I have been reading and rereading the four pieces in the
“Finale” section of Alice Munro’s new collection Dear Life. Munro calls them “not quite stories,”
forming a unit that she calls “autobiographical in feeling, though not,
sometimes, entirely so in fact.” She
says she believes they are “the first and last—and the closest—things I have
had to say about my own life.”
I have already written about one of these memoirs—the title
piece that appeared earlier in The New Yorker.” You can find it by
typing “dear life” in the “search” line on the top right. The remaining three
pieces—“The Eye,” “Night,” and “Voices,”—are interesting to me because they
provide the opportunity to explore the differences between “memoir” and “short
story.”
As usual, I did a little research on this relationship
between memoir and story by typing the following in Google: “memoir vs. short
story.” And the first thing that came up was a blog entry I wrote three years
ago, and damn all, if it didn’t focus on a story by Alice Munro (“Some
Women.”)! I am not sure I have anything
new to say about the issue of memoir vs. story, vis-à-vis Alice Munro, but you
never know until you start exploring.
Munro has said that she has based many of her stories on her
own life. That is not unusual, of
course. But the question I want to
explore is: What is the difference between an anecdote of an actual event in
one’s life and a short story based on that anecdote?
If you do some research on the memoir/fiction topic, you
primarily will find discussions on the issue of “truth,” that is, did the event
recounted “really happen”? This is a
common question members of the audience often pose to writers at “readings.” Indeed, it is probably one of the first
questions children ask when you tell them a bedtime story? I used to tell my children a story about
being chased by a huge bull while picking blackberries in a pasture near my
childhood home. They were more
impressed with the story when I told them it really happened; they would have
been less engaged if I had told them it was “made-up.”
This, of course, is one of the reasons why biographies and
autobiographies are more popular than fiction; if the work is just a “story,”
it seems less important, less interesting, less “real.” The flap about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces raised
the ethical question about fictionalizing one’s life experiences and calling it
“memoir.” However, more pressing than
the ethical question is the profit question:
Narratives billed as an account of what actually happened simply sell
better than narratives labeled as fiction.
Although this issue is most often raised with long fictions,
it does occasionally crop up with short fictions. For example, when Rick Moody’s short piece "Demonology"
was first published, it was listed as a memoir. However, the following year, it was included in Prize
Stories: The O. Henry Awards for
1997. When asked to comment on the work
for the O. Henry Award collection, Moody said there were few things he
has written that he would rather talk about less than this. However, he once told an interviewer that he
is always tying to muddy the surface of the nonfictional with fictional
techniques by paying particular attention to form and structure. What makes "Demonology" so
affecting are Moody's efforts to transform a powerful personal experience into
something that has universal significance.
The title of the piece stems from the fact that the sister's
death from arrhythmia takes place within the context of Halloween, her children
dressed as demons and monsters, beating back the restless souls of the dead in
search of sweets. This demon motif is
repeated throughout the story until ultimately the sister is transformed into a
"revenant" that compels Moody to find a way to use language to
communicate his grief. The story ends
with Moody, in a common self-referential tactic, considering how he should have
constructed his memoir, telling himself he probably should have fictionalized
it more, for example, conflating the sister's two children into one and making
her boyfriend a husband. He says he
should have let artifice create an elegant surface for the story, thus making
his sister's death shapely and persuasive rather than blunt and disjunctive.
However, it is precisely the blunt, barely restrained, voice that makes the
story so powerful.
As a student of the short story, what interests me most
about the blurry line between story and memoir is not the ethical or the
economical issue, but the aesthetic one: Is there a basic difference in
technique and thematic significance between a short story and a short memoir?
We might ask, why did Alice Munro give us “The Eye” as a
memoir rather than a story? Was it
because she felt the event that she recalls from when she was five years
old—her first encounter with death—would not have yielded a complex story, but
only a cliché? Of course, it is
unlikely that Munro can recall in such detail the events of something that
happened when she was five; it is more likely that she recalls some of the
events from what her mother has told her over the years, whereas other aspects
of the recollection may have actually been invented over the years. But what difference does that make?
