Writing Is My Drink (28 page)

to hear a recounting of another’s dreams. I understand. It’s up

there with the recounting of acid trips. So, briefly, here’s the up-shot: I was in an art gallery. The show was all self-portraits. One piece was simply three typed pages on a podium. When I asked

a faceless person about this piece, they said it was a portrait of

the artist’s life that he’d written in twenty-six minutes.

Eyes open. Light on. Capture the essence of your life in

twenty-six minutes. Yes! I grabbed a notepad and a pen. I looked

2 1 7

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 217

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

at the clock. Six eleven a.m. (not four a.m.—nice). I wrote for

twenty-six minutes. The piece I wrote was about being alone and

how being alone was a recurring thread that ran throughout my

life. I liked what I wrote. But more than that, I liked the exercise.

I liked the idea of trying to get to the essence of one’s existence in a very short time frame, with no warning, no recourse, no

planning, no extra time. That evening I told my class about the

26-Minute Memoir. They were intrigued. The cool part was they

didn’t question it too much. Write about the theme of your life in

twenty-six minutes—okay. So we set the timer. They wrote. They

liked it, and many of them kept working with the pieces they’d

begun in that twenty-six-minute frame. To give you an idea of

the possibilities of the form, here is one of the 26-Minute Mem-

oirs written that night, this one by my student Natalie Singer:

As much as the house I grew up in, the cars my parents drove, the
cold classrooms and school hal ways I roamed for years—as much

and more as these touchstones, when I think of my childhood, I think
of the mall.

I can see myself there now, standing at the end of the low brown,
brick building, under a dul flickering fluorescent.

I have just walked through the glass doors near the entrance to
Eaton’s, the Canadian department store where we bought our boots
and underwear and where, in its heyday as an upper class destina-tion, my grandparents had taken me to lunch at the cafeteria. I still
feel the cheese lasagna steaming my eager little face, my Mary Janes
knocking the post underneath the laminate table.

But now I am 14. It is snowing outside, the big new flakes of

another winter. My hair is puffy, my coat is wide open, a plain gray
2 1 8

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 218

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

school uniform rumpled underneath. I am walking with a couple of
girlfriends, gossiping about boys or the bitchy geography teacher. But
even as I nod and swear perfunctorily, I am fielding my own private
thoughts.

We walk past the windows of the stores, Jacob, Roots, Mexx.

I study the mannequins, who are wearing the kind of clothes that
I don’t own. They pose in their short black skirts, leather boots,
bomber jackets. I cannot have these things, because they cost money
my mother doesn’t have.

I marvel at the mannequins’ smoothness, their creamy unblem-

ished robot skin. I am the opposite of them, me with my frumpy

sweater from Reitman’s, where the mothers and cleaning ladies shop,
where my own mother drags me when I desperately need something

new and berates me. “What is wrong with this?” she asks, urges,
waving a polyester thing in my face. “You are so spoiled. Money
doesn’t grow on trees. And I don’t see your father offering to buy you
kids anything.”

When the mannequins become too much, I turn my focus to the

other groups of girls and boys my age roaming the grubby mall floor
in little cliques. I pass right by some of them but they do not look, as
though I am the air itself.

These girls seem to defy their very DNA—they almost all attend

the private Jewish day schools nearby. But they are crowned with
shiny gold hair, glossy and straight down their backs or gathered in
sexy/messy ponytails jutting out the back of their small well-shaped
heads. They wear uniforms too, but their skirts have sharp, black
pleats, their tights patterned, their boots laced high. They have dia-monds in their ears and gold nameplates hanging down their neck.

These girls, who sometimes knock into me as they brush by,

2 1 9

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 219

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

walk with boys. Beautiful, unreal boys with longish hair and letter
jackets and white teeth. Boys who put their arms around the girls
and grip their small waists. Boys to whom I am invisible.

I stand in my puffy, gaping coat and study the mall floor tiles as
they move by, as though I have important business down there and my
ears aren’t red. This is how it is for me, how it always has been. I am
fine—I look ok, not beautiful but not horrifical y ugly, a little pimply
but not covered from chin to forehead in fat blackheads like Andrea
Betamun in homeroom. I know the requirements for fitting into the
world around me—stylish clothes like the mannequins, glossy hair,
manicured nails. But I don’t have the key to get in. I can’t get through
those windows. I need to be perfect, I know that, but I can’t.

So I walk with my other invisible friends through the mall, past
the colored cement indoor playground my grandparents took me to
as a child, past the deli where the bubbies in their fur coats order
chal ah and eggplant spread, past the Cattleman’s where the glossy
girls and sometimes me stop for wide golden steak fries stacked like
thick pencils in their oily paper cups.

The voices of the mall travel and echo like a train station, muffled, a sort of engine revving to take off. I am here, but not a part of
anything. The thrum of the mall, as with life outside its wal s, moves
past me. I stand in place and watch it go, feeling slightly drugged, unable to keep up with the action, the requirements. I think about the
walk to my bus stop, the icy wait, trudging through the slush piled up
on the sidewalk, the cracked steps leading up to our sagging duplex.

I think about the other girls, ponytails, gliding up their pil ared
walkways into golden lit hal ways and sitting rooms painted red. In
my loose-fitting coat, in the middle of the brown mall, I am cold.

