Author Gives Advice on Memoirs
Florangela Davila - Seattle Times
Feb 21, 2008
Even when the act of writing can feel like purgatory, Natalie Goldberg convinces us to take the plunge. She liberated scores of insecure folk with her seminal 1988 "Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within." And now she gives us a new book about championing our own life stories with "Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir."
Equal parts meditation and "how-to" tome, "Old Friend" will sweet-talk the most reluctant and panic-stricken auteur-to-be while also reining in the sort of person better served by Facebook. (What are you doing right now?! Tell your friends!)
If I were completing one of Goldberg's mind probes/writing exercises (there are many good ones in this book), I'd be writing furiously for 10 minutes about my 75-year-old aunt's soft, freckled hands, or how I can tolerate loneliness only if the TV is turned on.
Yes, there's likely a story in there somewhere so long as I move beyond the concrete details; abort every darling life experience; be "willing to go to the hot, steamy center"; and just let go.
Goldberg, 60, who teaches writing workshops in New Mexico, where she lives, is currently instructing and inspiring attendees while on a book tour. I reached Goldberg at a Portland hotel last week.
Q: Why are memoirs so incredibly popular?
A: I think they're a very American form. Memoir used to be something at the end of your life, to reflect. Like America, we broke open the concept. People realize they could write one at 20, at 30. Last night in Iowa, I had a young lady at the bookstore who's in the fifth grade. She wrote a memoir. She wrote about her memories. As Americans, we don't want to wait until we get old to understand things. We want to understand things right now. In a way that's a good idea. I'm more in touch with some things now than I was. You can write many memoirs. My life with coffee. My life with men. It doesn't have to be a whole life.
Q: To be honest, I've shied away from first-person accounts. Some newspaper columnists, for example, write about their kid or their spouse, and I'm thinking, You know what? I really don't care. What's the biggest mistake people make when trying to write about themselves?
A: They think they have to put down everything. What really memoir is, is the study of memory and the way we think. The way we remember. There's a lamp in front of me. I could look at the lamp and flash upon the pastrami sandwich that my father ate in 1981 at the Carnegie Deli in New York.
It doesn't make logical sense, but it makes sense of the human mind and the way we remember; of the human condition. If you can find that richness and you put it on the page, it will seduce you to read it. We use concrete details to find a felt emotion underneath. What was our life? Who are we? We are really looking for that underneath.
Q: But do you believe everyone actually has an interesting story to tell?
A: Yes. It doesn't matter what you have to say but how you say it. You could stop right now and have enough to write about for the next 40 years. It's how you approach it and open up and feel the world.
Q: Maybe some of us just make good subjects who have good stories worthy of being chronicled by someone else.
A: I believe everyone can learn to write if they're willing to break down deep enough to discover the world. Often the people who come to my workshops, who are the most talented, don't have the drive to keep going. And the ones who sit in the back, who are kind of like nerds, they keep staying in there. Absorbing. Listening. Surrendering. Eventually they find some genuine voice.
You can learn how to tell a story so that people will listen and open up to it. What you're asking, I think, is when people think, "Well, I'm not talented." Talent is like a water table under the earth. You tap it with your effort, and it comes through you. It's a very Eastern way of looking at things.
Q: When did you make the connection between Zen meditation and writing?
A: It began at the beginning. A kind of spontaneous combustion. I started writing, meditating and also painting. It just all came together. I saw writing as a practice. It's been taught in this country that if you're going to start writing and the beginning two words aren't "War and Peace," then you should quit. I see writing as an athletic activity. It just happens that the muscles I develop happen to be my brain, and I can't show them off as well on the beach.
Q: You talk about writing not so much as an act of surrendering oneself or even of wanting to preserve oneself but as an act of generosity. Can you elaborate?
A: You fall in love with your own life, and you don't worry whether it's interesting or not. You put your deep heart on the page, and hopefully somebody will pick it up and it will communicate something.
Q: Your writing instruction, that process of digging deep, sounds a lot like therapy.
A: But it's not therapy. It's going beyond therapy. I mean, it's therapeutic writing, but finally you're working to create something. It's not just about healing yourself.
Q: How do we know if what we're remembering is true?
A: You don't know. Memory isn't about black-and-white truth. It's understanding that memory has vagaries.
Q: You write about how a writer's job is to speak. But how it can hurt and be painful. Your book "The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth" explored betrayal and disappointment with your father and with your teacher [Katagiri Roshi; her book talks about his transgressions with another student]. One consequence: You later lost friendships with others in the Zen community. How do you know if something you've written about should be made public?
A: There's not a should. It's what feels right for you. I feel like you can't control people's reactions. I feel like I did the right thing. It wasn't about revenge. It wasn't flippant. I deeply wanted to understand betrayal and disappointment and my own part in it. Sometimes you have to have some faith in what you do, and the world might not right away notice. But I tell you, if I didn't write that book, I couldn't write this book. If something presents itself and you try to avoid it, it will muddy everything you do.
Q: You don't name him, but you write about James Frey. And you actually defend him.
A: I have a lot of compassion for Frey. I'd like him to be able to go on with his life. When I first read it ["A Million Little Pieces"], it was obvious he was making things up. He's an addict. He's lying. We have to get a little sophisticated as readers and not feel so duped that the written word is black and white.
And at the same time, Bush was making up these huge lies and nobody said anything. This skinny kid goofed in this one book and we went crazy. I think a lot of that was subliminal anger and frustration and pain.
Q: So after we've written something, how do we know if it's worthy?
A: You wait two weeks. And then you can read your stuff. It's sort of like the blood has dried. You have more objectivity, and hopefully it's just like any other activity. You have tennis friends you play tennis with. You have writing friends, and you show them and you say, "What do you think?"
Q: Do you have a writing ritual?
A: No. I have my little notebook with me, and the feeling rises in me and I go. I wrote 20 pages on the plane, and I just kept my hand moving. I threw in everything. Obama. Hillary. The winter in the Midwest. My mother dying. I don't know if it's good enough. I can't wait to look at it. But I can't look at it now because the blood hasn't dried yet.
Q: Do you have to write?
A: I don't have to write, but I have to live as a writer. Receiving the world. Noticing some things. Having some time for dreaming. Caring about detail. Because writing isn't just writing. It's a whole way of life. It's a way of seeing and caring. A desire to have intimacy for your life and for the world.
I'm hoping this book is a whole experience. The book's not really about memoir; it's about waking up. It's about learning to trust and have confidence in your experience and your mind and in what you feel, see and think. Those are the kinds of citizens we want to have in this country.
Q: Engaged.
A: Yes, you got it, sister.
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