It may seem hard to imagine how to write a life in short pieces rather than with a more traditional narrative arc, but it works. Here are excerpts from memoirs-made-of-pieces that I like very much:

Excerpts from Abigail Thomas’ What Comes Next and How to Like It.

Excerpt from Kim Stafford’s 100 Tricks Any Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared.

Excerpt from Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted. This book is marketed as a novel but the author has gone on record saying everything she writes is 80% true.

Excerpt from Merri Lisa Johnson’s Girl in Need of a Tourniquet. And here is more from that book.

After you read the excerpts offered at these links, think about how each of these writers offers life experience succinctly through scenes, skillful exposition to fill the reader in and just the right amount of commentary and reflection as they look back on the scenes they are remembering.

For example:

Abigail Thomas writes:

I remember maybe rain. I was roasting a chicken. My youngest daughter, Catherine, sat next to him [her friend Chuck] on the sofa. She had a new Donkey Kong game and they played it while I peeled potatoes. Now and then I looked at them, thinking, How nice. Their heads touching. I was forty. He was thirty. My daughter was nine. Her hair was always tangled in the back. Did he let her win? I doubt it.

Earlier, before Chuck showed up, she had ushered me into the kitchen, telling me she had a present. What could it be? I wondered. It was a bowl of sliced peaches and cream, she had prepared it carefully all by herself, and she stood next to my chair and watched as I ate every bite. “Do you want some more sugar?” she may have asked, and “No, this is perfect,” I may have answered.

“When I grow up, I want to be just like you,” she said, and my heart filled with gratitude. I was flattered when she grew up and people said we looked exactly alike.

The scene is set with action (Chuck and the speaker’s daughter Catherine sitting together playing a game and the speaker peeling potatoes) and a memory of earlier that day before Chuck showed up. We have details in the scene in addition to the potatoes and game and characters: we have ages, tangled hair at Catherine’s neck, and a bowl of sliced peaches and cream prepared by the nine-year-old Catherine as a treat for her mother. This seems like a cozy scene. As we learn about the years ahead, these particular details become especially resonate.

Kim Stafford offers reflection in his piece about his brother’s suicide:

It has taken me over twenty years to realize my brother came to a point where he could not live. He loved his family, and his life had many blessings. But he had to stop his pain, and did not have the skills to come to safety in some other way. I could run from my life—by divorce, by wandering, by writing a fierce new self-definition. My brother did not have these devious means.

This reflection comes between an excerpt of his brother’s philosophical writing and words from his brother about what he sees from an airplane window.

Pam Houston’s exposition (insertion of important background information within a story) borders on scene:

Back on the greenbelt, this time with Fenton the dog and Liam, big brother showing little brother the ropes. If you have spent every day of your life, as Liam has, on a ranch in Colorado, the tiniest things can impress you. Streetlights, water sprinklers, fire trucks, bicycles, roller blades. Everywhere he looks, so many people, each one of them the keeper of a potential pet.

The author fills readers in on where she walks with her two dogs and how the younger of the two is new to the situation. In her sentences, we not only learn that we are walking along with the speaker and her dogs but learn too of the things encountered as if they are unusual. This is a good lesson on how involving images shortens the need to explain (use exposition).

Merri Lisa Johnson uses exposition as well:

I break up with Emily more times than I remember—my recon­structed timeline is a tedious report of the days and reasons for each decision to split—but we never follow through with the plan to stop seeing each other. We never run out of excuses or holidays or alibis or lies. We never pull back long enough to detox. Just long enough for the most acute symptoms of addiction to subside. I am thoroughly engaged by this game of EAT YOUR HEART OUT. I can’t stop throwing my organs like playing cards on the table and yelling at Emily when she tries to pick them up.

She covers a continuing length of time with phrases like “never run out of excuses or holidays or alibis or lies,” “just long enough,” and “thoroughly engaged.” Her language keeps us moving along since her voice is unique and full of images and simile that offer an emotion I would call disheartened anger with herself: “throwing my organs” and “game of EAT YOUR HEART OUT.”

****

It’s your turn now:

• 1. Jot down remembered scenes from your life that are vivid in your memory or continue to move you, either to joy and contentment or to sadness or irritation. Choose one of them. Write the scene that you have in your mind.
  2. Choose a second scene from the list or one that has popped into our mind now that you have written the first scene. It doesn’t have to come in chronological order — it can be simultaneous to the one you just wrote or further in the past or in the future from that first remembered scene.
  3. Write a third scene that takes place yet another place or time.
  4. After you have written all three scenes as separate pieces of writing (and they can contain commentary, reflection and exposition as well as images), think about what connects them in your memory–time, distance, place, characters, event, or because they are like stepping-stones to finding an answer to a life question.

If you were to continue on this path of writing parts as a memoir, what does the connection you see among the paragraphs suggest you might use as a title?

Take a cue from one of four authors:

the title of a book you love or loved (Stafford’s title includes the book title 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do),

a question you want to answer (Thomas’ title tells us what she is trying to achieve),

jargon from something you do often (Houston’s words are from airline flights she seems to almost always taking)

a colorful, apt “proclamation” about yourself as Johnson makes.

Decide on an order for the three scenes you’ve written and then separate the scenes with an asterisk. Add the title you have chosen.

Do you feel like adding and continuing to write more scenes on your way to a longer piece? Do the three scenes perhaps make a short memoir piece?

What does it feel like to build on passages that are intuitively linked together? I hope that your answer to that question includes, “It feels freeing.”