiny laughter, and of Father’s terrible, smashed wrong notes.”

Dennis McFarland knows how to tell a story, slipping easily from the past of the central narrative into the present of memory, with all scenes past and present moving relentlessly forward.

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how we got here from there

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IMG_2110I don’t write memoir. But I like the way Abigail Thomas writes, the way she tells the truth. “My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back. Most truths I have to learn over and over again.”

I got hooked on the truth in her fiction first, Getting Over Tom, An Actual Life, and Herb’s Pajamas–the last two are little hardback squares. I loved Safekeeping, her first memoir. Its short sections are a concrete example of her life zigzagging and doubling back, the many truths of herself.

Thinking About Memoir is another little book. A rectangle instead of a square. Thomas writes, IMG_2175“Memories survive on a wisp of a fragrance, or a particular shade of blue…” Then a phrase you’re probably sick of me using, but oh, then I really knew I was in: “This is… about letting one thing lead to another. Follow the details.” She concludes the two-page preface with this,”Memoir is the story of how we got here from there.”  And this story is fascinating whether you write fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or memoir.IMG_2172

She writes, “Be sure to include what you can’t make fit neatly into your idea of yourself, or whatever it is that ruffles the smooth surface of your life story.” This may be the most important thing I’m taking from this book at this moment. Nothing is supposed to be perfect. Let the messy real show through.

The only book of hers I have not read is Three Dog Life, a memoir of her husband’s brain injury. In an article published on June 20, 2009, Marion Winik recounts a moment in that book where  Thomas writes about being accused of “stealing a memory.” “Is memory property?” Abigail Thomas asks. “If two people remember something differently, is one of them wrong?”

IMG_2174And here in this book she adds, “Memory seems to be an independent creature inspired by event, not faithful to it…” I can just imagine this little creature up in my brain somewhere, in a little cave with a kodak instamatic and a pen and a pencil, maybe some file cabinets, doing the best he can to keep track of everything, and interrupted yet again as I get a whiff of  something sweet. His long, floppy ears perk up, and off he goes, scurrying around, eventually delivering summer camp in Vermont, walking to the stables.

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stop time

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Frank Conroy was the director of the Iowa Writers Workshop for 18 years. He was also a writer himself, the author of 5 books, including the “classic memoir” Stop-Time. He died of colon cancer in 2005 at the age of 69.

“My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence.”

Conroy was interested in time and memory. The title of his book on Nantucket, a place both he and I love, is Time & Tide. img_19701He begins this book with a preface, which recounts his earliest memory.

Stop-Time begins at the opposite end of the spectrum, with a brilliant one-page prologue from the point of view of the older speed-crazed Conroy, who would do “anything at all to keep up the speed, to maintain the speed and streak through the dark world.” We don’t see this older narrator except for a couple of other times in the memoir. Yet we keep him in the back of our mind as we move through his memories of his childhood.

Conroy’s writing is exact. Note these three examples from the memoir:

“My mother would make a quick meal out of cans.”

“Half to himself, his voice fading as we went around opposite sides of the car, he said…”

“My mother laughed nervously, not because she thought it was funny, but because her relationship with Donald forced her to laugh.”

Jayne Anne Phillips said, “He believed that the work leads the writer, and not the other way around. He used to say that in his own writing he’d read and re-read what he’d written the day before until he knew what to do next.”

Frank Conroy could also write beautiful sentences:

“A bewildering array of emotions exploded simultaneously–confusion, embarrassment, a kind of childish love, apprehensiveness, but behind it all, as steady as the solid bar of sunlight across the polished table, triumph. The moment was at hand.”

out stealing horses

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“We weren’t really stealing them…But we call it stealing to make it more exciting.”

Per Petterson is a writer who can stand inside a moment, turn in a circle and look up and down until there is no inch of that moment left unexplored.  Mary Gordon calls this “saturating the moment.” Read this:

“…and then he fell on his knees like an empty sack and beat his forehead on the ground, and stayed there huddled up for what seemed like an eternity, and for the whole of that eternity I held my breath without stirring. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I felt it was my fault. I just didn’t know why. At last he stood up stiffly….”

Or this one:

“‘Which farm was that?’ I ask, although there can be only one farm in question. But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we get to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?