Munro might very well have made the event recounted in “The
Eye” into a story, for the child’s fascination with the romantic life of the
hired girl Sadie and her ambiguous relationship with her mother can be seen in
a number of Munro’s stories. The central thematic issue has something to do
with the scene of the child looking down into the coffin and seeing the eyelid
of the dead girl lifting just a tiny bit. This does not frighten the child, but
rather it “falls into everything” that she knows about Sadie and also “into
whatever special experience was owing to myself.” There is a sense of recognition here, a sense of identity, not
the sense that a five-year-old would feel, but rather a sense that a woman
would later remember as a mutual understanding.
The short piece “Night” is a much more discursive account,
based largely on thinking about something rather than on seeing or doing
something. We do not know the age of
the child in this piece, but she is old enough, or young enough, to have some
fantasies about strangling her younger sister during the night, and she loses
sleep about it. Her brief talk with her father one night when she walks out of
the house is enough to make her identify with him and to appreciate his wisdom.
For when she tells him about her fantasies of strangling her sister, he says
not to worry, for “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.” And she knows that he has given her just
what she needed to hear.
In “Voices,” Munro is ten years old and accompanies her
mother to a dance in a home to which a prostitute has brought one of her
girls. But it is not the girl that so
fascinates the young Munro; rather it is the talk she overhears of some of the
Air Force men stationed nearby who try to comfort the young woman, and she
marvels at how they bow down and declare themselves in front of her. Later, she
thinks of those men, and hears their voices directed to her: “Their hands
blessed my own skinny thighs and their voices assured me that I, too, was
worthy of love.” This fascination with mysterious
sexuality and the risky business of becoming thought desirable to men is a
common theme in many of Munro’s stories.
Of these three short memoir pieces, “Voices” is, because of this
thematic echo, the closest to merging into the realm of fiction.
For me, the difference between the recounting of an actual
event and a fictional event has nothing to do with whether the event actually
occurred, but rather whether the event “means” anything. My own experience with writing fiction is
minimal. Although I have several notebooks of observations, recollections, and
descriptions, I have only published two stories. Both stories are based on actual events, although they did not
all happen at the same time; rather they are disparate fragments that seemed to
“go together” thematically. I think
putting the various “real life” events together in the way I did by providing
for them a “point of view” actually resulted in “stories.” However, I still have many recollections in
my notebooks that remain simply that—recollections. I will provide one example
of what I think is a recollection that could, with the right point of view and
the right context, become a story.
When I was young, my maternal grandmother lived in the
country on a farm, and I recall her in that rural context. However, my father’s mother was a “city
girl,” although the “city” where I lived was a small Kentucky mountain town of
approximately 4,000 people. My “city
grandmother” seemed more sophisticated than my country grandmother, although
she only had a high school education. I
have many memories of her, of course, but one image sticks in my mind, although
I am not sure I ever actually saw it or whether I created it out of the “late show” 1940s movies that I stayed
up and watched the whole summer the first year we got television.
Here is the image:
The Paintsville
Hotel is on the main street of town, just two doors down from the Greyhound bus
station, which I remember as the center of exciting activity. Between the two is the Kentucky Cafe where I
occasionally stopped to play the pinball machine and get a cherry joke. In front of the Hotel the sidewalk is made
of glass brick. The barber shop, where my paternal
grandfather, always dressed in a white shirt and black bowtie, cut my hair, was
just below, and because he always keep a light on there all night, a glow came
up through the glass bricks so that when you walked across them it was like
something out a Busby Berkely musical.
What I remember is my grandmother in a black dress and a long black coat
with a high fur collar. The collar is pushed up on her neck so that it met her
short white hair. She has on heels and
I see her walking down the street toward me, past the bus station, past the
Kentucky Cafe, and onto the glass bricks that give a radiance to her
nyloned legs. Her head is high, and her
pelvis is thrust forward a bit; she looks slightly amused at something. She walks fast, her arms across her breasts,
and the breeze her motion makes stirs the fur around her neck.
That is only a memoir image, but placed in the right context
with the right point of view, some meaningful narrative movement, and related
thematic details, it could be a story, don’t
you think? Whether it happened
or not is not important.
