Former teacher and head of the English Department at my alma mater, Frank McCourt passed away today at age 78. Although I was never his student, he was the writer that introduced me to the idea of everything a memoir should be- and the need for its existence.
"I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed," McCourt told the Hartford Courant. "Her generation and my generation, to a certain extent, were never proud of having grown up in poverty and adversity. We always wanted to give people the idea that we grew up in kind of middle-class, or lower-middle-class, circumstances."
-Frank McCourt
-Frank McCourt
A memoir allows you to draw from the bones of your autobiography; leaving the truth to the judgment of your readers. Under the guise of the memoir, the embarrassment and gritty details are both present and yet protected. It's your life as you wish to convey it to the world. Events are strung together- perhaps not as they occurred, but as you have come to make sense of them.
A memoir is not a compilation of events that are stretched to create something evocative. The thing is, if I were to write you an autobiography, it would be brimming with the ordinary. You have to realize that adversity and the subjects that Frank McCourt describes above are situations that are known, if not felt by many in society.
But if I were to take the fragments of life which I truly felt were worth teaching, and if I hid the truth within a universal premise, then I imagine that I would create something that makes an individual life worth writing about.
For anyone that hasn't read Angela's Ashes, I highly recommend it. It's a very emotional read.
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