Welcome back. A good memoir doesn't just tell a tale. It grapples with philosophical problems. So how does a writer introduce her pet concepts or questions into her story? What is the reciprocal relationship between intellectual or moral questions and plot? This week, we will look at the way a writer's point is not simply the conclusion of a story, it is the story's spine. Knowing your point or points, and weaving them throughout your story is a way to keep the fabric of the whole thing strong and unified. When I wrote my memoir, the thing that told me "this can be done. I have a book here", is not that a lot of bad things happened to me all at once in a fairly dramatic fashion. That's a story, but it's not a point. I couldn't have written my story if I didn't have an idea, a point, that drew everything together. The point in my case was that we live in a world where we have control of so much. We can take pictures without any film on these handheld computers that tells us how to get where we're going, and who Franz Ferdinand was, and the dates of World War II, and the right way to get out a chocolate stain, and allow us to communicate with our friends and family on the other side of the world with the push of a button as if they were in the next room. All of that was impossible and non-existent in the world I was born into. And so much else besides technology has changed so quickly. In my lifetime here in the United States, we've had the women's movement, and the first black president, and the advent of gay marriage, and all of these progressive change that seemed impossible before it happened. So, the idea of my book was that all of that changed suggests that the rules do not apply, which was the title of my memoir. That anything can be overturned or controlled if you try hard enough, but the human body doesn't play by those rules. Mother nature always has the last word. So, my story of loss is also the story of how I became aware of what I just told you. How I was liberated from my illusion of control, to some extent. If I just had the story of losing my son, and my spouse, and my house, it wouldn't have worked for me as a book because that's just a tale of woe. That's just I'm really sad because I lost all this. I needed it to mean something. So that the idea, the meaning, was the spine of my story. The meaning held it together and made it about something bigger than just me. Whatever I was writing about, whether it was a scene from my childhood, or the first day of my job, or the really bad stuff, all the laws I just mentioned, whatever I was writing it had to have some strong connection to that spine of meaning in order to be one coherent entity, one book. Now, in a personal essay, knowing your point is of course essential because the thing that makes an essay an essay is that it makes a statement, or poses a question. In Roger Angel's beautiful first-person piece, This Old Man, we learn many things. The details of his aches and pains. The deep sorrow of losing his wife and the way he still hears her voice, and feels her presence throughout his day. What he calls the oceanic force and mystery of losing his daughter to suicide. All of these things come together to make the point of the piece, which I think he articulates very clearly in this passage I'm going to read to you. He writes, "We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It's no wonder we're a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn't bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming." Isn't that beautiful? It really is his point. He is surprised to find that the accruing weight of these departures doesn't bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. Notice that he uses the word 'gleaming'. The connotations of that word gleaming are like waves gleaming in the sun, or diamonds gleaming on the Queen's jewelry. Beautiful things. The pain of loss he suggests without word choice is not only agonizing and nearly unbearable, it is also in its own way radiant. Because it gives us our humanity. Life would not be as precious as it is, if it were not tenuous. It doesn't feel good when the distant pain of loss gleams stubbornly on your emotional horizon. Anyone who has ever lost someone she loves knows that pain is stubborn and never really goes away and it feels absolutely awful, but it gleams. In its way, it's beautiful. Because in order to really grieve someone's departure, you must have loved him. Grief is predicated on love, and love gleams. Roger Angel says all of that without saying it just threw his word choice. That's the work of a master. He's also a master of balancing the profound with the humorous, the dark with the light. He starts that paragraph about grief with the sentence, "we geezers carry around a bulging directory of dead people". We geezers, I mean, it's such a charming way to start a paragraph that ends with this incredibly painful truth about being a human, and suffering the death of loved ones. And none of these insights, jokes, or beautiful images are in the piece just for fun, or just to show off. They all contribute to his point. All of his techniques in that piece add up to a unified whole, and that's what you want.