Cold and unperfect. And, as usual, alone.

2 2 0

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 220

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

I marvel at Natalie’s ability here to get an essential story so

quickly. I can’t help but think that the urgency of the twenty-

six-minute assignment helped free her to write such a compel-

ling and honest scene rich with exquisitely particular details.

After seeing my students’ pieces that night, I became hooked

on twenty-six minutes for a while. When I’d sit down to write,

I’d write for twenty-six-minute stretches. I started proselytizing

about the virtues of the twenty-six-minute writing assignment,

trying to see if I could bring others into this new way of life I’d created. I wondered if there were some inherent magic in the

number 26. I added the numbers and divided them.

I started a blog called 26 Minutes (now housed at Writing-

IsMyDrink.com) and asked Facebook friends, strangers—any-

one—to set the timer, write, and then send me their unedited

pieces. I trusted that they wouldn’t go past the time (it’s not

like there’s a huge incentive to “cheat”) and that they wouldn’t

edit and that they wouldn’t send anything that I wouldn’t feel

comfortable posting. To date, I’ve published all the 26-Minute

Memoirs that people have submitted to me, and I have to say,

I love them. There is a rawness and vitality to them that I find

remarkable. And writers have told me that they’ve had a great

deal of fun writing them. There are now many 26-Minute Mem-

oirs posted at WritingIsMyDrink.com; some writers have even

written more than one 26-Minute Memoir. If you’d like to write

a 26-Minute Memoir of your own and submit it to be posted,

please do (details for submitting are in the “Try This” exercise at the end of this chapter).

And what I started to notice in reading these memoirs writ-

ten in twenty-six minutes is that they tended to have an arc—that

2 2 1

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 221

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

for the most part they charted the course of a transformation,

even if it was something as subtle as a shift in perception, a new

insight into an old story. When Claire Dederer, the author of

the
New York Times
best seller
Poser: My Life in Twenty-three
Yoga Poses
,
came to visit my class recently, she articulated something of crucial importance about the arc of a memoir: “Think-

ing the event is the story is the biggest mistake of student writers of memoir,” Dederer said. “The transformation of the self is the

story.”

As I hurried to scribble this down, two things scrolled across

my thoughts: the majesty of Vivian Gornick’s
The Situation and

the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative
and the latest
New
York Times
piece in the paper’s continuing effort to eradicate memoir as a literary form.

First, let’s talk about Gornick. In the slim but mighty tome

The Situation and the Story
, Gornick asserts that in personal narrative the plot itself is not
the story
. The story is the magic the writer creates out of the events, the brew of insight, metaphor,

and voice that renders the events meaningful. In fact, here’s ex-

actly what she said: “Every work of literature has both a situa-

tion and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance,

sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that

preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one

has come to say.”

“
The emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.
” That phrase articulates perfectly what I find most compelling in

memoir. I’m not so much interested in the events the narrator

has endured as I am in the narrator’s insight into the experience.

There are all sorts of crazy life stories out there, but to me what’s 2 2 2

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 222

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

interesting is what the story
means
to the writer. And that brings me to the aforementioned
New York Times
article.

A few months before Claire’s visit to my class, I’d received a

flurry of e-mails from my students one Sunday afternoon: “Have

you seen this?” they asked. I could almost see their ashen faces

as I read the article attached, titled ominously, “The Problem

with Memoirs.” One of my e-mailers wrote: “I just pictured a

million writers shutting down their laptops simultaneously.”

The
Times
piece—and it’s by no means an isolated one—was all about how we don’t need any more of these crappy memoirs that

are clogging the bookstore shelves.

As I read the review, I was instantly of two minds: The first:

Forget you, Mr. Smug Reviewer of Books who has probably

never dared to enter into the sweaty arena of writing about one’s

own experience. The second: Yes, actual y I think you might be

right. There
is
a type of memoir I do find a bit flat. For me, it’s the type of memoir that editor Rachel Klayman once summed up as

“a forced march through the writer’s life.”

“A forced march” is another way of saying that the writer has

mistaken the events for the story. Obviously, this is easiest to do when the events of the writer’s life are dramatic. It’s easy, say,

to believe that the stories of a traumatic childhood or the jour-

ney to alcoholism’s bottom and back are in themselves enough.

But I think it goes back to what Mary Karr said about “sound

bite memoirs” that recount every instance of a mother’s abuse

and overlook the real story, which lies in the fact that no matter

how much the narrator was abused, his real problem is that he

still loves his mother. Which reminds me of Dederer and her

insight that the transformation of the self is the story. And for

2 2 3

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 223

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

me, this transformation-of-the-self story is the type of memoir

I want
more
of, and it tends to come in two forms: memoirs that take a quiet situation like
Poser
‘s (a new mother pursues yoga) and render it into a story that speaks volumes about something

larger than the narrator (in
Poser
‘s case: the women’s movement, the impact of divorce, the state of middle-class motherhood)

and memoirs in which the narrator goes to the mat with the fact

that, despite abuse, love endures.

There was something else that troubled me about the
New

York Times
“Problem with Memoirs” article: its willingness to buy into wholesale memoir-as-less-important-literary-form