I began working on the
material for my memoir, A Door in the
Ocean, many years ago, way back in the year 2000. I was deep into the
stories that would one day turn into my first fiction collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, and back
then I believed I was a dyed-in-the-wool fiction writer. I never considered
that I had a life worth writing about, and like a lot of fiction writers, I’d
been raised on the idea that nonfiction wasn’t the stuff of literature. There’s
a long tradition of such prejudice. Ned Stuckey-French, for example, says, “[Essays]
continue to be associated in the minds of many readers with fish-wrap
journalism. They are seen as a product of memory and reporting rather than imagination
and intellect.”[i]
And when it came to memoir—the personal essay’s slutty cousin—the criticism was
even fiercer. In a 1994 essay published in Harper’s
magazine, William Gass had whined, “Why is it so exciting to say, now that
everyone knows it anyway, ‘I was born . . . I was born . . . I was born’? ‘I
pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A's.’”[ii]
It’s hard to get more
damning than that.
In the summer of 2000, I
began to assemble materials for a class on Rhetoric and Writing a the
University of Utah. The class would focus on contemporary Utah criminals. I’d
lived in Salt Lake City for about a year by that point, and like a lot of
people I saw Utah as overwhelmingly homogenous and excessively wholesome—an
image so many of my students were invested in upholding. So I wanted to mix
things up and try to show the students that Utah’s history wasn’t so squeaky
clean. I knew Ted Bundy had spent time in Salt Lake City, for example. I also knew
about Gary Gilmore – who’d murdered two young men in Provo in the 1970s and was
the first person sentenced to death in the United States after a decade-long
moratorium on capital punishment – from Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song. As I began searching for articles and documents,
I came across an essay by Mikal Gilmore, Gary’s younger brother. (It’s titled,
“Family Album,” and was first printed in Rolling
Stone and then in Granta, and
later expanded into the memoir, Shot in
the Heart, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994.)
As I read Mikal Gilmore’s
account of his brother’s life, crime, and execution, I felt a strange
transformation taking place. The revelations I wanted to deliver to my students
I was experiencing for myself. But the revelation wasn’t about Utah so much as
it was about the power of the personal essay. I’d never read a story that
struck so close to the bone, or that felt so urgent. I gasped at the final
scene, then immediately turned back to the beginning and read the essay
straight through again. Every now and then, as readers, we stumble across a
text that absolutely changes our lives. In many cases, it’s been in front of us
the entire time. Mikal Gilmore’s “Family Album” was that text for me.
The essay appealed to me
so profoundly, I think, because it gave me a vocabulary for understanding my
own relationship to murder. When I was fifteen years old, a kid in the suburbs
of Houston, Texas, my closest friend was shot and killed in a home invasion, along
with his father and older brother. It was a bizarre and incomprehensible crime
that has never been solved, even 21 years later. I’d talked to my friend on the
phone just twenty minutes before he died; his mother and younger sister were
sitting in their car, in my driveway, when the gunmen arrived. I’d spent the years
following the murders not exactly trying to forget them, but definitely trying
to convince myself that they no longer affected me, that I was, in the jargon
of pop-psychology, “over it.” Sudden, unforeseen disasters had crept into my stories
for years, but before that day I’d never considered the possibility that I
might have something personal to say about murder. But now I felt a story
taking shape: what was once a knotted jumble of odd emotions and surreal
memories was metamorphosing into language, and into a communicable order. So I
began writing the first draft of my first personal essay, which survives today—in
a very different form—as the first chapter of A Door in the Ocean.
My essay about the murders
imitated Gilmore’s voice and writing style. It was a personal account with a
ruminating voice, part story and part cultural meditation. Digressions,
aphorisms, and ruminations are, of course, hallmarks of the personal essay. Essays
themselves are, by nature, tentative endeavors: investigations freed from the
obligation of making firm moral pronouncements. They are permitted to wander,
to loaf, to puzzle over great questions but to ultimately refrain from having
to answer them. The preponderance of prepositions—“On” and “Of”—found in the
titles of so many famous essays, including several by living writers such as
Joan Didion and Phillip Lopate reinforce this notion of the essay’s
tentativeness. Opinions on this, thoughts
of that. But tentativeness also has its uses, and as Mikal Gilmore shows,
the power to haunt. And, for me, a narrative form that resisted conclusions was
perfect for a story about an unsolved murder.
