Marion Roach Smith - The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life

A T HOROUGHLY N ON-STANDARDIZED
T EXT FOR W RITING & L IFE

MARION ROACH SMITH

NEW YORK BOSTON

For Richard Young

There is an old saying that most men would rather have you hear their story than grant their wish.

THIS IS A SIMPLE tale. I was born in the Little Neck Public Library in Queens, New York. Next to the card catalogue. Well, thats the way I remember it, and Im sticking to that story, no matter what. Go into therapy and you are likely to be asked, What is your first memory? And for many people, this is a rare opportunity to unlock the floodgates, remove the tourniquet, and let the platelets flow. But when I want to investigate myself, I type, and when I ask myself to re-create those first moments, what gets typed up is me standing on my tiptoes, peering into a card catalogue.

It was a long wooden drawer that may have pulled out for a mile and a half. Like a great straight snake, right at hip bone level to my mother, exactly at eye level to me, it slid out and I waited.

I want you to see something, I think she said.

A gorgeous woman; I would have done anything she told me. This was the person who held the keys to the kingdom of power, the parent who had taught me to read, sitting with me as one day the letters turned into words, and the words into sentences, and the sentences into the authority that every child cravesto learn, to retell, and to entertain. My mothers red fingernails, lacquered to match her lips, were flipping like sexy windshield wipers through the cards, one after the other. Where were we going this time? I wondered. Maybe I was five. We had long before run through the Golden Books and had recently been to meet Black Beauty, and we were about to read The Pushcart War, a book about the Lower East Side. We had dabbled in poetry and had read of the requisite heroes and demons of the Bible.

Suddenly, she stopped, lifting up a single card. On it was my fathers name: James P. Roach.

Look at that! she said. Isnt that wonderful?

It was. In that snug, long drawer, there for the world to stumble upon, to cross-reference, to read: my dad. A sportswriter, he was in the card catalogue. Other girls wanted to be veterinarians, to marry rich, to be Rockettes. From that moment on, what I wanted most was a place of my own in the Dewey decimal system.

Shortly after that day, we moved into a house with a den in which was placed a desk and a typewriter, and thats where I watched my father write on deadline. It was there that he was discovered one afternoon, sitting hunched over that typewriter, running his hands through his thin hair. For the previous three days, painters had been in the house changing the color of every single room to champagnethe white of the 1970s. On the fourth day of this monotonous work, a lone painter followed the sound of the clacking keys. The encounter went something like this:

Mr. Roach, said the painter.

Mr. Roach looked up and said nothing.

It seems a shame, the painter continued.

Mr. Roach said, Who are you?

The painter? the man asked, now unsure himself.

Yes. My father looked back to his blank page.

That dining room. You want that champagne, too?

Champagne?

Like the rest of the rooms?

The rest of the rooms?

Are champagne.

In this house? Since when?

Thursday.

And the dining room?

Not yet.

The writer cast a look at the clock, the typewriter, then the painter. The story was due. What nationality are you? he asked.

Huh?

Nationality.

Croatian, said the painter.

Such lovely national colors, said the writer. Use those.

Back to the typewriter, the assignment, and the silencewhich was broken six hours later by the earsplitting scream of a woman viewing her red, white, and brown dining room for the first time. It may have been the only time Jim Roach expressed himself in anything other than words in his own home. But it is worth noting that the dining room walls remained a deep red, the ceiling a pure white, and the beams their natural brown for as long as we had the house.

It seemed to me that to get into the stacks of the library, writers had to keep their heads down, no matter the consequences.

And writing does have consequences. Especially if you tell the truth, which is what memoir requires. When my friend Elizabeth recently found out that she has multiple sclerosis (MS), she thought about that for a while and then wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. Some years before, via in vitro fertilization, she had gotten pregnant, given birth, and then donated some of her unused embryos to science. After her MS diagnosis, she wrote how she wished those cells had gone toward fetal tissue research for her illness and others. Upon publication, accolades came in from her peers, but she also had to ditch her home phone number because of the phalanx of wingnuts calling to say they would have adopted those embryos.

On some level youve always known that consequences lurk when telling your talea chill from the family, crank calls on your telephone, or perhaps a unique terror that comes from retracing something to its beginning to understand the power it has over your life. Which is why this morning, when you could have been writing, you rechecked your closet for what youll wear on the Today show during your book tour.

Today may or may not be in your future, but what is entirely possible is that youll lose somebodys affections if you tell the truth. However, I am quite sure that if you tell the truth, you will feel something real. Feeling something real is where I prefer to live, trying to palpate the small moments of life, the moments of intuition, the places where we fail and where we change. Right now my life is packed with middle-aged friends engaged in all manner of dangerous behaviors againthe ones they forgot we did in our twenties. They insist that they are merely trying to feel something. I suggest honestly writing about your life. Youll feel something. I promise.

But first, you have to agree to be taught. This is harder than it sounds. Which is why I start the book off not with a classic introduction but with an opener called Required Reading. Because like everyone who wants to write a memoirvia writing vignettes expressly for their children to read, blogging, writing essays, or taking on an entire bookyou want to skip the intro and get right to the part where I assign you the writing exercises, prompts, or bulleted list of killer tips that will fritter away the time until you buy your next book on writing.

You wont find any of those insulting tasks here. From this moment on, you are writing with purpose and are no longer merely practicing. You are writing with intent. So read the book and follow the advice.

And write.

There once was a time when I was terribly polite about this work and what it requires. At cocktail parties, when someone asked me what I do, Id smile just above my string of pearls and reply, Im a writer, and nearly to a person, hed say he was going to write when he retired. Nodding, Id wish him the best with it and slink off to find the canaps, wondering what was wrong with me that I was going to devote my whole life to writing, when clearly people who were smarter than I could put it off until they got around to it.

Now Im not so polite. Now, when someone tells me that he is going to become a writer when he gets around to it, I reply, And what do you do? And sometimes he says, Oh, Im a brain surgeon, and thats my favorite reply. Then I can say, When I retire, Im going to become a brain surgeon, with just a hint of a sneer above those pearls.