Sharon Harrigan

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Letter to My Thirteen-Year-Old Self

dear sharon love sharon

In my first-year memoir class, we cover Bill Roorbach’s excellent craft book, Writing Life Stories, in a year. My favorite chapter is the one about voice. The first exercise is to write a letter to someone, a letter you won’t send. Roorbach says, “This exercise always produces the best writing of the term up to the time I assign it. . . . When we address a particular person . . . we know what’s vital and urgent. . . And all this knowing gives us a clear, confident authoritative voice.”

For our in-class writing assignment, I asked my class to all address the same person—their own younger self. The results were compelling. I had no idea when the fifteen-minute timer started on Thursday where I was going to go. Below are the results:

Sharon, tomorrow is your last day of seventh grade. You are thirteen. You’re not yet the mother of a thirteen year old. You to go Huff Junior High School in Lincoln Park, Michigan.

Your hair is too straight and too red and you have too many freckles. You don’t talk loudly enough, and you’re not as pretty as your sister or as smart as your brother. No, Sharon. Don’t think those thoughts. I know now they’re not true.

Not everyone has to have thick poufy hair like Charlie’s Angels. Straight will come back. Eighties style is the pits. Everything you are aspiring to look like will be laughable in a few decades.

But that’s not what I really want to tell you. I want you to know that your hair doesn’t matter. That you are smarter than you think. Your brother might have a photographic memory and be a whiz at foreign languages but you, you’re a poet. Sensitive. Perceptive. And you have emotional smarts. You don’t know yet how important this kind of intelligence will be.

You haven’t been kissed yet. You will be this summer, at your first overnight camp, one week in northern Michigan. Bible camp. The boy you’ll kiss will have even redder hair than you, if that’s possible. He’ll be tall and gangly and everyone will say what a perfect couple you are and you won’t care that the only thing you have in common is your red-hot hair.

He lives hours away from you, but you’ll exchange letters, and you’ll keep his letters under your pillow and cry a little after you read them for the four millionth time.

He’ll call one day, even though long distance is expensive, and you’ll stammer and he’ll stutter and you won’t be able to believe that after all those letters neither of you knows what to say. This exchange will come to represent for you, years later, what awkwardness is. This fumbling and stumbling will be what it means to be thirteen.

Dave. That’s his name. All your church friends will tease you about him. Your first “boyfriend,” though that seems like too important a word to call someone you never saw again. You can still feel how hard you tried to read the whole world into his letters.

My daughter is thirteen now. Tomorrow is her last day of seventh grade. When we walked the dog together, I told my daughter about Bible camp, but I didn’t mention Dave. I don’t know if my daughter has been kissed yet. Would she tell me? Did I tell my mom? Of course not.

This exercise helps teach us to be compassionate to that crazy person we used to be. Writing ourselves a letter also helps us understand how to use retrospective voice, the voice of the older (wiser?) writer, as opposed to the younger self on the page we’re writing about.

In my class we talked about the pros and cons of using present tense in memoir, and I weighed in on the con side, even though I used present tense myself in this exercise. It’s not that present tense isn’t effective, it’s that using it makes the writer’s job more difficult. Because when you insert your retrospective voice from the present, it’s got no other verb tense to use except the same one you’ve been using for the past. Which is one way I got tripped up in my exercise.

So, don’t do what I did! See how much trouble it got me in. Which is really the same thing I wish I could tell my thirteen-year-old self.

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Country Roads, Take Me Home

cherry blossom

It was the week Prince died. Music was on our minds, so I gave my class this writing prompt: Write about music you loved or music you hated. Let it take you back in time, in your head and on the page.

We did a three-minute meditation, then wrote, nonstop, for fifteen minutes. This was mine:

I don’t remember my mother singing me lullabies. But I know she did because I sing them to my own children. When my son, my first, was a colicky newborn, I’d often spend the whole night dozing on the rocking chair in his room, as I held him against my chest, to lull him to sleep. Sleep wouldn’t come to him unless he felt my heart beat next to his. And, perhaps more to entertain myself than him, I sang. I was too exhausted to think of song lyrics. I had to sing something I knew without thinking.

