literary commentary & stories for remembrance

Thinking back on many of those journal entries I made in early recovery, I recalled something Ernest Hemingway once wrote:

“If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

I can relate. During that period I was strenuously dealing with things, and it just felt better to write down what I was doing, and why.

But writing has been second nature to me as long as I can remember. So I was not always getting rid of things so much as either recording them or celebrating them.

This memoir-in-progress that I’m writing about here – it’s a little bit of all three: getting rid of,  recording and celebrating.

When I started, one of my writing coaches suggested I go to Barnes & Noble and survey the biography section. She suggested I pick some memoirs, which are scattered about in that section, and sort-of scan through some, read the ones I liked and thereby get a feel for the genre.

This I did. In B&N and Borders and some Indies, you can scan a book pretty quickly while having a mocha. You can quickly get an idea about whether or not you should buy it, go to the local library and check it out or forget it.

I learned that when it came to recovery memoirs, there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of authors getting rid of things.

We would call them “drunk-o-logs.” I found them largely boring and many poorly written.

The memoirs I loved, though, were those that reached for the uplifting in life – books that took us to new levels, even through bad situations, or memoirs that were simply humorous or satirical as they dealt with the tribulations of life.

Speaking of which, one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time was The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. It’s a memoir about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, where Bryson’s dad was a long-time award-winning sports writer for the Des Moines Register, one of the best mid-size- city newspapers in the country. The Life and Times lives up to its cover-flap billing – that it can leave folks rolling on the floor in laughter.

It’s a fun read, but it also has a message for contemporary America. And that is that we’ve lost a lot in the last half century or so. What was possible, and what kids had the freedom to do then seem fast-fading memories, as I observe some kids today grow pale and flabby spending their free time  in front of digital devices.

And when I know that today my grandchildren cannot leave the house after wolfing down breakfast and spend the whole day playing outside, exploring the woods, riding bikes, playing impromptu baseball games in the schoolyard, not to return home until nearly dark, and not leave mothers hand-wringing worried. They can’t do that today. But Bill Bryson – and I – did.

So memoir can be uplifting with a backstory that’s a message to ponder.

That’s the kind I found out I liked.

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While I’m at it, here are some tidbits about writing I’ve journaled over time:

 “A few hints as to literary craftsmanship may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost: get writing! – Samuel Eliot Morison

“Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.” – T.S. Eliot

“I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque…”  — Flannery O’Connor