Author vs. Character

In an interview I did with Nora Ephron After she released her last collection of essays, the screenwriter and director talked about what it was like to be raised by two writers. Ephron was as prone as any to complain about her teenage dramas. Her mother, however, would have none of it.

“I’m not interested,” she said. “Don’t bring me anything until it’s funny. It’s all material.”

While this may be a questionable parenting strategy, it’s an excellent foundation for any memoirist or personal essayist. Everything that happens to us, every failure and success, every kiss we give or receive, every meal we eat, every trip we take, is potential material. The challenge for the writer of personal narrative is twofold. She must take the sprawling, innumerable details of her life and shape them into a coherent, compact narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end. This is not always so easy. Life has no beginning, middle, or end; it just keeps going and going and going, with or without us. The writer must make peace with a certain amount of fabrication in her narrative, even though that narrative is based entirely on what she believes to be true.

Yet before she can begin telling her story, the writer must be able to see her life events as material. Material is inherently neutral. Wood and cloth and steel and rubber aren’t right or wrong, just or unjust; they’re all there to be used or not in the cars and shirts and homes we build or buy. A piece of material’s value depends entirely on whether it serves a creator’s creation.

The difference for a writer, however, is the material we use to pen an essay or memoir is our own past, what we often erroneously call life, and all that I’ve done and said, all the things I’ve seen and heard, all the roads I’ve taken and not taken. My real life is what’s happening right now. My yesterdays, meanwhile, are comprised of the stuff I can use to tell a story today. I will only be able to make this distinction, to hold the past in my hand as I would a lump of clay, if I have no judgment on those life events. There can be no good days and bad days, no right or wrong choices, no crimes or guilt. There can be only things that happened that I will use or not in a story I most want to tell.