“Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself: pedant that it is, it will have its way.

When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and a fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph…” (3)

Beautiful words and a lovely metaphor. I wanted so much to love this book. I love this author, and the subject matter of German memory, history and literature are some of my favorites. With a beginning like this, I expected a German version of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…and somehow I am disappointed. Starts strong, finishes with no resolution.

About 70 folks (I think) came to hear me read and talk about Opa Nobody, which was sooooo wonderful. Yay to the Book and Cranny in Statesboro for all the help, and to Eric Nelson & his posse for the beautiful food, and to my son for drawing on my face while I was trying to sign books.

In other good news, Booklist says of Opa Nobody: “[T]houghtful discourse on political activism and the toll exacted from those dedicated to unpopular causes.”

In the wake of the Margaret Selzer fake-memoir scandal, it was discovered that the author of “Reflections in the Pond,” a meandering work of literary nonfiction, was also assuming a false identity. Dr. Arno Schwartz, the mild-mannered professor who readers knew as the author of “Reflections,” was revealed to be Shazaam Waloon Walker, former knife thrower, sword eater, and bounty hunter.

Waloon Walker published “Reflections” to little acclaim, no advance, and sold approximately 1,700 copies of the work, which was published by a now-defunct “indie” press, Seventh Jackal Books. Over time, however, the literary value of the work brought it into such demand among panelists at literary conferences that a second indie press, Nine Horned Beast Words (now also defunct), scraped together enough support for a second press run of 150 printed by hand with letterpress.

“Reflections” enjoyed modest name recognition among a handful of name-tag checkers at regional literary conferences, and might have faded into the comfortable obscurity of the indie has-beens if it hadn’t been for the industrious blogger, Snarfling Lorax. Lorax, a bedridden consumptive with an axe to grind against the literati employed as first-year composition teachers with 4-4 teaching loads at community colleges, combed through the manuscript and announced on his blog yesterday that “Reflections” was indeed an utter fabrication.

“The walks in the woods? A lie. The hazy metaphors connecting the cycle of life to the color of the birch leaves? This guy has never been more than seven feet from either a car or a pool table,” wrote Lorax on the blog post. Lorax cited the key discovery of “Reflections” as a hoax: a reference to Schwartz/Waloon Walker visiting Walden Pond on Long Island. “Jesus Christ,” wrote Lorax. Literary fans of “Reflections” had assumed the gaffe was a knowing and subtle commentary on American relationship to its literary history.

“I just wanted some respect,” said Shazaam Waloon Walker in a phone interview. “Every girl I met, it was always about the scars on my face, the questions about the decades I spent as a drug mule, and the knife throwing–especially the knife throwing. I love the alphabet…but who would have thought me capable of stringing a metaphor?”

“I wasn’t in it for the money, obviously. I can rustle that up anytime I want. I didn’t want to write about my low points and devour my own life for the sake of a huge advance…What do you think I am, some sort of corpse-eating zombie? I wanted what no money can buy. I wanted the quiet and unremunerated satisfaction of somebody who’s just into the alphabet. I guess love affair with a good story was my downfall. I’ll never be anything but a knife-throwing sword-swallowing former drug mule.”

(A little short story, a joke and a lie. The Onion wouldn’t publish it because it wasn’t funny enough. No, that’s a lie, I never submitted it to The Onion.)

These are a few selections from a wonderful new book from Ohio University Press, Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist:

“Only by lingering on something outside the self, with which he has had intimate experience, can the author disclose himself. Memoir is a relational form.” (22)

“[T]he subject of a memoir is often the self in search of an earlier or later self, who is found in the person the book gives birth to and whose awareness of past and present, in turn, becomes the focus.” (66)

“What is it about you now that’s so interested in whatever stage you choose? Pressure from the now may help unearth the best phase to explore, especially the unfinished ones that haunt us the most.” (67)

“[T]he memoirist is she who sticks with the form long enough to undergo changes in how she sees the past. The act of memoir writing and its river of recollections has made her different from the person she would have been had she not traversed the rapids. The act has also changed and deepened those predictably indulged and semitrue stories she’s been telling herself and others, no doubt, for years.” (113)

“Once we realize that the here and now has the greatest control over the personal narrative, we are saying, in effect, that the core self can never be found. It can only be activated now and in the succession of now’s memoir writing activates.” (131) (Cool, very Buddhist!)

“Unlike the sum-happy autobiography or the sin-absolving confession, memoir allows a reanimation of, and a relational bout with, one’s authenticity.” (135)

I got this random piece of paper in an envelope yesterday and it turned out to be my first review. from Kirkus Reviews, dated 1/15/08. Okay….they’re not my mom, so they found stuff that I totally agree with: “the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing.” And also “The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication.” (well, I’d call that fiction and a mixed-genre thing while trying for honesty, but these are quibbles.) Here comes the good part:
“Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read. Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.”

I walked around the house kind of dazed, and then a half an hour later I said to Donny, “Wait, I think this is a good review.” It is a good review. Bumpy is okay–hell, they could have said hellishly incomprehensible and galling for even existing. “worthwhile,” “unique,” “imaginative…” aww, and they don’t even know me So I’m relieved and glad for such a strange book to be liked.

From The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.” (p. 411)

“I did and do believe that if you project  yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something happen that would not otherwise have happened, you will find <span style=”font-style:italic;”>something</span>, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked your grandfather anything at all. I had finally learned the lesson taught me, years after they’d died, by Minnie Spieler and Herman the Barber. There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally seeing, what was always there.” (p. 486)

The book is incredible. Read it.

“I began to read the greats in essay writing–and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.” (p.24)

“These writers might not ‘know’ themselves–that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us–but in each case–and this is crucial–they know who they are<span style=”font-style:italic;”> at the moment of writing</span>.” (p. 30)

“Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life. In fiction, a cast of characters is put to work that will cover all the bases….In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required. To see one’s own part in the situation–that is, one’s own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part–is to create the dynamic.” (p. 35-36)

From Ann Patchett’s afterward to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 231-2:
“It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,” a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf. “All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?”
“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
…By telling us that the sentences spoken in the book were not necessarily verbatim, Lucy claimed complete ownership of her history. It was her world and she would present it the way she wanted to. Her memory and desire were indeed the facts. She taught me something while I sat in the audience that night about the nature of writing and the nature of truth. In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapeable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art, I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that contains the weight and power of an entire terrain.”

One of my students, Brett Dickerson, has an eloquent answer to this question:
“It’s the same type of storytelling we use everyday. When my wife asks how my day was, when Dad tells me about the livestock sale, or when my brother tells me whey he drank so much last weekend, it’s all creative nonfiction.”

“Faction” is Wole Soyinka’s word. It’s also been described as literary journalism, personal essay, impersonal essay, reportage, autobiography, memoir, lyric essay, meditation… <a href= “http://www.billroorbach.com”>Bill Roorbach</a> (in the wonderful Writing Life Stories) describes all these terms and others as fitting under the umbrella of the term “creative nonfiction,” which I also like.