Writing a Memoir

About five years ago I started to write something that I’ll call a memoir because there’s no other genre that comes close to what I’m doing. I went great guns and finished what I took to be a first chapter. I was happy with it, more or less. It skipped from point to point and didn’t really have a time-wise progression. But that was ok. I bunched together things and events that seemed to me bunchable and didn’t worry about anything like a plot. Despite all that mess, I thought there was coherence and direction.

 

And then I got bored. To vary Hamlet’s wisdom, when boredom comes it comes not a single spy. I put the thing aside.

 

Then a few weeks ago I thought I’d take it up again. I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote. I whizzed through five more chapters, almost without pause. Not making a judgment as to the quality of what I wrote, I felt great about it all. It reminded me of the writing of my dissertation, when after years, literally years of collecting sources and weighing them and thinking about my primary objective and reading some more source material and weighing some more, I sat down and wrote the damned thing in a rush. Writing this sequence of chapters was as exhilarating.

 

I especially enjoyed coming up with titles, for the memoir as well as for each chapter. The whole I’ve called Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For: A Life. And then the chapters, in sequence: Paradise Mislaid; North of Eden; North by Northeast; Journey to the Centre of the State; Errand into the Hub; Midwestward Ho!; Albert Redux.

 

I think that I’ll make that final title the last chapter. But writing it is giving me conniptions. For one thing, the number of years that it represents is much larger than any of the previous chapters. The first chapter takes up all of eight years. The chapters other than “Errand into the Hub,” which occupies eleven years, take up no more than four years each. That final chapter goes on for thirty-seven years and counting. How to deal with all that time and all the events and changes and surprises and losses and gains . . . it’s imponderable.

 

I’m thinking of stopping right now, with the final chapter just barely begun, and letting the project lie fallow, maybe for another five years. To be sure, five years may see me dead, so I don’t know that it’s the smartest of strategies. On the other hand, what I want to get out of the memoir is not so much completion as the satisfaction of remembering. I don’t have a madeleine to help me recover the lost past. Indeed I have some huge, major lacunae in what I do remember that not even a madeleine would help fill in. What took ages of reading to tease out in writing my dissertation has become the teasing out of memories as best I can. That teasing takes time and effort and it is exhausting in its own way.

 

If I die before I finish the task, so be it.