Post #74 – Women’s Memoirs, Author Conversations – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Last week, memoir author Betty Auchard shared with us some of her experiences in writing her newest memoir: Home for the Friendless: Finding Hope, Love, and Family
[If you missed last week’s interview, here’s the link.]
Women’s Memoirs: Question #3. You’ve said a little about how going back into the old memories caused you to change your perspective on that time. I wonder if you would share with our readers any other changes you notice now in looking back on your multi-year writing experience?
Betty Auchard: Ah yes. I always felt that my siblings and I had made successful lives for ourselves in spite of our parents. By the end of the book I knew that my creative nature, personality and outlook are because of our parents and the unconventional way my family lived.
Bruce also taught me how to change my voice when narrating my very young stories. I’m not talking about baby talk but just a manner in which a young child phrases sentences; no compound sentences or big words. From a child’s point of view, I was a narrator even though an unreliable one sometimes. Readers have noticed that child-voice technique more than anything else. Bruce also stressed the importance of getting inside of the heads of all of my family characters so they could come to life on paper. It was such hard work.
It may interest your readers to know that I found I made progress when I left home and wrote in a hotel room with no interruption. That’s when I understood what “getting in the zone” meant, so I fled to a hotel more than once.
Deeper intimacy with my family characters allowed me to feel things the way they felt them. I sometimes thought of my talented mother as kind of crazy, but I developed empathy for her and the hardships she had to bear. Her behavior was rarely steady but varied with her mood swings. Mom might have been bi-polar, though that word hadn’t yet been invented. While I was writing about my grumpy grandmother, I could feel why she was harsh and cold when she got tired of rescuing us. Writing about everyone made me remember and appreciate how often my aunts, uncles, and grandparents jumped in to help take care of us whenever our parents split up. Mom and Dad were married and divorced to and from each other three times trying to make it work. Whenever we were all happily together they were knocking themselves out trying to be a “normal” family but it never lasted.
As adults my siblings and I realized that we simply adjusted to disruptions, so I have now redefined the word, “normal.”
Women’s Memoirs: Question #4. Now that you have this memoir finished, are you starting to think about a third one? You know, we’re never too old to write.
Betty Auchard:I wish your readers could see me sitting here laughing. I was old when I started writing. My first book was published when I was 75 and the second one when I had just turned 80. Yes, I’m still writing like mad and have even enrolled in a memoir class again with Ann Thompson, a teacher I had in 2001. I will always be a student and have no plans to publish another book, though I’m not embarrassed to say that I dearly love my two books.
But I must write more stories about my mother because they broke the mold when she was created. I could no doubt write a whole book about Mom because she was wacky but wonderful. I couldn’t appreciate her uniqueness when I was young because I was always embarrassed by her bohemian nature.
I also want to write about two other experiences in my life. I even have titles for them and I’m working on those stories in my memoir class. I must tell you what they’re about. One title is “Living with 12 Men” when I lived in a boys’ dorm as a newlywed. My husband was their supervisor and youngest person on the faculty in a small church college in York, Nebraska. The other story is titled “My Gin and Tonic Period” about teaching art in a junior high school when I was menopausal. Middle school and menopause do not mix. They are both fun stories to remember and write, but my whole life is so chuck full of stories that I’ll never get them all written. I keep lists of all the subjects that I would love to preserve, so maybe just the lists could be published. The titles are titillating such as “Breast feeding when I had no nipples.” I’m also writing new short stories and illustrating them for my story blog every three weeks. If you are interested, you can enjoy them by subscribing at www.bettyauchard.com/blog
Women’s Memoirs: Question #5.Betty, Women’s Memoirs would like to thank you for your fresh and open discussion of these issues. Finally, do you have any advice for women who are just now starting to work on a memoir?
Betty Auchard:Yes, I really do. I feel compelled to share with others that we are all living history and unique in our experiences. We have stories to tell and only we can tell them. When we’re gone our stories go with us. One might say, “But I’m not a writer.” Any woman I’ve ever met has told stories that are just wonderful. If you can talk you can write. Don’t worry about punctuation or about saying it in a literary manner.
Just talk to paper the way you talk to your best friend. Pretend you’re writing a letter to someone you’re close to. That method still helps me. When I want to get a good tale written, it’s more fun to write it to my cousin, Don, in Martelle, Iowa. Don is an authority on Laura Ingalls Wilder and children’s literature from the 30s and 40s. I start with “Dear Don, you simply will not believe what happened yesterday and I can’t wait to tell you about it because you’ll drop your jaw and wish that you’d seen it yourself.” Then the story flows forth full of life because I really want to get Don’s attention.
Also, I believe you should not feel compelled to write an outline in order to get organized before starting. It is restricting. If you’re not sure where to start, carry a little purse tablet with you and notice that when you’re sharing experiences with others that their stories trigger your stories. Stories beget stories, so jot down only a few words in your teeny tablet to jog your memory later. One of my favorite notes to myself was “write about the dog falling into the outhouse on Aunt Dee’s farm.” That outrageous experience made it to print on page 110 in The Home for the Friendless.
One more thing: don’t write to get published. Write because you are dying to preserve stories that will keep you alive after you’re not. Leaving our stories behind is another form of life after death. I’m not ready to go yet so I’ve got to keep writing like there’s no tomorrow.
Betty Auchard’s Home for the Friendless is also available as a Kindle book.
