Memoir Writing & Halloween

Because my clients have purchased Halloween cards that I have designed (which you may view by clicking here),  and because I have decorated a "dedicated" portion of my urban (New York City) terrace garden to honor Halloween (which is discussed in a few posts on The New York Botanical Gardens' tumblr blog, that you may refer to by clicking here) as evident in the image to the right of this text as well as below it,

and because my clients and colleagues have seen a photograph (posted below) of yours truly, the one on the far left, with my sisters all decked out for Halloween despite wearing our heavy winter coats,

the idea of dressing up for Halloween has come up in conversations that I have had with them. Halloween, in New York City, where I live, is a holiday that can be over the top, as most things are, in the "so-called" greatest city in the world.

Most everyone knows about the infamous (and often outrageous) parade in The Village, and if you'd like to read about it, there is much ado regarding this parade that can be found on the Internet, such as an article, for starters, which you may refer to by clicking here.

A lesser known Halloween celebration to outsiders of New York —  but a fast-spreading "secret" among New Yorkers — is the annual Halloween event which takes place on West Sixty Ninth Street in Manhattan's Upper Westside. "Every year the neighborhood on West 69th Street from Broadway to Central Park West is transformed into a big Halloween Trick or Treat Party. The neighbors decorate their domiciles, don full costume regalia, and some turn their living rooms into haunted houses for the little ghosts and goblins to traipse through. It is a great place to take your kids on on Halloween." If you'd like to read about this event in a web-site which is associated with this quote, please click here.

I have been to the West 69th Street Halloween event on many occasions, but have not attempted to photograph it, as I am usually carrying a Hot Toddy. Liquids and cameras are something I do not balance well, so I leave the photo-opting of this event to others, and I take pictures of this Halloween festivity in my mind as my way to remember it. However, the way one remembers events is interesting to me, because it is so often tainted with the way one was feeling at the time of an event which he/she is recalling, rather than what indeed may have actually occurred. "Remember what it is like to be me: that is always the point", Joan Didion, has said in her essay On Keeping A Notebook, which brings me to what I introduced early on in today's blog entry, and that is the topic of dressing up for Halloween, which is a topic that came up with my friends and colleagues in relation to the "costumes" one wears when memoir writing.

It had been brought to our attention that an alleged "member" of the blame-the-parent generation (of which, I must unfortunately confess, I have been an active member myself in bygone years) has written a tell all mother-daughter memoir à la "mommy-dearest" and that person is Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha Stewart. The book is called In Whatever Land: Learning to Live Here.

In her "tell all", Alexis Stewart evidently chronicles the travesties of her growing up having Martha Stewart for a mother. One such horror evidently was "having only ingredients in the house but no prepared food" (her mother wanted her daughter to know how to create her own meals and Alexis Stewart apparently has not realized some children grow up with no food — not even "ingredients"). Another apparent horror for Alexis Stewart was "having a glue-gun pointed to her head" (glue guns were not invented when Alexis Stewart was a growing up, and one wonders if she knows if some children grow up with a loaded gun pointed to their heads); there are evidently many more scenarios of having Martha Stewart for a mother, which Alexis Stewart shares in her book, but it is her recounting of Halloween that sparked the conversation with my colleagues, clients, and yours truly, who knows very little about Martha Stewart.

"There were no costumes. There was no anything. We turned off all the lights and pretended we were not home", Alexis bemoans according to a report on the book which you may refer to by clicking here.  However, alas, like Alexis Stewart's glue gun memory, the truth has been revealed that her childhood Halloweens did not all end with her sitting in the dark — wearing no costume and pretending not to be home. According to Martha Stewart, (for source info click here), "Alexis has clarified her statement about not dressing up for Halloween and instead turning off the lights to pretend that no one was home. 'OK, I left out the years when my mother made me costumes on the sewing machine or let me wear my grandmother's fabulous costume jewelry when I was very young and wanted to be a gypsy for Halloween . . . and it was kind of fun pretending not to be home; no one else did that or would admit they did it, and I still do it to this day.'"


So, now, dear reader, I ask you, in a question prompted by a few of my clients and colleagues, in light of Martha Stewart's revealing quotes that appear to be disclaimers made by her daughter-turned-memoir-author, has a reader-ready "audience" been prevented from being tricked (just in time for Halloween) with by yet another mother/daughter memoir due to be released next Tuesday, October the 18th of 2011?  Or does Alexis Stewart have the "right" to depict her experience as "how-it-felt-to-be-her" in accordance with Joan Didion's philosophy (although Didion was speaking about one's private journal writing not published memoir writing)?


Notice that I said, "yet another mother/daughter memoir"; I chose those words because there have been many mother/daughter memoirs, and not all of them have followed the "mommy-dearest" model; some have attempted to go beyond finger pointing and beyond pouring salts in wounds, in an effort to reach an understanding. 


One such mother/daughter memoir, is Vivian Gornick's, Fierce Attachments, "a memoir structured around Gornick's walks with her mother in New York City".  At the beginning of the book, Gornick states, "And I — the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image — I absorbed them [Gorrnick is referring to her mother and her neighbors here] as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood."  However, in the aftermath of Gornick's success with her memoir, she, like Alexis Stewart, has been grilled about the use of certain details to relay her experience of coming to terms with a mother/daughter relationship. This is indicated in the following excerpt from Confessions of a memoirist, by Terry Greene Sterling (which you may read in full by clicking here). 


"Gornick admitted she had 'composed' some of the walks and conversations with her mother in the memoir, and had also invented a scene that involved a street person and her mother. She said this matter-of-factly, and said she considered memoir to be in the genre of 'personal narrative,' not journalism.

Gornick was quickly grilled by her audience. It was surely a culture clash: a sophisticated New York memoirist facing off against a crowd that included highly regarded journalists. 

But it left some students scratching their heads afterward, trying to understand when fabricated information is acceptable in nonfiction . . . "

Gornick later defended her own words — "a response to critics" —   saying:

"[In my book Fierce Attachments] what was desired was the presence of two people who existed only between the pages of a book. The models for those people — me and my mother — were, in the flesh, a rough draft. On the page, we were a pair of satisfactory principals in a tale of psychological embroilment that had as its protagonist neither me nor my mother, but, rather, our “fierce attachment.” It was to this tale that the book had been devoted, and to which all had been subordinated — including me and Mama. At the heart of the embroilment lay a single insight: that I could not leave my mother because I had become my mother. This was my bit of wisdom, the story I wanted badly to trace out. The context in which the book is set — our life in the Bronx in the 1950s, alternating with walks taken in Manhattan in the 1980s — that was the situation; the story was the flash of insight. If the book has any strength at all, it is because I remained scrupulously faithful to that story.

A memoir is a tale taken from life — that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences — related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story — to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader. What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters. As V.S. Pritchett said of the genre, 'It’s all in the art, you get no credit for living.' "

So, there you have it dear reader, Halloween and memoir writing. Is memoir writing a costume chosen by an author that is invariably perceived by the audience in a manner they decide (as evidenced by the comic strip posted below)?

AND, as always, dear reader, I appreciate it when you weigh in with your comments, thoughts, ideas and reactions. If you are new to posting this type of thing, you may click here for directions.