Post #50 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
When is a memoir a memoir? When is an autobiography an autobiography? How can you tell the difference? This week’s Book Rave gives us an opportunity to consider these questions, hopefully in a way that provides a light to guide you along the journey of discovering your life story through writing.
Before exploring the memoir versus autobiography aspect of The Dr. Erica Miller Story: From Trauma to Triumph, let’s look at the opening to her book. For almost two years, we’ve interviewed authors, blogged on Story Circle Network (SCN), and taught classes about effective ways to hook your readers at the very beginning. During that time, we’ve written 17 blogs for SCN and the most recent one, called The End of Beginnings, provides easy links to the 10 short focused interviews with memoir authors and eight long interviews that we’ve made available on our website. We’ve even created a five-minute video about openings based on the sage advice of William Zinsser in his best-selling book, On Writing Well.
An Exemplary Memoir Opening
In case you didn’t get the point, we think openings are critical. You have to deliver with solid content in the remainder of the memoir, but you’ll never get your book read (not even by family members), if it doesn’t seem interesting from the first word. What did author Erica Miller do that passes this “I’m hooked” test?
Let’s look at her Introduction. These are the elements that make it zing for me:
Writing an Effective Memoir Opening
1. Time and place with action. Miller states the time 5:30 AM, December 30, 2005 as the first line of the introduction. This might not particularly grab me, but it centers me so that I know when something is happening. Then she begins:
“I jump out of bed, not sure if I am awake or in a nightmare.” At this point I know that this is a recent event and that something has caused her to jump out of bed.
2. Sensory information with more action. Miller writes: “The noise is deafening–explosions, thick smoke, the rattling of fire raging mercilessly and engulfing my universe.” By my quick count, I find the author has used sight, sound, smell, and touch in the three page Introduction.
3. Foreshadowing. An effective opening will foreshadow the rest of the story. Miller says, “In an instant I’m back in the war zone of my youth.” Part I of her book describes her childhood as a concentration camp prisoner in Europe and in this introduction she has linked the present with part of her past.
4. Dialogue. Miller includes both internal dialogue (“‘Run, run for your life. Get out.'”) and external dialogue (“‘Jerry, wake up! Wake up, we have to get out of here. Hurry.'”) I’m there with her in the burning house and want to help her make Jerry move more quickly. The dialogue has that kind of urgency to it.
5. Shared emotional state. Miller tells the story not from a detached distance but as the woman whose “breath is shallow … heart beating fast.” My heart begins to pump along with hers. She doesn’t have to tell us she is frightened. The physical description of the effects of the emotion lets me see her reaction to the fire.
6. Character description. Although the weakest of the opener tools, Miller begins to let me see her husband, even thought I don’t yet have a sense of her. It is just an inking, but it helps to make me feel that the action is happening to three-dimensional characters. She writes: “It seems it takes [Jerry] forever to get out of our massive king-size bed. He looks bewildered, clumsy, searching for his shirt and slippers. He is so slow! … Barefoot and half naked, we stumble toward the front of the house …
Thanks to one brief, but gripping introduction, I’m eager to read more.
Memoir versus Autobiography
Well back to the notion of memoir versus autobiography. Memoir, as we know, is usually defined as a slice of life while autobiography is an accounting of an entire life, or at least a life to date. Miller’s story extends across the years 1933-present. So in a way, it looks more like an autobiography. However, she has selected a few specific events and told her story through them in a three part sequence: Rumania (1933-1949), Israel (1949-1958), and America (1958-present). As a story of “trauma to triumph,” she needed to cover a large number of years. However, by staying true to the thread of her story, she easily moves us forward along with her through the years.
If you find there is a lot of your life you want to cover, you need to be willing to carefully select the scenes and elements that tell an integrated story that maintains forward movement.
