How to Report On Our Lives, With Marion Roach Smith and David Leite

HOW TO REPORT ON OUR LIVES is a major theme for all memoir writers. Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording for content and clarity).

David:  Today, it’s just you and me, Marion. And we’re talking about how we report on our lives when we write memoir. And you’ve done it and I’ve done it, and I think we’ve got some solid tips here for anyone interested in writing about what they do.

Marion:  So David, I was thinking the other day that I once took someone to a baseball game in New York City who was from Switzerland and I was explaining things like the infield, fly rule, and designated hitter rule. We were at about the eighth inning and he turns to me and he says, “But Marion, what’s a base?” So, in other words, I had neglected to explain the basics.

Marion:  One of the things I think people want to hear stories about is, “Do you remember that when you’re writing memoir?” “Boy, you have an amazing memory.” people say to me sometimes. And I say, “Oh no, no, no, I’m sorry, I forgot to explain the basics to you. I don’t in fact. What I do is a lot of reporting.” And everyone’s really surprised to hear that in memoirs. So I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about that.

David:   Sure. How did you do your reporting on your first memoir about your mother and Alzheimer’s? How did you, because she had passed when you wrote the book, correct?

Marion:  No, she was, when I wrote the book, I was actively living and what I call writing in real time. The worst possible circumstances. My father had just died, I’m 26 years old. She’s in her early 50s, she’s got Alzheimer’s disease. We’re trying to afford her care, live with her for the first seven years of the illness until at 56 she went into a nursing home. So I’m taking notes to write a piece in The New York Times Magazine that appeared, that started my first book. And I’m doing a lot of reporting for that because I’m a very, very young person at the New York Times at the time, and I’m interviewing brain scientists and that. That’s a different kind of reporting.

David: Let me ask you, was your mom viable with her memory? Were you able to ask her questions?

Marion:  Not within the first few years. Not by the time I sat down to write it. By the time I had published the book, she didn’t know who I was.

David:   Ooh. Yeah.

Marion:  And so, a really vital source was lost to me. And I was just at the age, maybe you were like this too at 26 years old, I hadn’t paid a bit of attention to my parents. It’s not like I had written down my parent’s lives stories. And this is an essential thing — knowing how to report on our own lives when writing memoir.

David: Except all the therapy hours that I put against it. But beyond that-

Marion:  Right. I wasn’t in therapy, well, actually I was. But anyway, that’s a different story. David don’t-

David:  That’s another podcast.

Marion:  Writers and therapy. Boy, that’ll blow up the internet. I needed to kind of reconstruct her life so you could fall in love with her before I took her away. And that is a whopper of an assignment and it has nothing to do with memory, it has everything to do with interviewing the people who knew her. So I made a list of her friends and her friends told me stories. And so that’s how it started. So, can I give you an example?

David:   Absolutely. Please.

Marion:  So for instance, my sister and I had a very different experience with my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. My mother was my best friend. She was my sailing partner, she was my tennis partner. We lived together, we did things together. I was still very young when she got sick. And so, I was unable to cope. I just fell apart completely when she got diagnosed. My sister who didn’t much like my mother was able to move home, take care of everything, make spreadsheets, get the damn job done.

Marion:  And I couldn’t really understand it until I interviewed one of my mother’s best friends who had known my mother since they were infants together. And she told me that when my mom first gave birth to my sister, who is the older child, my sister was six pounds, and my mother was terrified of her that she would break her. And so, my grandmother, my mother’s mother got sick of watching my mother not be able to pick up this infant and scooped her up. And guess who my sister bonded with?

David:   Of course, the grandmother.

Marion:  Never connected with my mother, never in her life had the kind of relationship I did. When I was born, I was 10 pounds with a big mop of curly red hair. And my mother immediately, according to her friend, dubbed me her durable kit. So guess who bonded with whom? And guess what the byproduct of that is? Now, I never knew that story. And so, once you know stories like that, you can start to build a narrative, right?

David:  Yes.

Marion:  So when we were doing, we were working together on your book, you have this marvelous detail that I have literally, I literally think of it every single day because-

David:  Oh my.

Marion: Yeah. Everyday. When I go to reach for my kitchen knife, which I now refer to as my kitchen knife because it’s the only knife I use. And why is that David that I use this one kitchen knife?

David: Because that’s what people do and you’re probably being reminded of my mother who has had one knife for her entire life from 1965 until now. It’s one knife and my father, every six months or so goes downstairs and he files off a little bit more to sharpen it. And it is so thin now, it’s maybe three quarters of an inch and it’s very long and it’s her one knife. And everything that she ever made for us came through by with that knife.

