Writing Lessons: How To Be Entertaining When Writing Memoir

WHENEVER I GIVE A TALK about how to write memoir, I always leave the E word for last. In fact, it is literally the last line on the index card I take with me to any talk on memoir, and the only full sentence on the little card of prompts, reading, “Above all, be entertaining.” So when the writer Kate Cohen proposed the topic of how to be entertaining when writing memoir, I snapped it up. The author of two fine memoirs, Kate has this ethic firmly in mind as she currently tackles her third memoir, due soon. Let her entertain you on this tricky topic and you’ll why she’s the best writer for this job.

Entertain Me!

By Kate Cohen

It’s a particular kind of torture for me to read anything I’ve written once it’s in print and impervious to revision. But I do love to give advice. So the other day I forced myself to open A Walk Down the Aisle, my memoir about getting married. Notes fell out from readings I had given a decade ago, and the text itself was riddled with cross-outs, arrows, and marginalia. I persisted, read a little. The writer was evidently a younger version of me–sweeter, more earnest, a little tentative—but the editor was the same: totally ruthless.

Why so many cuts and corrections just after publication? Hadn’t I been satisfied with the text for even a minute and a half? I had. Then I started giving readings. And that’s where I began to understand what my job as a writer was: to entertain.

That’s right, a writer of memoir is an entertainer. What? Did you think your job was to instruct or speak truth or heal old wounds? No, sorry. Books are a form of entertainment. And if you want people to choose what you’re offering when they could be shopping for sweatpants in their underwear (or vice versa) while watching So You Think You Can Cook, you have your job cut out for you.

As advice, “be entertaining” is about as helpful “be charming.” I realize that. But it’s not as bad as “be pretty”: there are some concrete steps you can take.

Suppress your research. Most of the paragraphs I cut when faced with an audience contained neat summaries of the research I had done. All that stuff I read and learned about weddings in the course of writing that I thought I had to include for “legitimacy.” If you need to prove to your readers that you’ve done your homework, add a bibliography: don’t make them read your notecards. Leave in outside facts or another author’s words only if they advance your point and are entertaining in their own right. And then still cut half.

Make us laugh. Don’t suppress the funny part of you, whether it’s goofy or snide, even (especially?) if your subject isn’t funny in itself. At one of my first readings, I asked the professor/host what excerpt to choose: funny or serious. And he didn’t hesitate: Funny, he said. Because everything you write is serious. In other words, the meaning, the import, the thoughtfulness are there either way, so why not give people a good chuckle too?

Unleash your opinions. Don’t equivocate. Don’t soft-pedal. People love strong opinions, even ones they disagree with. Ever read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Well, everyone else in the country did, and they all hated it. Right through to the end.

Finally, and most important,

Read your memoir out loud. First to yourself. You will find awkward syntax, repeated words, and spots that bore even you, the person who thought this story was so interesting it was worth writing about. It’s amazing what you’ll find. Then, read it to someone else. Are you rushing to get through extended passages on fly-fishing? Are you thinking you might have gone into slightly too much detail on the childhood history of your great-aunt’s Lithuanian violin teacher? Are you hearing a light snoring sound?

It’s painful, but it works. And it works a lot better before it’s in print. Take it from me.

A Walk Down The Aisle, an excerpt

Filene’s housewares department, mid-July. Adam and I wandered slowly past mahogany-colored cases full of Lenox, Spode, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood. Lights set into glass shelving made the china appear to gleam from within. I hunched close to Adam, as if to hide; I spoke in a hush; I was embarrassed. We were registering. Registering for china was, I thought, about as far as one could get from the idea of marriage as a profound commitment between two adults. We had arrived instead at marriage as a bonanza for greedy kids. We were calmly, matter-of-factly making a list of the things we wanted our guests to give us. It was so blatantly materialistic, so shallow, so . . . much fun.

We loved things and we loved to entertain; picturing our dining room table covered with glinting crystal and china was deeply pleasing. Besides, our bridal consultant, a motherly woman in a swivel chair behind a polished desk, poised to record our choices at her keyboard, acted as if we were being quite sensible, as if making this computerized record of our greed were the natural response of any kind-hearted bride and groom to the be­seeching of bewildered guests. Apparently, we actually owed it to our loved ones to spell out our desires. And she was so solicitous, so helpful. We sat down in the thronelike upholstered chairs across from her and suddenly her desk was transformed into our dining room table. She set a place in front of us so we could see the various elements in combination; she knew we were not registering for silver, but here, just for the full effect, let’s try a set of Reed & Barton next to the Villeroy & Boch. There we are.

Salespeople had been paying a great deal of attention to us since we began making wedding plans. I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t like it; the pressure underlying the pretense of friendship made me nervous. I hadn’t felt this much consumer discomfort since Adam and I had bought our car over a year earlier. That had been long before we even thought about picking a date to wed; looking back, though, I could see the straight line from that moment of merchandise selection to this one. I should have known from the time we strolled into the lot of the Honda dealership that marriage was looming.

