What is memoir? What isn’t memoir? Sometimes (and in my case, more often than not), the memoirist can’t tell until she steps back and reads the words she’s written.

As most of you know, I’ve been working on a memoir entitled Black Rectangles for nearly thirty years, ever since I wrote the story, “Black Rectangles” in the Fall of 1989.  After my mother died this past January, I decided to tackle a story about my father who seldom appears in any of the stories I’ve written so far. The reason for this is obvious: I don’t know him very well. Why? Perhaps writing a story about him would tell me why. The working title of the story is, “Granite State.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Marking the boundary of our backyard and two feet from a small birch tree was a salmon-and-gray-flecked granite boulder the size of the compact refrigerator in our family’s Holiday Rambler camper.  No one knew how it got there, and as hard as I pushed my right foot against the birch tree, the boulder at my back, it never budged. It was unyielding.

Nearly every Sunday afternoon – at halftime of the 1 p.m. televised NFL football game — my father would saunter outside, sit on it for about 15 minutes – his back to the house — and then disappear into the woods. He seemed about as wide as the boulder and from the upstairs dining room window — thanks to his crew cut — looked like a giant pineapple with a sheared-off crown.

Sometimes I wasn’t the only one watching my father. Cupping a mug of steaming Lipton tea, my mother would watch from the kitchen sink window. She told us that he spent so much time sitting on that boulder that he must be incubating something. I couldn’t imagine my father incubating and then hatching any living thing larger than the scores of guppies that he tended to in his basement aquarium.

I once asked my oldest sister if she remembered that boulder and how much time our father spent sitting on it. “Sure I do,” she replied. “He sat on it at the dinner table, too.”

Perhaps my father knew he just wasn’t cut out for parenting so that’s why, without telling any one, he left the house and retreated to that boulder and then to the woods.  He knew his way around the woods but seldom around his wife and daughters.

This story starts out as strong memoir writing because the reader is not just seeing what the writer is seeing, but also what the writer is feeling — “Perhaps my father knew he just wasn’t cut out for parenting,” etc. The reader has some empathy, compassion and understanding for the writer because she is making herself vulnerable. She is asking a universal question: Who is my father? This is memoir.

But in the next page or two, the story sputters into what Beth Kephart describes in Handling the Truth as “a chronological, thematically tone-deaf recitation of everything remembered,” i.e. what memoir isn’t. Here’s an excerpt from the same story about my father:

My father’s primary parenting duties were exercised on weekday mornings when he woke us up to get ready for school while he made breakfast. Most of the time, he prepared breakfast wearing an old, unbuttoned, short-sleeve work shirt and the blue-and-gray polka-dotted boxers he slept in. If he accidentally slept through the alarm, he would simply set out the Cheerios, Wheaties and Corn Flakes boxes, and spoon Tang into juice glasses and Ovaltine into mugs. Most of the time, however, he attempted to concoct something with eggs. Because he sold feed to farmers, including chicken feed, he often came home with one or two dozen eggs, and eggs became his go-to breakfast. Unless he added them to pancake mix, however, he always botched them, frying or boiling them too long or not long enough.

We always kept our fingers crossed for scrambled eggs with the added ingredient of only grated cheddar cheese and not the leftovers from the previous night’s supper because they inevitably made it into the scrambled eggs the next morning.  Leftover succotash? Macaroni and cheese?  Corn casserole? Liver and onions?  My father tossed most any leftovers into the skillet, mixed them with the eggs and then heaped the mess onto a slice of Scrapple. Next, he’d call us to the table to eat so he could get ready for work. My mother usually walked into the kitchen shortly after we heard him backing the car out of the driveway.

Where is the writer in this excerpt? What is she feeling?  Kephart would describe this excerpt as, “a stew of information and facts”; “a recitation of events” rather that what I have learned. Reading this breakfast excerpt is like someone playing one note on the piano being over and over and over again. By contrast, the opening paragraphs of the story hit several notes.

Do you see the difference? Why did my father become more one-dimensional as I wrote this story?  Who was I protecting? The father I still don’t know or the daughter who will probably never know him? Most importantly, how and where do I get the courage to go back in and make myself vulnerable — not just to the world but also to myself?

There is only one way, of course — to continue writing. And as William Styron once said, “Let’s face it, writing is hell.”