retrospective voice

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.

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.

Letter to My Thirteen-Year-Old Self

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