Marion:  And do you remember because I remember the moment when I said to you, your mother has only one kitchen knife and you grew up to be this famous cook.

David:  Right.

Marion:  There was this dead silence on the phone. Like I don’t think you saw it as the totemic detail.

David:  I did not. I did not see the connection because what it is, it’s a connection about disconnection. She has this knife, it’s the one knife, and here I am with more knives than I know what to do with. And so that idea that there was such a difference, I wasn’t seeing it as a connection. I saw ii as the difference. And now it has become incredibly totemic and it’s one of the things that I think, it’s like a tent pole in the book. So much of that sort of hangs on that tent pole.

Marion:  So sometimes we do our own reporting on our own lives and sometimes we working with another human being, have those details emphasized for us. Like you and I then, well you did, but I said to you, now sculpt down this section so that that knife percolates up off the page.

David:   Exactly.

Marion:    And the reporting is, I think of reporting as being all in that. Those two experiences though they’re very different, mine with my mother’s dear old friend and you with me, but they both live under the house of finding your details. In other words, you had put it in there as a small phrase in the middle of a paragraph and we transposed it to a much higher key.

David:   Right.

Marion:  But it’s about reporting on our own lives.

David:   We gave it the attention that it deserved in order for using your term of basis, for the reader to get to first base and then start moving and heading towards second base. It’s just one of those things.

Marion:  Exactly. My mother was a very thoughtful kid apparently. This is another detail, her other friend Janet told me that my mother’s mother used to love to sew my mother’s prom dresses. And she would put rosettes along the scoop neck line. And my mother used to carry her evening bag, a pair of cuticle scissors and a needle and thread. And on the way to the dances, she would cut off the rosettes because she didn’t like them, but she would sew them on the way back home.

David:  That’s a great detail. That says so much about your mom.

Marion:  Wow, right? Her considerate response to her mother with whom she shared no aesthetic but from whom she would not like to have a break.

David:   You know what’s interesting, that brings up a very important point. When I’m reading people’s work published and unpublished, I’m not a fan of when someone describes a parent or a person and they say, my mother was very thrifty. She was the kind of person who would decide her own dress and how she wore it. Because what you’re doing is you’re telling me. When you start telling me and getting me, I was right there in that car on the way to the dance and I’m seeing your mother cutting those things off and then putting them back on. And that says so much. So we can really get a lot about character through action and through dialogue.

Marion:  Absolutely. When you were eight, you weren’t standing there with a notebook unless you were a little weirdo.

David:   No, of course not. And that’s what I call literary forensics because when I was doing my, I love that term, literary forensics. When I was dealing with my stuff, which is of course the bipolar and dealing with coming out of the closet and dealing with being Portuguese and not wanting to be Portuguese, there were so many things that I had to cram in there. And it’s interesting because a lot of my readers have said that the first third of the book is so intensely visceral and sensory, and then they criticize it, I’ve gotten criticized a lot for this, that the middle part, there’s not the sensory element. It’s because all the sensory stuff turned inward on me because I was trying to examine myself and figure it out.

David:   So when things were going outward for the first third of the book especially, and also later, I had to rely upon, I looked at journals, I read my journals, which I started keeping at about 17 years. Of course, photographs. And medical records, psychiatric medical records and school records. And then I started doing things, of course, newspaper articles, people do that too. But I started walking the halls of my junior high in my 50s. And I went to, I don’t remember where my locker, I don’t remember my locker, but I know where it was in the hallway, and then I went to Mrs. Fry’s English class, which I have no idea what it is now. I went to the art room, I went to the library. So therefore I could describe it more accurately and I took photographs.

Marion:  I love that.

David:   And I think one of the most amazing things for me was my mother used to wear this big smiley face. Remember in the 70s, smiley faces, have a good day?

Marion: I do, unfortunately. Yes.

David:  The yellow with the big smile. She wore a big button on her purse. She had a purse that had a long strap and it kind of was hip level but it went over her shoulder, and there was a big smiley face on it. And as I was going through a lot of photographs around the time where I went to the hospital, the children’s hospital for evaluation, I realized when I saw the photograph, I remembered that purse, I forgot entirely about it. So I was able to bring the juxtaposition of that purse that she hugged. And on that smiley face, while we have this very somber psychiatrist telling me that I have got unresolved rage and unresolved anger at my parents.

Marion:  When you were a little kid?

David:  Yeah. And I was 13 years old. The juxtaposition of that smiley face looking at me, I think made it such a richer moment. And I would have forgotten entirely. So, we have to use everything at our disposal in order to pull the story together. And of course, nowadays, it’s so much easier because everyone’s shooting everything on their phone. So you have a lot of that. And of course, I barely had a new phone, a cell phone.

