Honesty: Writing the memoir

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Debra Gwartney read from her newly released book, "Live Through This", at a local bookstore. I've edited a couple of her essays for The Oregonian's Sunday Opinion section and gleaned some tips about teaching from her over a lovely lunch in the Park Blocks. So I went to the reading at Powell's with a vested interest. Debra did not disappoint.

Before a SRO crowd made up with a healthy contingent of her students from Portland State University, Gwartney read an entire chapter from her painfully honest book, "a mother's memoir of runaway daughters and reclaimed love." I was impressed by the vivid descriptions of events and bits of dialogue that conveyed her raw pain and frustration in dealing with the two oldest of her daughters as a frazzled, divorced young woman. Imagine your daughters living on the streets of Eugene, then simply disappearing and going without contact for weeks and months at a time. (Turns out they decided to hop a freight train to San Francisco and were living in the Tenderloin.)

I was even more impressed at how she responded to a question about the difference between memoir and autobiography. Memoir, she said, is about self-examination and self-excavation whereas autobiography is more of a chronicle of a life. Memoir means coming to grips with the meaning of what's happened in your life and accepting culpability.

Well, it didn't take long for me to dive into Debra's book, as a fellow parent and journalist, and come away hugely impressed by her perseverance (it took her eight years to write the book) and brutal honesty.

An excerpt:

"I watched the truck disappear toward the center of town and I let the rain run through my hair and down my neck. It soaked my coat and my sweater and wet my skin. It filled my shoes. I thought if I stood there long enough the rain would melt me into a different woman. The rain would shape me into a different mother. Maybe it would pound into me which of my choices had been wrong, which turns were misdirected. Maybe the rain would tell me how this had all gone so bad. Maybe, if I got cold enough and wet enough I'd finally have a reason to go home."

Read more here, then go buy the book.