The Truth and the Obvious

One of the tricky things about writing a memoir is knowing what to include. In my own work, I try to pick the memories/moments that stick out to me, paring my life down to the juiciest moments. Then I attempt to find a pattern and frame that makes everything work together. This is incredibly difficult and I continually find myself struggling with how to weave while also keeping the material clear and interesting. As we know from this craft class, there are so many more options than the traditional/linear story line (particularly when it comes to memoir.) But a sequential format seems to be the easiest: finding a starting point and ending point and telling everything in between. Simple. Sometimes I’m definitely tempted to just begin with my earliest memory and work forward to the present but I feel like I wouldn’t be using all of the craft tools in my belt, you know?

Whereas many of the memoirs we’ve read so far really play with the conventions of craft regarding time/memory, Monica Halloway’s novel Driving With Dead People is pretty much a straight timeline. She starts at age six and then works forward, all the way to forty-three. She didn’t made any particularly surprising or unique craft choices but there was one aspect of her craft that I found really amazing:  her ability to pack so much in, introducing about a bazillion characters, and managing to both not confusing me and keep me engaged.

I believe I recall Elmaz mentioning how Holloway is able to do a great job of “condensing characters” and this is so true. She is able to tell us a lot about the essence of her characters without giving too much information about them. She picks the things that are unique and make the characters stand out in our minds. I remember that:

*Dad: drives fast and like to film footage of disasters

*Mother: likes nice furniture and keeps a gun under her car seat

*JoAnn (sister): is obsessed with the tennis play Billy Jean King (paints BJK all over her walls) and ties a pack of Mountain Dew to a rope outside her window so it stays cold in the winter

*Becky (sister): looks like a cheerleader with blond pigtails and wants to be one but she doesn’t make the team. She marries a man like her father.

*Jamie (brother): pole-vaults and has strong, sinewy arms. He could bet up their father but doesn’t know it. He ends up being a drunk/stoner

*Julie (friend): wants to be buried in a casket that is blue inside and when she’s older, she had the personality of a business woman

*Granda: is 100% loyal to Monica’s mother. She killed her cat

I could go on but the point is that I didn’t even have to look back in the book to remember all these characteristics/essences. They stuck with me even though there were so many characters. This is a real skill and I’m just going to make a wild guess and say that Condensed Characterization is one of the lessons for the week.

As far as packing a whole like into a book, I was surprised at how Holloway chose to do this. I read the back first which says, “Small wonder that, at nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home...becoming fast friends with Julie Kilner, whose father is the town mortician.” The back also says a lot about dysfunction but this theme of death was what I clung to (and this might have something to do with the title and the picture of the hearse on the back of the book.) In any case, I went into reading Holloway’s memoir assuming that it was going to be focused around the topic of death and possible even set in primarily in a mortuary. However, although death is a big topic is this novel, it wasn’t addressed in the way I expected. In this, I guess I mean that death exists but it’s mostly about life. Let me see if I can explain this…the beginning of the book is very focused on the author’s fascination with death, which mirrors her own abusive father’s obsession with disasters, and although she does spend some time in the mortuary with Julie, almost as suddenly as Monica stops wetting the bed, Julie and the topic of death are abandoned for quite some time. I felt the focus move away from death around chapter eleven, after the family goes on their summer vacation to the Rocky Mountains. After this, the story is all about life in high school: Monica’s first kiss, her mom going to college, her siblings moving away, her creepy PE teacher, her first love/heartbreak, etc. And then on to life in college and beyond (focusing on her relationships with men.)

Holloway visits the mortuary and the theme of death again when she and Julie get a job in high school driving the hearse and later when she watches Liz embalm a dead man but it’s not the main focus of the memoir as much as it is about her relationship with her family. For most of the book, I felt like I was just going along with the ride and hearing all of Monica’s memories (which was very entertaining) but then, near the end, when her sister JoAnn starts to remember that she was molested by their father, the story seemed to take on a whole other dimension of depth. Holloway also starts to play around a lot more with format. She flashes back to memories of her father and, at one point, she even cuts back and forth between her day at work and her sister going to the beach to attempt suicide. I thought that this was very effective and I felt much more connected to the story/characters at this point. I would have liked to see more playing around with craft like this in the rest of the book.

Another thing that really stuck out to me craft-wise was the way that Holloway uses LOTS of topic and summary sentences. She is constantly either introducing us to her new subject/story/topic or giving us a quick analysis of the information she provided us. A few examples:

1.)  I felt that the big “topic sentence” of the book was: “We all acted differently to our volatile home life.” (49) Then Holloway goes on to tell a whole book worth of stories to prove how she and her siblings and her mother acted as a result of her father’s abuse.

2.)  Monica visits Julie’s house for the first time and is surprised how nice Dave Kilner is. She says, “Dave’s kind of weird. He hung around the whole time. He didn’t leave once. He kept asking us questions.” Her mother replies, “That’s the way dads are supposed to act.” The author summarizes: “We were the weird ones.”

3.)  When Monica’s boyfriend picks her up to go to prom, he is driving his mom’s blue Oldsmobile, wearing a light blue tux with a ruffled blue shirt. She then states: “He liked blue.” (134)

In some cases, this craft technique of providing short, definitive statements seems to be the Holloway’s way of either trying to pack a punch or be humorous. I’m trying to think about how comedians do it. They often open up with one big, overarching statement like: “Having a baby is such a shit slide” and then go on to tell a personal story about how the birth of their first child led to all kinds of shit they couldn’t even predict (Evan, I hope you don’t mind me referencing your wonderful material.)  I though about it a lot and I’m not really sure if this technique is effective or not but I definitely thought it was overused. If the statement is funny like Evan’s shit slide metaphor is, then maybe it’s worth using. But just to restate that her date likes blue isn’t particularly funny (at least on the page…maybe it would be is Holloway was acting it out). I feel like the information is redundant and unnecessary and she gives us these little summaries constantly throughout the book: She tells us a story and then wraps it up with a declaration or vice versa. “Show don’t tell, Monica,” I kept wanting to say. When your boyfriend sleeps with your ex-lover who told you he was sterile, got you pregnant and then refused to help pay for the abortion, we know that this is “the ultimate betrayal,” as you so poignantly summarize (216). You don’t need to tell us that!

Ok, I feel like I’m being a little mean and I would probably say this much more lovingly if Monica Holloway was workshopping Driving With Dead People in our class. (And, just to be clear, I really did like the book.) What I found interesting regarding her need to state the obvious is that, at one point, Monica realizes that she is much more like her dad than she thought. During her first flashback on page 173, when her dad is being a “good guy,” she gets the wind knocked you of her. “You took a big fall,” he said, stating the obvious.”

I feel it is only fair that I mention how ironic it is that I’m picking on Monica Holloway for this because I have the same damn problem! Elmaz is always busting me for telling/summarizing after showing. I think what this is read as is a lack of trust that the reader. It like I’m worrying that he/she isn’t going to get what I’m trying to say simply by showing so I feel like I have to say, “So what I was trying to tell you with this scene was…”

But, the truth is, we’ve gotta have some faith in our readers because if we don’t trust them, how the hell can we expect them to trust us? Right? I think Holloway put a lot of trust in us by sharing some really intimate/horrific stuff about her life and that is so honorable. The courage she expresses by writing this story far outshines my nitpicking about her topic/summary sentences and I only hope that I can have the same courage to share the truth in my own work.