I don’t know about you, but in my third age I spend increasing time on a vexing question: what to do with all the stuff. Downsizing advice tends to deal with one side of this, namely how to get rid of things we no longer need or want. That’s not easy, but it’s doable. Donate the furniture, sell the baubles, give mystery novels to the library for resale, recycle the glass jar collection.
The other side of the dilemma is harder, as it has to do with keeping rather than discarding. I’m talking about the preservation of legacy, the body of tangible and intangible records and memories that testify to a person’s life and work, often revealing, in the process, important aspects of family, community, or social movement history. Preserving legacy can involve archiving documents, photos, notes, clippings, and ephemera. It can also mean recording the past through personal memoir writing or oral history. And it’s important not just to preserve legacy, but also to share it. Because if we don’t make it accessible to those who come after us, what’s the point?
Let’s consider just one piece: writing personal memoir. I have no plans to do this myself, at least not in any comprehensive sense (I’ve written short bits, mainly about my time in Niger). But I’m reading memoirs written by others, including several friends, and find them fascinating.
Memoir is loosely defined as personal narrative based on memory. But how to define memory? Does the narrative recount what I, the writer, remember as having happened? Or what I would like to think happened? Or what I would like other people to think happened? To what extent should the writer’s version be taken on its own terms and when should it be triangulated with accounts by other members of the writer’s family, community, or social movement? In her blog Writing Family Histories, Sarah Einstein says, “Sharing a collective story means respecting the collective memory of it.”
What’s the purpose of memoir writing, anyway? I can think of several: to record, interpret, and celebrate the past. To tell the story of a person, family, or community whose experiences may be of wider interest. To document a social or political movement that we hope future generations can learn from and perhaps continue. To tell the “inside” story or one’s own side of a story. To sort through the writer’s feelings about the past and seek self-knowledge, acceptance, or closure. To make money (mainly possible for celebrities).
I thought about these questions as I read Michelle Obama’s Becoming, the book that accompanies the film I discussed in my last post. Many parts of it spoke to me. At the same time, I wondered – as I would about any memoir – how much was “true.” So I asked Prexy Nesbitt what he thought. A lifelong activist and longtime friend of our family, Prexy is a West Side Chicagoan who worked closely with Michelle Obama on a community project while she was part of the Chicago nonprofit world. Prexy was critical of some of the Obama administration’s policies, but about Michelle he was unequivocal. “She is a tell-no-lies, claim-no-easy-victories kind of person,” he declared. “She keeps her integrity.” If Prexy says so, I believe him.
As memoir, Becoming succeeds on several of the levels noted above.
To tell the story of a person, family, or community. I learned most from the chapters on Michelle’s growing-up years. Earlier generations of her family were part of the migration of African Americans from the South to Northern cities. She watched as her Chicago neighborhood, South Shore, changed from a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood to almost all Black as white residents fled to the suburbs. Various members of her extended family were personally affected by racism and discrimination in Chicago. For me, such storytelling can be more powerful than any academic account of this era.
Michelle’s great-aunt Robbie, a piano teacher, sued Northwestern University for discrimination after having been denied a room in the women’s dorm in 1943. She had registered for a choral music workshop, and instead of being housed in a dorm with the other participants she was told to find a rooming house for “coloreds.”
Michelle’s paternal grandfather, known as Dandy, was an irascible man given to shouting at the television. Growing up in South Carolina, he had been a bright youth with college aspirations. But these hopes were frustrated, she tells us:
If this were an American Dream story, Dandy, who arrived in Chicago in the early 1930s, would have found a good job and a pathway to college. But the reality was far different. Jobs were hard to come by, limited at least somewhat by the fact that managers at some of the big factories in Chicago regularly hired European immigrants over African American workers. … Gradually, he downgraded his hopes, letting go of the idea of college, thinking he’d train to become an electrician instead. But this, too, was quickly thwarted. If you wanted to work as an electrician (or as a steelworker, carpenter, or plumber, for that matter) on any of the big job sites in Chicago, you needed a union card. And if you were black, the overwhelming odds were that you weren’t going to get one.
