Post #17 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
Phyllis Helene Mattson tells the engrossing story of a childhood spent initially with an aunt and then in foster homes and orphanages in San Francisco where her mother managed to send her in 1940, in the final window of opportunity for escaping the Nazi occupation of Vienna. Her mother, never able to secure the necessary papers that would allow her out of Austria, worked as forced labor and was eventually killed by the Germans. Mattson’s father, thrown out of Vienna late in 1939 by the Germans, then spent the war in an Australian internment camp as a prisoner of war once England, his temporary home, declared war on Germany.
Caught in the middle of this tragedy, Mattson became the primary link for the scattered family from the time she was ten until her father came to the US when she was seventeen. She used the treasure trove of letters, long stored in a box in the garage, to help tell her story, to help her add richness of detail in the writing of her memoir.
There is much to be learned about writing a memoir from reading Mattson’s story. Do you have documents or records that may shed light on your story? How might you use them? What parts do you select to quote? How much do they just become background for you?
Mattson writes, “As I told my story, I told it as through it happened to another child, factually without emotion, a way to distance myself from the tragedy that I had experienced…” How close or how distant do you need to be from your story in order to tell it? Sometimes events never lose their personal edge, even when time might seem to have smoothed the edge. There is always a way to tell your story even if you need to manage it as Mattson did.
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