Women's Stories

 

At my writing group this week, we had a spirited discussion about memoir. One member of the group disliked the term, and was dismissive of the genre, even though what we write are life stories, and indeed memoir. She had been conditioned into thinking that memoir was ‘girlie’ and not worthy literature; that to admit to reading it was to somehow diminish your intelligence and your status as a serious reader and lover of books.

Two of us disagreed vehemently. Which then led to further discussion on – who is it exactly who sets these tones and standards? Why are men’s stories deemed more important than women’s stories?

Memoirists believe that we all have stories in us, stories that are worth telling. We read memoir to find the universality that links us, the common threads. “Aha,” we may think as we read another’s story, “I’m not the only one who thinks or feels that way.”

Back to the woman in my group who is reluctant to admit to reading (or writing) memoir. Let’s call her A.  Unsurprisingly, A’s view on memoir as ‘cringe worthy’ was formed by remarks made by a man. At a party, hearing she was an avid reader of biographies, autobiographies and life stories, he dismissed the whole genre as the ‘dermatology of literature’.  Superficial stuff. Lipstick on a corpse.

November is non-fiction month, and here are two memoirs that I have recently read that are anything but superficial or cringe worthy. I have no hesitation or shame in stating that I have read them and enjoyed them immensely. They are stories that go deep, below the surface, examining aging, stereotypes, prejudices, and women’s lives, told through their own.

LEFT ON TENTH by Delia Ephron is not only a story about surviving cancer, a harrowing tale of medical procedures, told in simple language that is easy to understand, but it is, at heart, a love story. A story of love found late in life. It is a story of confluences that gave her the guiding hand when she most needed it. It is a story of aging, loss and grief, yes, but it is also a wonderful story of, as the tag line states, ‘a second chance at life’. I would highly recommend this if you are an older woman.  Who says love is only for the young?

LOTS OF CANDLES, PLENTY OF CAKE by Anna Quindlen is also a memoir written by an older woman. Quindlen covers a range of experiences in her life, from mothering to marriage to girlfriends to aging. Quindlen articulates beautifully what many of us older women are thinking but not saying. She mocks the helicopter parents who accompany their grown children to interviews. She refuses to see ‘older’ as ‘less’. She is willing to admit that the older we get the more we realize there is no formula or plan for a happy life and sometimes we ‘may have wandered down’ a path ‘by mistake’, and that’s okay. She is open and honest about the boomer generation (hers, mine), who have had more choices than our parents, who were encouraged to ‘have it all’ without understanding what that really meant, who have silly prejudices and are seen by the younger generation as a bottleneck because we won’t ‘step aside’ to make room for them. This is the generation that is now redefining aging and Quindlen says that the “hallmark of aging (is)…that we learn to go deeper, in our friendships, in our family life, in our reflections on how we live and how we face the future.” It is another book I would highly recommend if you are an older woman, or even a not-so-old one.

I leave you with these quotes on living, writing stories and memoir in particular:

“...write it so that people hear it and it slides right through the brain and goes straight to the heart” Maya Angelou

“True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world” Patricia Hampl

“A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”   Vivian Gornick

 “What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.” Anne Lamott