Over the next decade, I made
headway on my story collection and I continued to write personal essays, the
vast majority of which maintained the same pseudo-academic stance as my first.
Like the essays I read, my essays were largely organized around themes. I mused,
for example, on the connections between my mother’s recurring battles with
retinal detachments and her divorce from my father, on hunger and poverty, on
my lifelong love affair with swimming, on anxiety and madness and my wife’s job
as a hospital social worker. Each essay was rooted in experience, and therefore
grounded in time and space, but because each essay was discreet and
self-contained, I believed I was freed from connecting one to another. I told
friends I was writing an essay collection—a
book of nonfiction similar in structure to a story collection. Thematically
overlapping but ultimately kaleidoscopic, with wide gaps of unaccounted for
time between one narrative and another. I’d titled the collection Rough Water, and in my mind, the book’s
structure was like a chain of lakes, the small bodies of waters connecting one
to another but the coastline left jagged and unmapped.
And I did my best to use the
gaps in the story to my advantage, specifically to evade and deflect my most
invasive and risky material. I was afraid, for example, to openly tell the story
of how I’d been pulled in by my stepmother’s evangelical Christianity in the
months following the murders. Instead I attempted to slyly reveal myself as an
erstwhile evangelical within an essay about proselytizing on college campuses.
It was an essay that explored what I originally termed “the missionary
impulse”—which in hindsight sounds a lot more sexual than I ever intended. I recognized
that the story had enough heat to warrant my telling it, but I was nevertheless
intent on tiptoeing gingerly around the scenes that made me uncomfortable.
When The End of the Straight and Narrow appeared in print in 2008, I had
about two-thirds of the essay collection complete, and some of the essays were
starting to get some attention. The title essay, “Rough Water,” made it into The Best American Sports Writing
anthology, which drew the eye of several agents. I signed on with one of them
who promptly told me the book would have a better chance at finding a publisher
if I could nudge it in the direction of memoir. “You know,” she said, “more
story, less thinking.” But she also
said the book was close to being finished and that if I could just put the
pieces into chronological order, we’d be good to go.
About half the stories in
The End of the Straight and Narrow
are linked, and after the book appeared a number of people suggested they could
have been a novel. So, I’d come to believe that the relationship between essays
and memoirs was analogous to the relationship between short stories and novels.
If novels were merely a bunch of short stories with a recurring cast of
characters, memoirs were merely a bunch of shorter essays in chronological
order. As long as I started the book with the essay that occurred first in time
and was a little older in the next, all would be well. It sounded so easy.“ It
shouldn’t take you very long,” my agent said. Eager to see the book finished
and into print, I believed her.
When I went back to
rearrange the book into something more memoir-like, I made an important—and devastating—discovery.
Essays are not simply short memoirs. If the essay tentatively poses partial
opinions, the memoir works to draw more definite conclusions. The experiences
and scenes included in a memoir are there because they point to a moral, an enlightened
awareness, a sense of “what it all means.” The memoir is the antithesis of
tentative. Dante scholar John Freccero provides what is perhaps the most
elegantly succinct definition of a memoir I know: “I am I, but I was not always
so.” An autobiography, Freccero says, is “the story of how the self that was
becomes the self that is.”
You can practically hear
the hinge at the center of the phrase, “I am I, but I was not always so”—the
way it turns on the word “but.” Thus conversion is the master trope of
memoir—an account of the author’s life leading up to a cataclysmic
transformation, and the extenuating consequences of having made the change. And
conversion doesn’t necessarily mean religion. Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life turns on his becoming
the stepson of an abusive drunkard; Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum turns on the author’s awareness that he’s gay. Show me
a memoir and I’ll show you a conversion story.
