Founding Editor's Note - Memoir (and)

candida lawrence

Founding Editor’s Note

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner

When Joan handed me her Editor’s Note, I was completing my memoir of my sister’s long illness and finally her death in December of 2007. As usual in my writing I followed closely the daily events accompanying her hospitalization and watched all the family members react, sometimes rudely and hysterically, to the treatment she was receiving.

Joan says that “we follow threads, we gather memory fragments” and we certainly do that, but her memory analysis makes it seem almost rational like gathering material for a research project. I sit at my typewriter (yes, a typewriter) and walk the chronology of events and as I walk, I remember, muse about the linking of the events of the story. Is this solely my memory? Surely someone else saw it differently. I accept that and keep on writing. I spend very little time drawing any kind of conclusion—that’s for readers to do.

When the story (what happened) is there in typescript, I usually notice that I’ve not indicated my feelings about the events. This is deliberate and also unconscious. Most sentences about feelings produce a “duh” from my typewriter (yes it speaks to me) and I cross out and move on.

After this rough draft I’m always drawn to the Craft of Writing a Memoir, never expressed that way but the craft—the way you express yourself on paper or in person—is something that fascinates me and keeps me reading and reading, but is impossible to diagram.

I’m not sure that I believe that anything I do is “mysterious,” and certainly not “And then we kissed.” There are 42 reasons for my kissing someone and 1,000 reasons for turning away. But are any of these reasons demanding to be expressed? I prefer the bald statement. This is my kind of memoir. I am delighted that there are other kinds and that we publish them.

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