But first — I know what you’re thinking. Why the hypergraphia, Laura? Why are you writing about memoirs and stuffing versus dressing? What’s wrong? Well . . . I have nothing to do. Okay, “nothing to do” is strong. But I am in a lull, waiting for the galleys of WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and owing only one piece of writing that I recall, a short story for Megan Abbott, one that I’m not quite ready to write. (It needs to simmer for a while.)
At any rate, the previous entry on memoirs led to a mention of A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY in the comments. (Thanks, Sal!) And while I was typing “A Short List of Things My Father Lost Gambling” into the comments, I realized it was the platonic ideal of The Memory Project, a detailed, fact-based piece of writing that uses very few emotionally-laden words even as it incidentally breaks a reader’s heart. Here it is, again:
“1. My pony, Tim. He was excellently small and nice, and lived in a meadow behind the Mooreland Friends Church, with no one’s permission. One day I came home from school, and poof. If it were not for a photograph I have of me astride the little horse, with his name and mine written on the back by my mother, I would for certain think I made him up.
2. A small motorcycle. It appeared on the front porch one morning; no one learned to drive it; shortly thereafter, it was gone.
3. My mother’s engagement and wedding rings. The wedding band was heavy gold, with a little cluster of shooting stars that even had tails. In the center of each star was a diamond chip. In my imagination she just looked down one day, and they had vanished.
4. A boat. Like the motorcycle, it simply appeared. We lived nowhere near water, but every day I went out and pretended to drive it at abnormal speeds across choppy waters. For a brief time, it took the place of rodeo as my favorite sport.
5. My twenty-five dollar savings bond. I won it at the Mooreland Fair in a game of intense skill and concentration called Guess How Many Pennies Are in This Huge Jar. I guessed 468 and [ital] got it exactly right. [end ital] My name was announced just before the Grand Champion Pull at the Horse and Pony Pull, the zenith of the Mooreland social season. Twenty-five dollars was an unheard of amount of money at the time, and my father volunteered to deposit it in my “savings account” for me, which I had never heard of before that moment. Over the next few years, I probably asked him for the money 736 times, and he always assured me we were just waiting for it to mature.
6. A wide variety of excellent hunting beagles.”
This is a smart group, so I hestitate to point out the things that I love so much about this two-page chapter. But I’ll risk citing a few things that make my heart sing.
“Excellently” Stephen King famously (!) advises us to avoid adverbs but if you’re going to use them, a made-up/unexpected one isn’t a bad way to go.
“Abnormal speeds across choppy waters.” Self-explanatory.
All of entry 5, from the number of pennies to the number of times she pestered her father for the money, to “the zenith of the Mooreland social season,” which doesn’t carry a whiff of condescension or “wink-wink-I-know-better” archness.
I won a big jar of candy at the Halloween party at Dickeyville Presbyterian by guessing 249. I remember explaining to many, many people how I happened on that number, as if my “solution” were on a par with cold water fusion. But always with a certain amount of self-deprecation, as if aware that it was a great thing to guess the correct number, and I shouldn’t appear to be full of myself.
Haven Kimmel would do better by that story.
That two-page entry broke my hert, as well. Now I must go read A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY. “In my imagination she just looked down one day, and they (the rings) had vanished.” Oh, my.
I loved that book!
Another would be Caroline Knapp’s “Pack of Two”, which may not qualify as a “memoir” exactly, but was one of those books I wish I could have written.
You never sound full of yourself, Laura. One of the things I love about reading your posts (and books).
I’ll have to read Zippy. Sounds like a winner.
I read Knapp’s book on her alcoholism, one of the best addiction memoirs I’ve read.
If it seems as if I favor memoirs — I do. Perhaps because it’s the one genre I know I’ll never try. (I promised my family and one family member asked: “Could we have that in writing?”)
Some other recent memoirs I’ve really enjoyed: Leap Days, by Katherine Lanpher. (We knew each other at Northwestern, but anyone who has read an excerpt of this book would probably be drawn to it). and Miss American Pie, which relied on the author’s diary for much of the book.
Oh, and Great With Child, by Beth Ann Fennelly, a really beautiful book about motherhood.
I was moved by Jennifer Lauck’S Blackbird.
Zippy is one of my favorite books.
It occurs to me that I went in 24 hours from “Memoirs are Bumming Me Out” to a wholehearted endorsement of the form. Last night, I reread “Repeat After Me,” the David Sedaris essay in which he writes about the rationalizations he’s used in telling family stories. Perhaps my favorite piece of his.
“You’re not going to use it!”
“Pack of Two” was written after “Drinking” and it’s about her relationship with her dog. Beautifully written and fearless, plus well researched, which is not something you often see in memoirs.
James Ellroy’s “My Dark Places” was also pretty riveting and about the only thing he’s ever written that didn’t annoy me.
Has anyone read Haven Kimmel’s follow up to Zippy? She wrote one about her teen years, I think. Is it as good?
I haven’t read the followup to A Girl Named Zippy, but I did read the book about her mother, “She Got Up Off the Couch.” Actually, I listened to it on audio CD, my latest way of getting a lot of “reading” done. All the time I was reading Zippy I kept wondering why her mother was so passive. Well, she finally got off the couch and did something.
Jackie, that’s the one I was thinking of. Do you recommend it?
I’m a huge fan of MY DARK PLACES. The first part is written in this very cold, clinical Dragnet-speak. No emotion, despite the fact that it details the day his mother is found dead. The second part explodes with emotion, sensation, etc., as Ellroy details his life as a caddying speed junkie. A very deliberate juxtaposition of styles that adds a lot to the material.
And while it’s not a memoir, I want to mention one of my all-time favorite books INTO THE WILD. Again, the technique is key. It begins with the discovery of a young man who has starved to death in Alaska, apparently the victim of his own foolhardy ideals about getting back to nature. If you remember the story when it broke in the news media, your reaction may have been: What an idiot! And the opening bring back that same skepticism. Very cold, very indirect. But Krakauer did a beautiful job of fleshing out the life of the young man (and, not incidentally, correcting some factual errors in his own initial account in Outside magazine). So by the time you circle back to where the book began, it’s overwhelming. It’s a good book for crime writers to study because it shows what can be gained by humanizing those we kill.