It’s ironic that I would
resist such a structure, given the very literal conversions going on inside my
book. But for a long time I did resist it. I’d written the story of the
murders, as well as all the essays in the book, as individual pieces separate
from one another. It seemed artificial to force connections between the
different narratives, and I didn’t like the idea of opening my life so completely
to public scrutiny. On the other hand, the more I worked at converting the book
from an essay collection to a memoir, the more I saw that it had exhibited
memoir tendencies all along. My chronology had gaps, but it was nevertheless
recognizable. The themes I once believed were separate and varied were actually
points in a larger constellation, all orbiting around the original trauma of
the murders and my later attempt to “solve” the crime by adhering to my
stepmother’s eccentric and radical faith. A story was there; I’d just been
afraid to tell it.
I’d tried for years to
contain to the story of murders solely within the first essay, just as I tried
to contain my weird religious history within a meditation on American culture. It
became apparent that if was going to pull off the book, I was going to have to
narrate the harder truths about myself. The struggle was both formal and
personal, for I had to align seemingly unrelated scenes into a larger, coherent
trajectory and I had to risk looking like a freak. I pulled the book back to
its studs and started over from the beginning, this time removing the more
abstract meditations and including all the scenes and experiences that I’d once
avoided.
I
make sure I'm clear: I thought I had a finished book. I had an agent.
An editor had liked a lot of it before he decided to decline the manuscript. And I
started over from the beginning and wrote it all over again.
The revision was painstaking and
difficult: cutting away the essayistic observations felt like cutting out a
piece of my heart. Replacing them with visceral scenes from my private life
felt like taking off my clothes in public. And breaking apart a finished essay
and scattering the pieces across a larger canvas was simply a trial. I often felt, as I told friends, like I was trying to turn a cat into a dog. If I somehow managed to pull it off, it'd be a miracle. If not, I'd end up with a cat that barked, sort of.
In time, the memoir found
its way, and in an ironic reversal, it was during the revision process that I
finally realized, in a way I’d never been able to admit in the past, that the
murders had never stopped intriguing and terrifying me, and that the utter
dearth of answers in the wake of the crime had informed my life ever since. The
process of converting the book from an essay collection to a memoir had
revealed me to myself. Forcing my story into a coherent trajectory had shown me
that my trajectory as a human being was actually coherent. In a final stroke,
this newfound coherence even renamed the book itself. The image of a door in
the ocean—which I use in the second chapter as a metaphor for my desire to
escape the legacy of the murders—started to recur and echo throughout later
chapters. I was afraid to change the title until the day I blithely mentioned
it to my editor. He said, “Oh my God, that’s it!”
Having written the book
first as an essay collection and then as a memoir, I came to understand that
though the essay and memoir are antithetical forms, they are not mutually
exclusive. Rather, they maintain a tension, a dual gravitational pull. One of
my favorite aspects of nonfiction—be it essay or memoir—is its ability to move
between personal narrative and philosophical meditation, to show as well as to tell. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, for
example, explicitly moves between
scene and exposition, as does Shot in the
Heart, Mikal Gilmore’s memoir about his brother. Both books might be seen
as essays disguised as memoirs. On the other side of the spectrum, it’s
possible to read Philip Lopate’s essay collection, A Portrait of My Body, as a kind of fractured memoir. Over the
course of the book, Lopate meanders his way toward family life, slowly saying
goodbye to bachelorhood, to traveling alone, to bad affairs, to going to the
movies, to walking around Greenwich Village, and until, at the end, he marries
and soon thereafter welcomes the birth of his daughter. My work as a nonfiction
writer resides at the fault line of that tension, and A Door in the Ocean, though very much a memoir, retains many of its
original essayistic impulses. Some of the meditations live on as
micro-observations appended to scenes, others as deliberate departures from the
story’s action, moments when the camera pans out to allow the narrator to muse,
to think, and to wonder.
*
David
McGlynn is the author of the memoir A
Door in the Ocean, which won the Kenneth Kingery / August Derleth
Nonfiction Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and was reviewed
on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. His story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, appeared in 2008 and won
the Utah Book Award for fiction. His other work has appeared in The Huffington
Post, Best American Sports Writing, Men's Health, Swimmer, The Morning News,
and in numerous literary journals. He teaches at Lawrence University in
Wisconsin.
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