Ways of Telling a Life-Story

We live in a golden age of memoir. While we often like our fiction, in this postmodern age, to explore the outer boundaries of the imagination (including alternative histories and magical-realist fables), we also crave the weight and heft of real life. Well-written memoirs fill that spot perfectly. So it’s no accident that two of the books most moving to my book group in the past couple of years were Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Tara Westover’s Educated. Obama’s memoir won us by the force of her personality and the warmth of her voice, Westover’s by her honesty and the drama of her story. She describes growing up in a tight-knit, rural family dominated by charismatic, bipolar, fundamentalist Mormon men. She describes her struggles to separate from the dangerous craziness of her family while also continuing to love them. It moved me, and lots of others—enough to keep it on bestseller lists for months on end.

Memoir is so deeply connected to who we are now that it crops up everywhere these days—and in all sorts of forms. People craft key episodes of their lives into funny, sweet, heartbreaking performance pieces for The Moth Radio Hour. They record StoryCorps segments with their families. And my Learning in Retirement group has not one but two sections of a class called “Writing to Remember.”

Most of us would like to reflect on the key decisions and experiences of our lives, as well as to leave stories for our children and grandchildren. But it’s daunting to look back on a long life and not know where to start. It’s even more daunting to try to commit one’s memories to paper. Many of us find, on re-reading them a day later, that the tales we’ve penned are as dry and thin as the paper they’re written on. (The memories are so vivid. What happens when one writes them down?) That’s one reason StoryWorth worked so nicely for me. Each question was small, ranging from “Do you have a motto that guides you in life?” to “What were your grandparents like?” to “Who was your best boss?” I could answer one in an hour and move on to something else. I could attach photos. If I wanted to change my answer or expand it later, I could do that, too.

But there are also less straightforward, more playful ways to tell our life stories.

We tend to think of autobiography as beginning in the Renaissance, with the rise of humanism and individualism. These narratives embody the “great man” school of autobiography, the tale of “how I rose to fame and power”—useful to historians, but sometimes dry to those of us who are not policy wonks. (Parts of former President Obama’s new book are in that mode.) But before the Renaissance, the Middle Ages produced some quirky forms of personal storytelling, too. And those first-person narratives of the pre-modern period just happened to be my academic specialty. I loved their strangeness.

Part of their strange appeal was that they worked through allegory. The very term “allegory” sounds dull and wooden to our ears–and sometimes it is–but it just means “a metaphor extended into narrative.” Those metaphors can lend a universality to a story–even an autobiographical story. They can give it archetypal resonance.

Two metaphors dominated these peculiar forms of memoir: the Conversation and the Journey.

The Conversation took off with Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Poor Boethius was a prominent Roman who lived a life of high-ranking service to the Empire and then fell from grace suddenly in 524. In prison, knowing that the Emperor was likely to execute him at any moment, he wrote a dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy. As he weeps over his fate, she appears in his cell and slowly talks him out of his resentment and his fear. (Boethius was right about the danger he was in: Theodoric had him executed later that year.) Writing the Consolation allowed him to defend his reputation, no doubt, but it reads to our eyes like a very effective therapy session. 

[From a fifteen-century illumination of The Consolation. What better to carry pens in? It’s from Fine Art America.]

I loved it The Consolation of Philosophy moment I read it. Other people felt the same way: Boethius had plenty of imitators through the Middle Ages. To me, the most astonishing example is Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies (1405)—a feminist version of The Conversation. (Feminist! In 1405! Who would have guessed such a thing was even possible?) Christine was well educated by her father, an Italian who served as court astrologer to King Charles VI of France. In the opening episode, she shows herself reading account after account of women’s fickleness, wickedness, and stupidity. Under the weight of all those authorities, with their relentless condemnations of women, Christine sinks into a chair, crushed with despair. Then three ladies appear–Reason, Rightness, and Justice. Like older sisters or mentors, they give Christine a pep-talk, plus the strength and arguments to contradict those authorities. Together they build a fortress to protect and defend women.

To someone like me, who has journaled herself out of depression and anxiety for years, Boethius’ model feels familiar. It feels wise. To this day, I use a version of it to dispute the negative, catastrophic thoughts that are my initial reaction to almost anything. Here’s the exercise, adapted equally from Boethius and research in Positive Psychology. First I write down exactly what I feel in the phrases I’ve been using about myself (I will never cook a decent meal, I will never appear poised, I’m a trivial and silly person). Once I’ve stated my thoughts in the form I actually feel them, and once I’ve read back over what I wrote down, then I can see the exaggerations and absurdities. (Of course I’ve cooked some adequate meals in my time, even a few good ones. I can even look and sound poised for short periods of time. When I don’t, who cares? Being easily flustered doesn’t damage my life. And neither does some silliness, which helps me move forward despite my fearfulness.)

It may sound like this process is just a matter of talking reason to myself. But that’s not the way it works. Telling myself calmly and rationally that I have no grounds for these negative or catastrophic thoughts never does the trick. (Maybe it feels too much like self-scolding, Maybe I just dismiss it as naïve.) It has to be a conversation with myself. I have to whine first. Or, to put it a kinder way, I first have to feel—and thereby respect—my actual feelings. Then, and only then, can Lady Philosophy remind me of what I already know. Only after I voice my overstated fears and fantasies can they be put into perspective.

So the Conversation model of autobiography may be pre-modern, but it still has powerful possibilities in the postmodern world. Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll talk about an even more resonant metaphor for narrating a life—the Journey. We know it best through Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, popularized by the original Star Wars trilogy. But it was first given vivid, dramatic, archetypal form as a personal and autobiographical story when Dante Aligheri made himself the protagonist of his own journey in Divine Comedy.