David:  So I think it’s interesting how we can, we can do it, and I even say in the author’s note of my book that when it was something kind of inconsequential like the color of the inside of a restaurant or what someone was wearing, sometimes I just guessed based upon what I knew of the time because those are inconsequential details. But they’re details that sort of make up the error. So to say that somebody was wearing bell bottoms, which I had, swayed bell bottoms, not swayed bell bottoms, no, brushed cotton bell bottoms.

Marion:  Brushed cotton bell bottoms with a suede fringe vest. Come on.

David:  That bespeaks the 70s.

Marion:  It does.

David:   And I think those are the kinds of things that as writers, it’s our job to place a reader in the, kind of like the latitude and longitude of the story.

Marion:  And if you don’t know what those coordinates are, you’ve got to go get them. It’s not accuracy for what dress was I wearing that day. I always say to people, the accuracy really becomes important in terms of driving forward the argument. So, in other words, I have to show you in my first book that the loss that I experienced of this woman was of such value to me that I did crack up. And that’s an important thing. So you have to care about her. So to use, how many stories did I accumulate when I interviewed her friends? 150. How many did I use? Three.

David:  Yeah. But what those 150 did was corroborate and corroborate and corroborate.

Marion:  They did for me, and then I had to choose which ones best suit the argument going forward, which ones best illustrate the woman I’m trying to build for you. So there’s some choice.

David:   And for me with my mom, my mom is very fastidious and very neat and very put together. And I wanted to have that, again, the juxtaposition of a son falling apart in the presence of a woman who was very neatly put together and somewhat concerned with her external appearance, where I’m like blubbering left and right. I didn’t care, I just was desperate to get help. So those things, they do, they move this story forward and they do apply, they apply to your argument of your story. And at the same time, they do tell so much about the character.

Marion:  I think so. And people don’t realize I think a lot of the time, especially when writing memoir, that you can do the kind of research that you just touched on. You can walk the hall of your junior high. You can look in your yearbook. You can call your sister and ask her, what was the name of the dog that bit me when I was a kid? You can look in a phone book, I found out doing research on the house in which I currently live, that it was a speakeasy during prohibition. One of these days I’ll write about that.

Marion:  But in terms of what you can do, it’s almost limitless. And the fact is you need that especially in memoir to make your argument. You don’t need it because you don’t want to just throw in every detail. This is not a laundry basket, which we just toss all the clothes, but you’re building a story here and interviewing friends, talking to family. Ancestry.com is kind of interesting in terms of addresses I’ve found for people there.

David:   I’m getting into that. Yes, I have found that to be very fascinating. Yes.

Marion:  Yes. I think it’s a great resource for memoir writers more and more every day. When I initially heard about genealogy and memoir writers, I was less interested because I don’t want you to just tell me who begat whom, but I am interested in you having a working knowledge of where your people are from.

David:   Exactly. Because there might be themes that run in your family that you don’t realize.

Marion:  Right. My father lived all over in New York but it was poor New York. Always in apartments that were very much tenements when he was a young man in New York. That was confirmed for me by seeing the census going through the 20th century. And that’s confirming its also characterization.

David:  Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s interesting talking about, you know, not going all over the place with your book and literally visiting all the places. You can do that. Sometimes you can overdo it. And I know when I was writing the epilogue to my book, because it ends in a nice place, but I just felt that there wasn’t this wrap up. I didn’t feel like, oh, I’m done. So, I was going to go and visit the movie theater where I had my first panic attack in Fall River, Massachusetts. I was going to visit Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I went to school at Carnegie Mellon. I was going to go back to Rochester Institute of Technology. All the different places that I talk about in the book and therefore, write about what it felt like to be an adult going back to these places after all the trauma was over.

David:   And that I thought, first of all, was an expensive proposition. And I thought, is that really going to finish the story? And so, what I did instead, instead of visiting places, I visited myself in the past. My 11 year old self, I visited-

Marion:  Interesting.

David: … and saw myself pacing outside of the movie theater, which I did and trying to communicate. And then I saw myself later when I was 21 and having panic attacks and ended up being very depressed. And then another time when I was close to wanting to kill myself and visiting and saying, okay, it’s going to be okay and then following myself and showing the growth till finally my younger self understands what I’ve been trying to say all along. So, it was interesting to visit myself.

Marion:  That’s so generous of you to share with people. I love that. And I think you’re right because I hear, trust me, I talk to writers, you know, I talk to many writers every month in my work, working one on one with writers. And people come up with these, first of all, they’ve got these grand schemes to build an office. And I always say, stop it right now. Just find a corner of your dining room table and get to work. Let’s stop putting off the work. And then they start with their grand scheme of where they’re going to go. This isn’t a literary pilgrimage, your life. You do have, it’s just like Dorothy and her red shoes, you have on you right now everything you need to know, right?

