The Book I've Been Waiting For

Last week, I received and devoured Sue William Silverman's new Fearless Confessions:  A Writer's Guide to Memoir (U of Georgia, 2009).  And gentle readers, I have to tell you:  This is the teaching text I have been waiting for.

It's terrific.  It's smart, practical, honest, and candid, and it's clearly the product of Silverman's long experience as both writer and editor.  (She has two riveting memoirs in print, and she's the associate editor of Fourth Genre, one of the top two journals that publish creative nonfiction exclusively, and my personal favorite.) 

Until now, as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate memoir workshops, I have liked and used Vivian Gornick's shrewd and literate The Situation and the Story:  The Art of Personal Narrative with students, but honestly, it makes only a few really important take-away points, and most of them can be found on pages 3-26 and in the last chapter.  Most of the rest of the book addresses (at length) texts that my students haven't read, which can be alienating/confusing for them, and I'm not able to devote our whole semester to reading Gornick's references.  The Situation and The Story is a good jumping-off point, but then I've had to cobble together numerous other resources to make the pedagogical points I've wanted to make.

Fearless Confessions addresses everything:  craft (from plot to sentence-level issues), ethics, the vexed issue of truth and memory, and even marketing.  Silverman also addresses the psychological challenges of memoir writing, the fear that such a project can evoke, and the reasons to have courage.  "Most memoirists I know are scared to write their stories," she acknowledges, "but the point, I think, is to write anyway--in our own way, in our own time."  Throughout, Silverman's voice is warm and open, a voice of guidance, instruction, and encouragement from a been-there perspective. 

Politically, as a gender critic, I was pleased to encounter her assessment of the highly gendered reception of memoirs in our culture, an issue that has troubled me since I read all those hostile, slanted reviews of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--so brilliant, so maligned--way back when.  Silverman tackles the issue head-on:

. . .[W]hy are members of the media and society, broadly speaking, more likely to honor stories written by hostages, prisoners of war, or soldiers who have fought in foreign, faraway places?  Aren't stories about domestic civil wars, stories of abused women and children, domestic POWs and homebound hostages--just as acute?  Yet when we write about our wars closer to home, or even in the home, we are frequently, and pejoratively, labeled "confessional" writers.  Whiny.

She talks back clearly and convincingly.  A whole section late in the book, "What the Media Doesn't Understand about Confessional Stories," develops the point, and Silverman's book title reclaims the term confessions from its pejorative past.  For women and men whose writing focuses on domestic issues, I guess it helps to know the critical terrain in advance, so you can be prepared. 

Useful appendices offer seven complete essays--three written just for this book--from contemporary writers such as Michelle Otero and Karen Salyer McElmurray, as well as a bibliography of "Contemporary Creative Nonfiction" that I love.  Because it has so many works on it that I already admire and teach, like Alice Sebold's Lucky and Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate, as well as classics of the genre like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, it feels particularly trustworthy, and I look forward to exploring the works I don't know. 

And I'm really excited that another appendix offers Silverman's essay "The Meandering River:  An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction," which I liked so much that I assigned to my graduate CNF students when it first appeared in The Writer's Chronicle last year.  It provides useful descriptions of immersion writing, the lyric essay, and other CNF forms.  Hurray!  Now we have it in book form.

I look forward to using Fearless Confessions with students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, because it builds on, reinforces, and amplifies all the things I already try to teach when I teach memoir writing, the things I learned from good teachers and trial-and-error:  sticking close to the body and the senses, showing-not-telling when portraying people and events, figuring out how to blend your voice then with your perspective now, which verb tense to choose, differentiating between therapy and memoir-writing, and so on. 

This past weekend, I taught a mini-marathon blitzkrieg of a two-day intensive workshop, "Kick-Start Your Memoir," for the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference to a group of fourteen wonderful, serious participants, and I felt very confident, during our last hour together, recommending Fearless Confessions to them. With its guidance, reflections, and several very fruitful-looking writing exercises, it's a book that can keep them going strong on the route they've chosen.

Silverman reminds us why we all keep showing up:

    Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size.  By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown.  Memoir creates a narrative, a life story.
    Writing my life is a gift I give to myself.  To write is to be constantly reborn.  On one page I understand this about myself.  On the next page, I understand that.

Yes.  Lovely, and just so.

One of the tricky issues Silverman discusses in the book is writing about family.  This Wednesday, if you'll be in Lincoln, you'd be very welcome to join Hilda Raz, Glenna Luschei, Aaron Raz Link, Kelly Grey Carlisle and me at NuVibe Juice & Java on 14th Street at 1:30 for the panel discussion "Speaking from Memory:  Writing about Family."  Come out, sip a smoothie, and share your views.