Displaying the True Self

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or
humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't
live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't
 love enough. Nothing else really counts at all
                                                                      Ted Hughes

There's lots of talk about honesty in memoir writing--being true to circumstance, event, facts, experience. Write as an honorable journalist when getting down the facts, for sure. And there's talk about being honest about who we really are to our readers, about creating a narrator who discards artifice and bluff. 

How can that be done? How does a writer find that strong, original voice?

Consider the memoirist's challenge in writing herself: Which face is the original one? The one for the game--fierce and ready to attack? The one for the in-laws--cooperative, non-judgmental most of the time? The one on the phone with a good friend--profane and sharply disdainful of foolishness? The one in front of the classroom--calm, all-seeing, open? Or the one in an empty house, lying in a hot bathtub holding a glass of Syrah, murmuring to the child inside, very softly and kindly about those troubling incidents on the playground in the third grade. 

Every memoirist brings the child and the adult to the composition of memory, whether it appears as explicit or implicit in the narration. Sometimes the duality and dynamic occur in the tension between the experiences of older protagonist--a young adult and an older adult.

Here's Maria Popova in a recent Brain Pickings post: 

Four decades later, 23 years after Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, Ted Hughes (1930--1998) wrote to their 24 years old son, Nicholas. The letter, found in Letters of Ted Hughes is superb...this particular passage speaking to the beautiful vulnerability of our inner child and its longing to be seen, heard, let loose is an absolutely exquisite articulation of the human condition--don't let the length and density deter you from absorbing it, for one you do, it'll saturate every cell of your soul. 

The excerpt from the Ted Hughes letter:

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am...But in many other ways obviously you are still childish--how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It's something people don't discuss, because it's something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet, we're likely to get a rough time, and to end up making "no contact." But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It's an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and when they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the more efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. So when you realise you've gone a few weeks and haven't felt that awful struggle of your childish self--struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence--you'll know you've gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you've gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. 

Hughes' letter is insightful on so many levels. What interests me here is his insistence that we interact with others on a level that recognizes each person's inner child. That perspective is usually too indulgent, too full of soft psychology for me, but there is something important here. Fiction writers create characters; memoirists create narrators. The challenge for the writer/narrator is to portray the writer's true voice. And, because we have so many--we code switch all the time--how do we access that truth?

We can portray ourselves as ideal, clever people. We can write smart, competent narrators. We can write from outside our venerable impenetrable armor. We can skim the surface. We can amaze and dazzle. Do these, and experience the hollow loss of connection.

OR

We can write as adults who "let loose" the person inside, the innocent, the person once unaffected by the anticipations of our society and culture, the person who struggles daily to overcome weakness, slogs along constantly learning how to live. It takes some work to summon the genuine self as we may have buried it--during decades of disregarding realities, years lost in the seas of denial, learned indulgence in fears, disappointments, victim hood. 

Very often the memoirist's access to the genuine self is stymied by pride. If we cannot find room to forgive our parents for their inadequacies, we will not find room to forgive ourselves for ours. This one achievement--forgiving and moving on--will do more for competent and meaningful memoir writing than all the techniques of craft you may employ.

Memoirists write as adults who have made peace with the past, people who have done the homework of reflection and meaning-making, narrators who can explain a small part of this complex world to readers. And we write as children, bringing heart to a reader, showing each other how, without guile, to live boldly and to love deeply. 

Wonder, wander, write--always.