So I sang my mother’s lullabies. Daisy daisy, give me your answer do, I’m half crazy, all for the love of you. . . Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . . Mama’s lil chillen love shortnin shortnin, Mam’s lil chillen love shortnin bread . . . Tur a lu ra lu ra, tur a la ra li, tu ra lu ra lu ra, hush now don’t you cry . . . And the one I remember best of all. The one that chokes me up even now (the one my daughter still asks for): I gave my love a cherry without a stone . . . The part that always gets to me is the last line: “The story of my love, dear, it has no end.” It’s a cliché. There’s nothing artful or original about that last line. But in my exhaustion I felt the endlessness of love, that when your body and brain are drained and you have nothing left, when it’s three in the morning and you’re still rocking in that chair, it feels like you must be doing it all for a reason and that reason must be the endlessness of love.

The music I do remember sharing with my mother evokes less sympathetic feelings. She listened to country radio, which felt, to me, like a glorification of two timing, heavy drinking, truck driving, foul mouthed rednecks. I’m not proud that I judged the music so harshly, so stupidly, back then. I was unsophisticated enough to fancy myself sophisticated, immature enough to think I was above all those twanging guitars and country roads take me home (I was moving to New York City! I knew where the real action was). I was no coal miner’s daughter, or at least I didn’t want to admit it. Only now, living so near bluegrass country, can I appreciate how much I missed out by dismissing my mother’s music. And, by extension, my mother.

 

 

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Writing Joy

briefs

In every memoir class I teach, we do a writing exercise. I used to find it difficult to write along with my students. I was too busy looking at the clock, planning what to say next. Or maybe I worried they would judge me. What, you’re the teacher and all you could come up with is that? But now I do the three-minute meditation and the fifteen-minute exercise, too. If they’re willing to be vulnerable and raw in front of others, shouldn’t I be?

At the last class, we discussed the “Writing the Body” chapter in Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story. I asked everyone to try to locate emotions and reactions in their bodies, to make their writing more visceral and immediate. We did an exercise called “free write a feeling.” The point is to reject clichés like “our eyes locked” or “I felt a bolt of electricity go through me” and find fresh imagery. We tried to imagine ourselves experiencing an emotion and noted what happened to our breath, our heartbeat, our muscles, our mouths—every part of our bodies.

I asked the class to name emotions, which I wrote on the whiteboard. We chose one and wrote it about without lifting our pens from the page. I chose “joy.” The bodily sensation that came to mind was “heat.” The image you can probably guess from the picture. This is what I came up with:

This is a scene I conjure again and again, as a way to calm down, but also to remind myself it’s the little moments that are the most exciting. James—my now-husband, then-boyfriend—is standing in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights apartment in front of his highly organized closet, in only his white briefs—the same kind he wears now, over a dozen years later. But it’s not the underwear I linger on. It’s not his strong pectorals, pumped up from swimming a mile every other day. It’s the expectation of what this dressing means: that we’re about to go on a date.

At this point we’ve been dating over a year, but every time, right before, he pauses in front of his closet, looks through his button-ups, and pulls on a “date shirt.” My two favorites are the violet striped cotton for winter and the deep purple linen for summer.

Just like my dog now knows when I pick up her harness and leash that she’s going for a walk, I know what putting on a date shirt means. Just as my dog starts jumping and nipping her tail, I can feel my body anticipating. My faces flushes, because pleasure, for me, registers as heat. A scalding bath or steaming cup of tea. A hot washcloth on my face. An embrace. Heat on skin, broiling in the sun. Soup opening my nose. Bubbling liquid coursing through my belly. A warm hand on my shoulder. The sun on my hair, baking blonde streaks into the red.

The shirt tucks into pants. Now no one can see what I just saw. But I can associate all the pleasure—food and drink, movie or music or dance, party or tete a tete—with this one image: the underpants. White. Empty. Blank. Ready. For what I know is about to happen.

Try this at home. Three minutes of silence, eyes closed. Fifteen minutes of riffing and not thinking too much. As Rainer says, “Let it be nonsense written at 90 mph. Embrace rubbish and absurdity in the attempt to find fresh imagery for your feelings.” Maybe you’ll locate fear in the back of your neck or anticipation deep inside your belly button. Once you do, you’ll be able to show those feelings, in a physical and vivid way, in your characters.

