Post #217 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Matilda Butler
Memoirs at the Movies
By Pamela Jane
Peggy Sue Contemplates the Future
It’s summer – the season for road trips, beach trips, and cooling off at the movies – and the perfect time for celebrating “memoir movies.” (I’m using this term loosely to mean any film that plays with time, either by employing a time-travel paradox, (or simply reminiscing about the past.)
Following are my five favorite memoir-movies, films that hold up time after time. For some reason, all except one was made in the 1980s—that must have been an exceptionally good decade for memoir-movies! All five, however, are readily available on DVD or on-line.
1. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
This is a classic memoir movie in which Peggy Sue (played by Kathleen Turner) is hurtled back in time after attending her 25th high school reunion. Throughout the film, she remains an adult mentally, while inhabiting (or reinhabiting) her teenage world. Like many memoir writers, she reflects, “…if I knew then what I know now…l’d do a lot of things differently.” The movie is delicious fun, in part because almost everything Peggy Sue experiences when she goes back to high school days is something that could have happened the “first” time around. For instance, why is she acting so confused and mixed up all of a sudden, her parents wonder. Because she’s a teenager, of course!
2. Big (1988)
The storyline of Big is the mirror image of Peggy Sue. In the film, 12-year old Josh Baskin is magically transformed into a 30-year old man, with his adolescent consciousness intact. It’s a reverse memoir, in a sense – a leap forward – but the ending is both wistful and nostalgic.
3. Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987)
A vividly-evoked memory of childhood narrated by the adult (Woody, playing Joe), Radio Days is beautifully evocative. Even the photography reflects the golden luminous light of memory. The film, which is both hilarious and poignant, recreates the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the narrative and images are filled with a haunting sadness for a past era that is slowly fading, along with the voices on the radio who helped define it.
4. I Remember Mama (1948)
"I Remember Mama"
This is another movie that employs the classic memoir structure, that of a young woman, Katrin, remembering and recreating her childhood growing up in San Francisco in 1910. The TV series of the same name was a spin-off of the movie, and a favorite program of mine when I was a little girl. It was this series that gave me the idea that ordinary life could be shaped into a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and created my association of attics and upstairs rooms with imagination, memory and reflection.
The movie, by the way, is an adaptation of Kathryn Forbes’ novel Mama’s Bank Account, which was loosely based on her childhood.
5. Somewhere in Time (1980)
This movie, which opens in the 1970s, features a successful playwright, Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) who wills himself back to 1912 to reunite with his lost love whom he met briefly as an old lady in 1972, when she thrust an old pocket watch into his hand, imploring him to “Come back to me.”
"Somewhere in Time"
Collier’s return to 1912 is tenuous, however and the spell is broken when he inadvertently unearths a 1979 penny from the pocket of his old-fashioned suit. Once again he is hurtled through time, back to the present. (Once, after an argument with my husband, I drew a big picture of a penny with the date 2025 and flashed it in front of him. Fortunately he got the joke – and remained securely in present-day time.)
The continued popularity and prevalence of memoir movies illustrates to us that the genre endures, which is good news!
Do you have a favorite memoir movie? Please share it with us!
Memoir Prompt
And while you are thinking about your favorite memoir movie, consider using this writing prompt.
1. Write the name of a movie you have enjoyed that was similar to a memoir in that it showed a person reflecting on their past life.
2. In two to three sentences, summarize the plot.
3. Write the structure of the story.
4. What worked well about the story structure? Does the movie’s structure give you fresh ideas for how you might structure your own life story?
5. And now, just to get your creative juices flowing, remember when you saw the movie. Who were you with? What were you wearing? Did you see the movie at a theater or at home? Is there the scent of hot buttered popcorn in the air? Are you sharing the popcorn or eating it on your own? Write a small story, a few hundred words, about seeing this movie.
More About Pamela
Pamela Jane is the author of over twenty-five children’s books published by Houghton Mifflin, Atheneum, Simon & Schuster, Harper, and others. Her new children’s book, Little Elfie One, illustrated by NY Times best-selling illustrator, Jane Manning, will be out from Harper in 2015. Her book (for adults) Pride and Prejudice and Kitties: A Cat-Lover’s Romp Through Jane Austen Classic was featured in “The Wall Street Journal,” The Huffington Post, and BBC America, among other places.
Pamela’s own memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer’s Story, will be published in 2016. For more information, visit her at Pamelajane.com or Prideandprejudiceandkitties.com.
Pamela is a writer, coach, editor, and co-founder of First Editing Service for womensmemoirs.com.
Pamela and I recently launched an unusual editing service. We edit the FIRST or FIRST 10 pages of your memoir with the conviction that practicing what you are doing wrong just leads to bad practice. So let us catch problems that occur in your first one page (or ten pages) and we’ll give you a roadmap that will help you navigate the rest of your journey more smoothly.
We put you on the right path, right away.
To learn more about this innovative service, click here now.
Here’s what one client wrote Pamela:
I wanted to thank you for your insightful editing comments on the first page of my memoir along with the synopsis. … In terms of the memoir page, your comments actually solved a dilemma for me as I have toyed with the beginning for a while. I like the solution you offered and made the change you recommended in the order of the paragraphs and presto, problem solved! So thanks so much! M.G-W.
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Problem #1. Writers get overly fond of metaphors, even failing to notice when they get tangled up with each other.
Pamela catches this in the FIRST 1 or 10 PAGES, and puts you on the right road.
Problem #2. Writers want to start at the beginning, even when that part doesn’t engage the reader. Back story can always come later, but we fail to notice.
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Learn more about EIGHT other problems that Pamela catches. Plus check out our FIRST EDITING SERVICE [click here] and see if it is right for you.
Here’s what another client wrote Pamela recently:
I want to thank you for your brilliant comments on my manuscript. I know that I am, at times, too close to the story and can lose the perspective of the reader. After all, he or she was not along for the journey! –C.L.
