“It’s all like a dream,” was my father’s response when I asked what it was like looking back on the last 70 years of his life. Now my own daughter is bemoaning the fact that I haven’t told her enough about my life, especially my 20’s. Since her father and I immigrated to Australia from Berkeley, California, before she was born, she has had to grow up with little extended family or the gatherings that are usually a rich source of family stories. Her grandparents have passed away. Her father died four years ago, and I suppose she feels her connection with my personal and family history is tenuous. So, in my 50’s I felt that I should begin transforming the collage of mental images that represent my past into coherent stories
As I approached this task, I reflected on something Dorothy Parker said about writing being the process of “applying bottom to seat.” There I sat and sat for hours–– playing computer games, reading E-books, surfing publisher sites for contributor guidelines— and not writing one word of my autobiography. I lacked confidence. I regretted not having regularly kept a diary when I was young, and I was afraid I wouldn’t remember enough detail from my past. I was uneasy about what I’d find when I started digging, and equally uneasy about sharing personal experiences. Writing true tales is a bit like amateur acting; in both cases, your performance can awkwardly expose your vulnerabilities and innermost feelings to the scrutiny of others. Also, since I’m not anyone famous, I wondered if I could write anything that would make a connection to not only my daughter but other readers as well. Would I read this myself? Only if it was genuine with intimate details.
What finally helped me were “memory triggers”–– music, photos and objects through which I could resurrect, in surprising detail, significant events and life experiences. These triggers enabled me to stand back and look at the memories as a third person with “me” as one of the main characters.
Stories from Song
My first trigger came via the radio in the form of the old Carpenters’ song “We’ve Only Just Begun”. Appropriately, this was the same song on the car radio that very early morning 34 years ago when my future husband and I drove to the airport to catch the plane for the instant-marriage centre–– Reno.
That song conjured up from my magic memory box details of the tacky storefront wedding chapel, the Southern minister and his wife, as well as the Casino where we cashed our check to pay them. In my desk I found an old postcard of the Christmas Tree Inn where we later stopped on our way to Lake Tahoe. It evoked little details of the dark, wood-panelled dining room and sitting in front of a roaring fire with our brandy balloons and later, the snug cabin where we spent our “blizzardly” wedding night. With the Carpenters’ song playing in the background, these memories became, not just mental images, but complete stories. That’s when I wrote “My First Wedding”— not as a memory, but as a short story with a plot, a beginning, and an ending.
Photographic Memories
After seeing how the song and postcard triggered a story, I got out my huge collection of old photos. You can tell so much from the background in a photo, the clothes and, most of all, the body language. Even stiffly posed photos, with people sporting fixed smiles, reveal underlying emotions and relationships in the way the subjects arrange themselves and touch or do not touch each other.
A photo of my brother and his new wife taken at his first visit home after a long estrangement was most revealing. In the photo, my brother stands behind his seated wife, Jane, with his hands on her shoulders, smiling tensely. Though obviously petite in comparison to my brother, it was evident Jane was the strong one in the relationship, exuding a quiet confidence that things would go well. In the background is the typical disarray of my mother’s kitchen, and on a table near Jane are the three homemade cakes she brought for us. Studying this photo gave me a sense of the setting, characters, and emotions. This spurred me on to write a story called “The Homecoming” about my brother’s reconciliation with our family, and years later, a tribute to my brother’s wife on her death, “Jane, as I Remember Her.”
Things Past
In Remembrance of Things Past, the French writer Marcel Proust, ill and confined to bed for years, wrote about how a madeleine cake and a cup of tea brought alive a wealth of memories.
“...[S]o in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park …and the good folk of the village sprang into being…from my cup of tea.”
I also found that certain objects helped me recall whole scenes.
The other day, I came across the tassel from my high school graduation, and I suddenly remembered the awards ceremony, where my proud parents were summoned to watch me receive a scholarship. It reminded me of that important crossroads in my life when my parents helped me decide to pursue an academic rather than a business career. Thinking of my first summer job at university, I realised the wisdom of their advice and that inspired me to write “My Name is Celia,” based on the memory of a summer job as a receptionist for an employment agency.
The agency manager made me change my name to “Jill” because her last receptionist was Jill, and she couldn’t remember to call me by my real name. At the end of the summer, I really appreciated getting back to university academia, where I could be Celia again.
Inspiration for another story came when my granddaughter, playing dress-ups with the hallstand hats, uncovered my father’s old tweed flat cap. Fingering the soft wool and the frayed peak, the years peeled back as I remembered my first European trip as a callow 19 year old asserting her independence. I remembered how I excitedly scanned the Arrivals crowd anxiously looking for my father’s hat when I returned from my adventure. Reliving my joy at seeing my father again, I realized that although at the time I thought that solo trip meant that I was finally independent, I still needed my parents in my life much more than I would admit. In a piece titled “My Father’s Hat,” I wrote about later trips home from Australia, remembering when that cap and my father were always there to meet me, except for the last time when my father lay dying.
Magic Memory Triggers
The three magic memory triggers–– music, photos, and objects—provided jumping off points for my memories and material for stories with plots, themes, and endings. I came to see patterns of behaviour and glean the significance of the particular incidents of my life. I relived the joys and sadness of those memories and realized that in recreating my past through the writing process, I was leaving something very personal of myself to my children and grandchildren, and perhaps, also, to others who will read these stories and appreciate or identify with them.
