The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

122 Pages·2007·0.62 MB·English

by  Sven Birkerts

The Art of SERIES
EDITED BY CHARLES BAXTER
The Art of series is a line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and
criticism. Each book is a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction,
nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue.
The Art of volumes provide a series of sustained examinations of key, but
sometimes neglected, aspects of creative writing by some of
contemporary literature’s finest practitioners.
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts The Art of
Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D’Erasmo The Art of Description:
World into Word by Mark Doty The Art of the Poetic Line by James
Longenbach
The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination by Carl Phillips The Art of
Attention: A Poet’s Eye by Donald Revell The Art of Time in Fiction: As
Long As It Takes by Joan Silber The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought,
Rhythm of Song by Ellen Bryant Voigt The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as
Assertive Force and Contradiction by Dean Young
THE ART OF
TIME IN MEMOIR
THEN, AGAIN
Other Books by Sven Birkerts
The Other Walk
Reading Life: Books for the Ages My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up
Counter in a Contrary Time Readings
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
American Energies: Essays on Fiction The Electric Life: Essays on
Modern Poetry An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century
Literature
EDITOR:
Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse The Evolving Canon
Writing Well, with Donald Hall
The Art of
TIME IN MEMOIR
THEN, AGAIN
Sven Birkerts
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2008 by Sven Birkerts Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant
provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State
Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support
has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other
generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations
and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Clara Ueland and Walt McCarthy are pleased to support the Graywolf Press Art of series in honor
of Brenda Ueland.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
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Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-489-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-339-1
4 6 8 9 7 5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007924774
Series cover design: Scott Sorenson Cover art: Scott Sorenson
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one
remembers it in order to recount it.
—Gabriel García Márquez
Contents
The Time of Our Lives
Paradises Lost: The Lyrical Seekers
Coming-of-Age
Fathers and Sons
Mothers and Daughters
Trauma and Memory
Coda
Books Cited
THE ART OF
TIME IN MEMOIR
THEN, AGAIN
The Time of Our Lives
If I had a dollar for every time some writer or student or chance
acquaintance has confided to me their desire to write a memoir, I could
buy myself a mossy castle in the west of Ireland and disappear once and
for all into my private mythology. There’s no getting around it: where
we find the sense-making itch—the urge to capture and memorialize
personal experience—there we find the scratching of pens. Or, far more
likely, the chattering of keys. Memoir is, for better and often for worse,
the genre of our times, and I have now read and worked with enough
would-be memoirists to recognize the force of the need as well as some
of the obstacles to its artistic realization. Again and again people say to
me, “If I could just tell it,” and I know exactly what they mean. But how
hard it is to disabuse them of the idea that if they just started at the
beginning and worked their way forward, all would be revealed. Wrong,
wrong, wrong. There is in fact no faster way to smother the core
meaning of a life, its elusive threads and connections, than with the
heavy blanket of narrated event. Even the juiciest scandals and
revelations topple before the drone of, “And then … and then …”
Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with
the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of
contingency and become story. There is no telling when—or if—the
transformation will come, and I am wary about universalizing. What
reflections I offer are based on my own experience and necessarily
provisional.
A curious thing happened to me personally and as a writer—I do make
some slight distinction—when I entered my late forties, that time zone I
reluctantly acknowledge as marking the onset of middle age. Quite
suddenly, at least in retrospect, my relation to my own past changed.
How can I describe it? It was as if that past, especially the events and
feelings of my younger years, had taken a half step back, had overnight,
following no effort on my part, arranged themselves into a perspective.