Memoir and Trauma

When I was in grad school, I took a creative non-fiction class that my friend Laura has described as "Let's write about the most depressing thing that ever happened to us." And for the most part, that was a pretty apt description.

People wrote about struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, broken families, alcoholism. Even the most (dare I say) positive story was from a girl who wrote about her parent's divorce.
It was a great class because it taught me how to use a story arc and how to craft something other than a poem, which was the genre I chose when I was 14. But it wasn't an enjoyable task.

Last week, I read a new memoir entitled Without a Map. I originally read the first chapter of Without a Map as an essay called "Shunned" in an anthology called In Fact. The book continues where the essay began: the author's pregnancy at 16 in the 60s. Her mother sent her to live with her father (where she hid her pregnancy.) To me, the most interesting part of the memoir is not so much the author's pain at being shunned or how it affected her in the first five or six years after the event, but the 15 and 20 years later.

The second half of the book deals with the author's reunion with the son she gave up, and how the fable she comforted herself with, that her son had a 'better' life without her, was not necessarily true. The son grew up in poverty with an abusive father. The author, at the book's end, is still estranged from her father, and her mother has died without ever giving an apology or an explanation for her actions.

There is no real resolution. This will never be an Oprah book pick. But the book is beautiful--the prose is spare, the descriptions are vivid, and she shows how one conflict, one secret, ends up changing the shape of familial relationships irrevocably.

Perhaps we remember the bad events, the traumatic ones, most closely because these are the ones we remember. We play the events back in our head over and over, saying or doing a different thing. We remember trauma because these are the things we wish to fix but can't.