I hadn’t known this about union cards. And it wasn’t only Dandy: several of her other male relatives ran up against the same problem. Then there was the time Michelle, her parents, and her brother drove to visit Black friends in an almost all-white suburb. When it was time to go home, they came back to find an ugly gash along the length of their parked car.
To tell the “inside” story. Michelle describes how she, Barack, and their daughters suddenly and vertiginously found themselves among the most famous people on Earth. During the family’s eight years in the White House, she says, “we lived with the gaze upon us.” By the time their father was inaugurated, “Malia and Sasha were quickly learning what it meant to be watched publicly.” As the mother of a daughter myself, I found that statement chilling. Michelle refers repeatedly to “heaviness,” the massive scheduling and security preparation that was required for any family member to set foot outside the White House. She watched as Barack’s plane landed at the airport:
Something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. … The whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane.
It's a riveting inside view, but I have to ask: doesn’t writing a bestselling memoir prolong the public gaze, extending it into the family’s post-presidency life? Or is that sustained gaze already inevitable, so one more book makes little difference?
To seek self-knowledge, acceptance, or closure. “And when it ends,” Michelle writes, “when you walk out the door that last time from the world’s most famous address, you’re left in many ways to find yourself again.”
Simple acts like making cheese toast take on new meaning. She took “a plate from a shelf in the kitchen without anyone first insisting that they get it for me,” and ate her toast in the backyard without needing to ask permission to step outside the door. And she washed the plate in the sink afterward. This mundane act was at once a step back toward the old normal and a step forward toward an uncharted post-presidency life. Michelle concludes,
For the first time in many years, I’m unhooked from any obligation as a political spouse, unencumbered by other people’s expectations. I have two nearly grown daughters who need me less than they once did. … The responsibilities I’ve felt … have shifted in ways that allow me to think differently about what comes next. I’ve had more time to reflect, to simply be myself. At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
As Michelle enters her third age, she has turned to memoir as a means to seek understanding of her “extraordinary journey” from Chicago’s South Side to the White House and beyond. And in telling her personal story, she has helped interest people in her collective story, which includes the experiences of African Americans who came north to Chicago and struggled to make good lives.
Have you written a memoir, or would you like to? How do you think about some of the questions suggested above?
I have NO desire to write a memoir .But the idea of memory fascinates me What do different people remember about the same event ? Different focus, different perspectives ( and ages) make for different memories
What of our memories are true, and how do they change over time ? I am a visual person.. so I have very vivid visual memories of all the stages of my life .. starting with the memory of being held by a waitress in a blue dress, eating a chicken drumstick, in a New Orleans restaurant on the water There is no picture of this ( sometimes we incorporate pictures into our visual memory and think we “remember” that) According to family records , I would have been 18 months It was a light blue dress And the water was a deeper blue
I have thought of writing a memoir, not necessarily for publication, but to leave for family and friends. But now that I have more time, it does not appeal to me. Most of my adult life I have spent working in the physical realm of visual art making. I have been (and still am) a visual artist and an art educator. But I also love to write and often thought that once I am too old to manage so much physical work, I will settle down and write more. I recently retired from teaching and I have been writing more. Mostly this takes form in long letters to friends and loved ones. I also have begun to write these on the computer (my lousy handwriting is fit for only short personal greetings) and saving them in files labeled according to the receiver, along with any of their responses. Letters tell a lot of how I am thinking and what I am doing at a particular time. They record the nature of a relationship, an exchange. I imagine my family and friends would enjoy reading those more than any memoir I could write.
There is a wonderful book titled "Letters of Note" compiled by Shaun Usher. It is a large collection of correspondences from a wide variety of individuals. Reading these letters is like hearing their voices across time.