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The Retrospective Voice: Why Memoir Matters in an Age of Shootings

winchester

Yesterday—yet again—a lone man opened fire on a school and killed people just because they were there. My Facebook feed filled with pleas to DO something about this epidemic. I sat at my computer and prepared a lecture for my next memoir class, wondering if there’s anything we writers CAN do.

Memoirists are sometimes accused of being solipsistic. Why write about your own life, instead of big, important topics—like war and poverty and climate change? Why not write about something that could change the world for the better? You know, life or death stuff.

I leafed through Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life to find an excerpt to illustrate to my students the concept of retrospective voice—the voice of the “I” who is writing the book and who knows more than the other “I,” the younger self who is the character on the page.

The passage I found is chilling. The scene takes place half a century ago, but it couldn’t be more relevant to the events that just unfolded.

Twelve-year-old Toby has convinced his mother, against her good judgment, to allow him to keep the rifle her boyfriend gave him. Toby promised to never take the gun out except in the presence of an adult. For a week or so, he kept that promise. Then, after school one day, alone in the apartment, the temptation is too great. This passage shows what can happen to a well-intentioned but suggestible kid, when he gets hold of a gun:

I decided that there couldn’t be any harm in taking the rifle out to clean it. Only to clean it, nothing more. I was sure it would be enough just to break it down, oil it, rub linseed into the stock, polish the octagonal barrel and then hold it up to the light to confirm the perfection of the bore. But it wasn’t enough. From cleaning the rifle I went to marching around in the apartment with it and then to striking brave poses in front of the mirror. Roy had saved one of his army uniforms and I sometimes dressed up in this, together with martial-looking articles of hunting gear: fur trooper’s hat, camouflage coat, boots that reached nearly to my knees.

The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I began to act like one. I set up a nest on the couch by the front window. I drew the shades to darken the apartment, and took up my position. Nudging the shade aside with the rifle barrel, I followed people in my sights as they walked or drove along the street. At first I made shooting sounds—kyoo! kyoo! Then I started cocking the hammer and letting it snap down.

Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 founds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.

But over time the innocence I laughed at began to irritate me. It was a peculiar kind of irritation. I saw it years later in men I served with, and felt it myself, when unarmed Vietnamese civilians talked back to us while we were herding them around. Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
One afternoon I pulled the trigger.

Toby didn’t mean to shoot. He was a mixed up and maladjusted adolescent boy, but who isn’t at that age? What he wanted more than anything was to be a good citizen. But look at the way the gun transformed him, its seductive power almost sexual, its effect like the strongest drug. The gun gave him the feeling of power, and that feeling inevitably lead to a spiral of actions that turned him into a killer. (He ended up only killing a squirrel, but he had been aiming at an elderly couple.)

So, how can writing memoir save lives? Perhaps someone will read the passage above and become convinced that keeping a gun in the house is dangerous, that no matter what benign intentions we have for our guns, sometimes the guns control us, not vice versa. Perhaps one more parent will say no when her maladjusted son wants a rifle. Perhaps one policymaker will understand the way guns can prey on young or suggestible minds.

Part of the power of the excerpt is the way Wolff uses the retrospective voice: “I saw it years later in men I served with, and felt it myself.” If we only stayed in the voice of the young boy, we would not have understood the lesson Wolff learned about what made him go crazy that afternoon, when he laughed with ecstasy over strangers’ “absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.”

I shiver when I read that quote. Yes, I like to believe I’m safe. Though lately, that belief does seem absurd.

Reading memoir has allowed me to get inside the head of a gunman. That doesn’t feel solipsistic or navel gazing at all. What could be more important right now?

What makes this passage so effective is the self-awareness. Wolff doesn’t just tell us what happened, he examines the events from his vantage point many years later. He looks at past behavior and tries to learn from it. Isn’t that what we should do, as individuals and as a country? There’s much we can learn, whether we’re writers or not, from the retrospective voice.

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Maybe It Happened This Way

memory eraser

Somewhere, almost lost in the thousands of words I’ve read this week about the misrepresentations in the The Rolling Stone article that recounted a horrific gang rape of a girl named Jackie at a University of Virginia frat house, were these three sentences: “It’s not about what Jackie remembered, it’s about what actually happened. This wasn’t a how-I-coped-with-trauma memoir. This was supposed to be innocent-until-proven-guilty investigative journalism.”