It wasn’t because the car was our first major purchase together, but because it was a Honda Civic. The right car for us. The car we liberal, college-educated twenty-somethings were demographically determined to buy. In marketing strategy meetings, they tossed our grinning photo in the Sold pile without a second glance.

It made me uncomfortable to own the perfect car for me. I had become accustomed, in the five or so years I had lived with Adam, to driving his family’s cars. The Greenberg fleet consisted of altogether inappropriate vehicles. The sportiest was an ’85 Oldsmobile sedan, dark blue, with electric locks and windows that thumped and groaned when you used them, as if you were asking rather a lot. Then there was an ’83 Oldsmobile station wagon, the size of two normal cars welded together, whose back seat could have doubled as a guest bedroom. I should not have been driving either of those cars: I was not old enough or patriotic enough or heedless enough of global warming or a good enough parallel parker. And I took great pleasure in driving them anyway. But my favorite vehicle to clamber out of was the Ford three­quarter-ton pickup. I have never thought of myself as slight—especially at college, where I first drove the truck, and where the thickest thing about my female classmates was their winter-weight Lycra—but in the Ford I felt like a mere slip of a thing. This truck was built to accommodate a three­hundred-pound construction worker. This was a bacon-double-cheeseburger truck, and I was a confirmed salad eater. I loved it.

The little green Honda we decided to buy, on the other hand, was definitely vegetable matter. That car and I were meant for each other. When I drove it, I would no longer be a diamond in the rough of a gas-guzzler; I would be a diamond in the shiny new ring of a well-made, fuel-efficient import. No one at the health-food co-op, the public radio station, or the art-house cinema would be surprised to see me drive up: it was precisely the car they would expect. And I like to defy expectation, not satisfy it; my thinking was that the world, especially the corporate world, was too full already of satisfied expectation. I hate to be one of the multitudes lining up at the cineplex on opening day to see an overhyped summer flick designed to appeal to my sex and age group, mechanically handing over eight dollars to enrich both a global media corporation and a monopoly cinema chain. Just as they had banked on. I wanted to be unpredictable, indefinable, uncategorizable.

On the other hand, I was irked that the Honda salesman basically ignored me; he insisted on acting as if Adam alone were making this decision. Adam introduced me as “My girlfriend, Kate” and the salesman clearly couldn’t figure out whether I was the kind of girlfriend who’d accompanied Adam to three overhyped summer flicks or the kind of girlfriend who’d accompanied him to seven family weddings and a funeral. Until then I would have been amused by his confusion; I would have enjoyed wearing the disguise of that hard-shifting, poor-handling word, girlfriend. I would have loved the fact that he couldn’t properly categorize me. But now it frustrated me. Didn’t he know how important I was? Couldn’t he tell I was Adam’s life’s partner, his better half, his . . .

It was then that I yearned for the word wife.

A wedding is essentially all of society’s expectations tied up in a weekend package. And planning a wedding, in a time and a place where most marrying couples are relatively free to do as they please, is largely a matter of deciding how many of those expectations you want to defy and how many you want to fulfill. I realized, when we started to get down to the details that summer, that Adam and I wanted to fulfill a shocking number. I didn’t even consider not wearing white. It took about two minutes for us, confirmed nonbelievers, to decide to have a Jewish wedding. Wedding party? You mean divide our friends into some sort of hierarchy, hurt some people’s feelings, and force others to rent tuxes? Why not?

And there we were at Filene’s, choosing between Lenox’s Hannah Platinum and Federal Platinum as if informing our guests that we would welcome the donation of eighty-dollar place settings (should we ask for twelve or sixteen?) were the most natural thing in the world. . . .

Author bio

Kate Cohen is a writer and editor in Albany, New York. Her first book, The Neppi Modona Diaries, tells the sometimes conflicting stories of a family of Jews who suffered under Fascist racial laws in Italy and went into hiding to survive the Nazi invasion. It also explores her own perspective as a post-Holocaust, non-believing Jew at the end of the twentieth century. In A Walk Down the Aisle: Notes on a Modern Wedding, she chronicles her wedding to a man with whom she had lived for eight years, examining the American wedding ritual, which is as irresistible as it is outdated. Her essays have appeared Fine Cooking, Brain Child Magazine, The Forward, and The Times Union, as well as on 51%, a syndicated public radio show about women, and WAMC’s The Roundtable. She is now working on a memoir about raising her children as atheists. You can read more about her and follow her blog at katecohen.net.

AND THE WINNER IS…

I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment of the series will take on one short topic that addresses how to write memoir, and will include a great big book giveaway.

It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.

The contest for this book is now closed. Please see the next installment of Writing Lessons.

The winner of the book is Leslie. Congratulations, Leslie! I’ll be in touch to send your book.