I currently have several memoirs in my stack of books. I am in the process of reading/listening to three and it occurred to me lately, why are memoirs so popular?
When I am listening to Sally Field's "In Pieces", part of me thinks "Really, why is she talking about this? Am I interested in her descriptions of her grandmother's house in Pasadena or her relationship to her father?" And yet, even in questioning this in my mind, I am actually drawn into her story, I am having a (albeit one way) conversation, I am thinking, thinking, thinking.
Last night I started reading Nina Totenberg's "Dinners With Ruth", a memoir not only about her long friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but also, she writes, about women's friendships and how sustaining they are. Ah yes, bittersweet words for me. My friendships with women have literally saved my life over the years. And I still have them but at such a distance that we can't just phone each other up, meet over coffee, hug each other. We have to content ourselves with emails and texts. We don't even phone anymore. So Totenberg's book is moving me, causing a conversation within me.
And again this morning I thought about memoir writing, about blogs--why? I came back from exercising with three female neighbors. We are as different as different can be. They are retired military wives, fiercely Republican, fiercely conservative. And yet we connected this morning around talk about, of all things, our experiences with learning about menstruation and sex as young girls. They may have conservative views about modern sex education but we somehow kept our conversation--talking as we marched along to an exercise DVD--to our experiences as young girls. And we nodded our heads--oh yes, that WAS awful, the embarrassment, the pains, the confusion. Memories and female friends.
Finally, and it amazes me how much synchronicity I find in all that I am reading and watching these days, in what people say in passing, I came home and have just now been reading "Dance of the Dissident Daughter" by Sue Monk Kidd; according to the fly leaf "A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine." Now, I have struggled with this book. So much of what she writes is way beyond where my own spiritual journey has taken me. I inwardly roll my eyes when she talks about some of her spiritual practices. And yet I keep reading, keep "listening" and there are, as there were this morning with my exercise friends, moments in reading when I go, "Oh YES, that's what my heart has wanted . . . that makes so much sense, or I've never been able to articulate that. " It's a conversation. And this paragraph that I have just read has answered the question that has been rolling around in my head the past few days--why memoirs, why blogs?
"The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed. 'All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them,' said Izak Dinesen, a writer who had plenty of sorrow and told stories to bear it. [footnote 56] The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning." (p. 172)
Some women can write fiction and through that fiction they tell their stories. For me personally I have (so far) been far better at writing personal narratives. I don't have the imagination to describe beautiful settings: not having any kind of geographical "sense" I can't describe places in a way that would inspire or excite people, I can't plot a fictional story or mystery with characters. At least not so far. So at least for now I tell my own personal, lived, stories and I read and listen to others who have told theirs. And in the responses to the stories and even in the very act of telling my story, I feel a healing.
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