Deborah Fruchey: Beginning

Deborah Fruchey attended the Memory to Memoir retreat and recently completed the first year-long memoir intensive. She brought this introduction to her memoir to our last class, her final piece to share with the group. I thought it was a fabulous description of the memoir writing process, as well an excellent piece of writing.

This isn’t exactly what happened.

No story ever is.

The first thing you do when you start to tell a story is to chop most of it off. You pick a beginning, dismissing everything it took to get there. Start with a baby. How can you understand that baby without knowing anything about her parents and their conditions? But you can’t really measure those parents without their own parents and their culture, and the culture cannot be understood without its history, back to the first human migrations to Europe, tracing the origins in Africa, through the fragile start of life on earth, and so on back to the big bang. Every life story starts much too late to be intelligible.

Then within the scope of one life, there are all the things you leave out on purpose. The boring things, the crude things: waiting in line, picking pimples. And there are things you omit for effect, as if it were background noise in a room where a desperate conversation is going on.

Naturally I will not be objective, no matter how hard I try. Objectivity is a chimera, like the golden city of El Dorado. “I’m right, you’re wrong” is the basic default position of the human psyche. You have to press that assumption down, hard, like a manhole cover over a geyser, to get anything done. And the minute you let go, it rushes up and boils over. Even if we have no personal bias, still we will favor our nation, or our race, or our species. If a volcano erupts in the wilderness, shooting magma into the air and causing a week of glorious sunsets, it is called a natural spectacle. If that same volcano kills 200 people, it is called a natural disaster. We do not count the trees and snakes and bushes who die with us.

On top of all this, there are the things I have forgotten, the parts of the story I never knew, and the linguistic bridges I had to erect to get from one distinct memory, over the fuzziness, to another.

Not to mention that every person you will meet here is a fiction. Most people you know are. Oh, there is a real, complex, ineffable person; but of that, we only know what they show or tell us, a smaller subset. And of that available grist, we don’t notice or remember everything, and what we do remember we may not understand. Nevertheless we will take this limited set of clues and paste and thread them together with what we think we understand, what we guess this person means or is, what we judge his motives to be (based on what are own motives are, coming from our completely different experiences). And we will stand this spidery creature of bits and pieces in our mind’s eye and say, ‘This is him’. But what we actually have is a fiction. People are not what we see, nor what we think we see; not what we selectively choose to write about them, and certainly not what a third party will carry away from that description and transfer to their own mind’s eye.

All this material, flawed as it is, shifts with time and distance. Like cereal in a box, sold by weight not by volume, some settling of contents may have occurred. Every time I look in the rearview mirror, the past is different.

So how you define what part of a memoir is ‘real’ depends on whose reality you’re looking at, because everyone in the story has their own, and so do you as a reader. We rely on a body of common knowledge and shared reality to fill in the blanks, but what two people ever shared exactly the same reality? Police say, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and I want to say which facts? According to whom? And for what purpose? “Just the facts,” is a joke.

So if someone should say that my version of the story is biased, or fictional, or incomplete, or wrong, I’d have to say that’s true. In 50 years the one thing - the only thing – I am absolutely sure of is that I can be wrong about anything. I am sure that when I get to heaven (or wherever) I will find my life spread before me like a topographical map, and see that I was finally and completely wrong about everything.

So I start out in the wrong. I know it and accept it. I’m starting from the position of the ungrateful child, the worst kind, the kind that tells family secrets. Nevertheless, there are things appreciate about my childhood, things I am grateful for.

I am grateful to have been let loose from Heaven, that glorious prison where there are no fleshly delights, no strawberries, no tongue, no odor of jasmine or sex.

It’s true that my mother worked hard, in all the ways that mothers do work, starting with splitting herself open to bring us in from the floating realms.

It’s true that my father was our slave. All day he served a telephone and men with bigger destinies, and came home tired, defeated, and longing to be big himself.

We never went hungry or slept without blankets. We got driven to soccer games and choir practice. Though we were abused with slaps, spanking and screaming, we never had more than bruises to show for it – no broken bones or cigarette burns. Others have had it so much worse that I sometimes wonder if it is churlish of me to complain.

I can still hear my mother crying out from behind the bathroom door, “Can’t you even leave me alone for long enough to pee?”

I can see my father, though I wasn’t there, shaking his head by my brother’s deathbed, saying over and over, “My son. My son…”

But pain stays in the memory better than pleasure. At the name of a horror movie, one recalls the two-second scene of red and crème carnage, not the bluesy clouds of the opening credits. And though I have been thrown clear and cooling for decades on this pleasant plain, it is the bolting through the air in fragments of lava that I remember.

I am grateful for adulthood. I am grateful I lived through my childhood. I know they did the best they knew how to do. They were absolutely sincere.

I am glad I was let loose from heaven.

But I cannot yet be grateful for how it was done.

Deborah Fruchey has been writing novels since she was 8 years old. Her first published book, The Unwilling Heiress, was chosen by the American Bookseller's Association as one of the best new books of 1987. Her self-help manual for the mentally ill, Is There Room for Me, Too? will soon be out on Amazon.com. In the meantime, check out her blog on mental health issues, 13 Ways of Looking at a Nut Case at www.alteredstatescentral.blogspot.com.

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