But the truth is, memory is a slippery thing, especially memories of traumatic experiences. If some of the details got confused, we can’t assume it’s because Jackie lied. The mind is more complicated than that. She may have simply misremembered. It was the reporter’s job to know this could happen and to fact-check.

I’ve been stunned multiple times during the research I’ve done for my memoir—whether in formal interviews or casual conversations—how often I remembered things the wrong way. Or not at all.

Here’s a small example. When my mother was visiting me about a year ago, a six-year-old girl was hit by a truck half a mile from our house and immediately killed. “Remember when your sister was hit by a car?” my mother said. It was a rhetorical question. She assumed I remembered—but I didn’t.

 “No.”

 “She was fourteen,” my mother continued, “walking to school in the morning. The driver hadn’t even scraped the ice off her windshield, so she couldn’t see a thing and dragged your sister under the car.”

What does it say about me that I forgot such a horrible event? Am I the only person with memory holes like this? I don’t think so.

I said, “All I remember is my brother getting hit by a car in elementary school. He’d been riding his bike in the playground at Keppen School, where I was playing. He rode into the street by accident. An ambulance came, and you went to the hospital with them and sent me home with Kimmie’s family.”

“I never would have sent you home with Kimmie’s family,” my mother said. “Kimmie was a bully.”

Had I made this memory up? Not just the memory of staying at Kimmie’s, but of the whole accident. My mother didn’t remember it.

“Maybe this happened. Maybe not.” Sometimes it feels like that is the only way to truthfully reconstruct memories. One of the best examples of a memoir that wears the pitfalls of memory on its sleeve is The Other Side. In his blurb, Nick Flynn says, “Lacy M. Johnson offers us a guide to the impossible—how to reconstruct a past when the past itself is shattered, each memory broken into pieces, left rattling around inside us.”

In the first paragraph, she reconstructs the scene of her escape from the basement where her ex-boyfriend locked her up, raped her, and tried to kill her. It begins:

“I crash through the screen door, arms flailing like two loose propellers, stumbling like a woman on fire: hair and clothes ablaze. Or I do not stumble. I make no noise at all as I open the door with one hand, holding a two-by-four above my head with the other. My feet and legs carry me forward, the rest of my body still, like a statue. Like a ninja. A cartoon” (p. 1).

From a craft point of view, I’m startled by the transparency of a mind at work on the page, the sense that we are seeing the thoughts in progress, hearing the author weigh the options, telling us: “I do this . . . or I do that. . . I’m not exactly sure.”

Later in the book, she backtracks to the scene in which she introduced this man to her parents:

“Maybe it’s Mom who comes right out and says she is frankly shocked at how old he is: thirty eight, exactly twice my age. Or maybe she first asks if he colors his hair Then Dad wants to know if he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. I cover my face a little and sink deeper into the couch. The Man I Live With answers honestly; he’s told me in the car he will not placate these people. He delivers a moving lecture on world religions, including an in-depth deconstruction of the savior myth. Or it is not a lecture. Maybe he just waves his hands while telling my father his beliefs are the beliefs of a small-minded man” (p. 44).

Notice the word she repeats over and over again: maybe.

She backtracks further and not only questions the details of her memories but actively tries to change them. Don’t we all wish, sometimes, that we could?

“We ride the train to Budapest, where we share a room at the hostel with three Australian rugby players who take turns touching my breasts. I can’t remember their names. Does one have a mole on his cheek? The Man I Live With holds up my shirt for them, pinning back my arms,.He laughs without smiling, his mouth wide open.

“Or maybe he is waiting in the hall for the bathroom. Maybe he is drawing me a bath. I want to remember being drunk. I want to be standing on the bed, holding my own shirt up, my own arms back. I want to remember that I begged them to touch me. Not how they finally turned away” (p. 88).

“I want to remember” is code for “I wish it happened this way,” but it’s also stronger than that. It’s a yearning, not just a wish, a desire that can become so strong it’s transformative. We can’t change the past, but sometimes (without knowing it) we change the way we remember it.

Maybe Jackie did, too.

Photo credit: http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/the-power-of-the-memory-molecule_1.jpg