The Memoir and the Memoirist. Thomas Larson
why do we believe that our memories of traumatic events don’t also grow and change? Why do we think that such events are isolated in their time and somehow just as isolated when we recollect them? I want to answer these queries because it seems that we are finally learning that memories evolve as their rememberers evolve. It may be the rightness of this idea that has so many people reaching to the memoir form, perhaps to verify it for themselves as well as to express the potency, both aesthetic and experiential, of remembrance.
Detaching Now from Then
Here is an example of how one memoirist has bridged from the person who is struggling with the past today and the person who struggled in the past. Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1987) uses the interplay between now and then to stage and reveal her childhood sexual abuse. Fraser narrates the story of her past abuse in present tense. She discloses in past tense that which she understands today about the past. It may sound disorienting but it’s not, for we soon discover why she adopted this form. Writing the book over a three-year period, Fraser brought the past back so vividly into her life that for her emotional security the past needed to be separated from the present. An instance of Fraser’s method comes from the second chapter, “The Other.” It begins with an account of her current knowledge about her father in the past tense:
When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember my daddy ever having touched me sexually. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In the future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.
Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, [sic] the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sex partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. (15)
As the memory heats up and challenges the author to flesh out her feelings, her “other self”—the little girl about to be abused—arrives in present tense. Fraser shifts from her narrator now to the persona, the four-year-old, who was the target of the father’s daily sexual advances. Italics highlight the current recovered material, which, as she gets closer and closer to it, becomes dissociated from her adult narrator and is rendered in third person.
Through the bathroom door I hear my father splashing in the tub. Holding my breath, I slide under his bed, grabbing for Smoky [her cat]. Now the bath plug is being pulled. With a gurgle, the scummy water sucks down the drain.
By the time daddy stomps out of the bathroom, saronged in a towel, my other self is curled on his feather pillow, sucking her thumb and wearing Smoky’s dirty pink ribbon. A breeze blows the curtains inward, just like the hair of a fairytale princess, giving her goose bumps. Whose little girl are you? (27)
Fraser’s “other self” is “sucking her thumb,” sprouting “goose bumps” from the inward-blowing curtains. “I” has become “she.” And because of the transformation, she achieves something remarkable. The author has merged “I” and “she” in order to juxtapose childhood abuse and adult remembrance. These voices become mutually supportive; working together, they enact the story and the means by which the story can be told. Neither the abuse nor its recollection dominate. They are coequals, as if to say Fraser’s true self is a never-ending release from and return to what her child self was forced to endure.
Margaret Atwood noted in a blurb that My Father’s House reads like “a detective novel—except that the detective is a part of the narrator’s self, and so is the murder victim.” As the author recollects the events, detective and victim slowly become aware of each other. Fraser’s interweaving of these two takes time, and she is careful to prepare us at each juncture. Eventually our recognition of their watery coexistence in her is what intrigues us the most. What’s more, these parallel selves call forth the memoir’s guiding narrator, who lives now. She sees how complex the multitimed and many-voiced narrative self can be. She builds a structure to reveal the past in the present tense and in the present intensity of recovered memory. She has the courage to bring the memory back full force, feel it again, then keep it corralled, the horses wildly running at the fence, for the rest of her life.
4
The Voice of Childhood
No Escape from Chronology
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