“‘The farm at home. In the village, of course.’”

In Out Stealing Horses, Trond is an old man. During the course of an evening, something happens to cause him to remember an incident that occurred when he was a boy. As the reader continues, occasionally we come upon a sentence such as,”Or that is the way I remember it.” As we continue further into the story, through the climax, we come upon, “My father could not have told me all this, not with all the details; but that is the way it is printed in my memory…” These kinds of sentences lend credibility to the story. They remind me of The Gathering by Irish writer, Anne Enright.

Petterson uses an omniscient narrator who can drop into a character so seamlessly, it’s difficult to even notice. “We heard the rain battering the roof and it rained on the river and on Jon’s boat and on the road to the shop and on Barkald’s meadows, it rained on the forest and …., but inside the cottage it was warm and dry. The stove was crackling, and I ate until my plate….”

And yet there are some things this big narrator doesn’t know: “What they talked about I have never been able to imagine.”

Petterson needs a certain coincidence to occur. So he takes it and owns it, making it a condition of the novel:

“…if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating…that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again.”

Per Petterson is a Norwegian writer. Out Stealing Horses was translated by Anne Born.

the yellow house

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img_1062 Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books.  Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989.  It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a  new preface.  In it, she called this memoir ”the dearest of my books to me.”

Although here in this space I try to keep pushing forward with the new books I’m reading, sometimes I like to take a look way in the past at the books I deemed at the time I read them as “all-time favorites.”  I take them off the shelf, blow away the dust, and turn the pages now edged in a rusty color, wondering if they still are.  So far I have not been disappointed.

In Remembering the Bone House, Mairs writes about the different houses she has lived in, as well as about the house she lives in every day–her body, the bone house.  She subtitled the book, An Erotics of Place and Space.  She uses the word erotics in the largest possible sense:  anything to do with her body.  She was forty-five when she wrote the memoir and living with multiple sclerosis.

The last time I read Remembering the Bone House was August of 1996.  I am putting it in my reread pile, which is growing ever larger, and which may eventually match my tower of unread books.  Whenever I get to it, I will report back.

I leave you with her words:

“I will write about the yellow house.  You will read about your house.  If I do my job, the book I write vanishes before your eyes.  I invite you into the house of my past, and the threshold you cross leads you into your own.”

rough red brick

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img_1047The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.  I read it in April.  In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family.

  • “The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.”
  • “There is always one child who is able, not just to look, but also to see.  The quiet one.”
  • “I am the careful one.”

But what I remember most about this book are the different ways Enright uses memory:

This is what I remember, but that can’t be right:

“It must have been the February of 1968.  I was still eight, Liam was nine, and we were going up to ‘say goodbye’ to Charlie.  I think I knew, even at eight, that you can say goodbye all you like, but when someone is dead they’re not going to say anything back….My memory has them all bundled in shawls; Ada’s back ascending in front of us in corseted black taffeta.  But this is 1968: there would have been patterned headscarves and big-buttoned coats that smelt of the rain.”

I don’t remember that so I must not have been there:

“I don’t remember the hospital.  At a guess, Ada did not take us inside.”

I don’t remember that; it’s not what was important:

“I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but conversation doesn’t stick to my memory of Liam.”

Which gives the novel the air of a memoir, of a struggle for the truth.

I’m trying to nail down my first memory.  Every time I bring the hammer up, it seems to slip away.  I think what I remember is green drinks in glasses and rough red brick.

word-smitten

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Charles Frazier‘s second book,Thirteen Moons, is narrated by Will Cooper, who has a friend named Bear, a Cherokee Indian chief. 

“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form.  Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath.  Smothered it.  Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected.  Everything that happens is fluid, changeable.  After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time.  Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall.  Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing….Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.”

Bear is objecting to the loss Mark Doty was writing about that occurs when we leave the physical world for the world of words. 

Bear would be against catching days, would say that we remember only what we remember for a reason.  And that we should let memory and time play with the facts.  Bear would say, let it go.

I agree that the way memory works is fascinating, but the fascination comes from the variance with the truth.  To be able to see the variance, we must know the truth.  So I tend to side with Will over Bear. 

He says, “…I was always word-smitten.  Always reading in a book or writing in a journal.”