David:  Yes.

Marion:  And if you can visit that, and if there are some visual cues to that, childhood photos are terrific. But really try reading them. I mean, don’t just show them to me. You’ve got to read them for what the content is. And it makes a big difference. So honestly, I’m glad you had that conversion that you didn’t feel you had to make that trip because those trips can be very hollow for a lot of people. It would cast you out of your work.

David:   I think so because it would be about visiting a place, and I’d be writing about a place when the whole book was about coming to accept myself. So that’s why I decided to turn inward and visit myself and finally wrap up. It was very, it was a very powerful piece of the book to write. I remember when I was done and I finished it, I was weeping and weeping and weeping because it was just over. And as you know, for weeks and weeks and weeks after I finished the book, anytime we would talk about it, I just started, I fell apart. Well, if I read it in class, I just could not hold it together.

Marion:   Well, that makes perfect sense because what you did was you integrated. And I mean, I had the great good fortune of watching a man integrate what he wanted to be with what he knew with what he was. I mean, there was a remarkable process that I got to witness and it was one of integration. And you can. I mean, on that topic though of visiting, I have to say, I wrote a book that’s called The Roots of Desire, that’s the history of red hair. And I traveled all over the place looking at art and dance and culture and all of these things. But I also traveled to some of my dead family that I’d never knew. I traveled to some of their spots.

Marion:  And so for instance, I went to the dock that my grandmother, my red-haired grandmother stood on in England, in Liverpool, from where she took off by herself with no one else in her family with her to come to America. And that was impressive because I did some research and that the view that she had as she left behind the dock at Liverpool was the view that I was seeing that day. And to be able to see what she saw and to know that she never saw it again was remarkably poignant for me. Did it inform the book? I’d like to think it did but it’s not for me to appropriate her story. But it was for me to try to see what I could gather there. That one was a flyer. And I announced to my family, I was going off on this two week trip by myself through these spots in England. I think my husband who’s a newspaper editor was deeply suspicious that I wouldn’t find anything.

I found a great deal. I found a sensibility. I found for instance, however, why it is that my grandfather who was left in charge of feeding us when we were kids when my parents were both working, my English grandfather, what a story he is, made me bake bean sandwiches every morning. Now, can you imagine when you get to third grade cafeteria in a New York City public school and you go to take your sandwich out and all the beans fall onto the table? How much fun the little kids make of you, right? And then all the bodily function noises that used to follow me down the hall and they’d make fun of me.

Yeah. Well, I never understood this and I totally blocked it, not even therapy on [inaudible 00:21:46]. Till I went to Southport, England and they’re on the menu as I was sitting having my lunch by myself was beans and toast.

David:  Isn’t that interesting.

Marion:  And so he was trying to recreate something for himself.

David:  Exactly. And you were there to experience it but that was really about him.

Marion:  Yes. Now I understand it and now I love it. But at the time in third grade, I didn’t love it so much. I have to say.

David:   That’s like me eating octopus when I was six years old. What kid wants to eat octopus? But you know, we had to eat it. But visiting is interesting because in my book, I go back and I visit for the very first time and only time, the house my father was born and raised in in a very, very small town on the Island of San Miguel in the Azores.

Marion:  This story always makes me cry.

David:  I know because it’s, seeing the house because I’d heard of what the house looked like, the dirt floors, the rock walls, the wall oven and where my grandmother made everything in that wall oven. And then upstairs was nothing more than a loft where all five kids slept. And then I knocked the door and it was a cousin of a cousin, cousin of my grandfather, I believe. So, she finally realized who we were. So she invited us in and there was nothing that looked remotely familiar to what I had always imagined. And I thought that, oh gosh, maybe my dad was off or maybe I didn’t understand it.

So I said to her, I said, is the wall oven still here? And I’ll never forget, she looked so proud and she said, si. And she had Alan and me move the stove and also this big metal sheet that was behind the stove. And in the wall was the wall oven, which still had char marks and still had wood in it. And it was the connection to my grandmother, my father’s mother, and the connection to these people who all of my life I thought were just, we ignorant immigrants. I suddenly realized the courage it took, the intense immense courage it took to leave that place, never turn back with little if any money in your pocket and start again in a new country where you don’t know the language. And I thought, wow. And it gave me such respect.

So sometimes that reconnecting with something like you did with your grandmother standing there on the dock from where she left to come to America and being in my father’s house is, it closes a circle. And I have to say, I think when you do any kind of memoir writing, whether it be an essay or a blog post or a book, you are forever changed. You’re not the same person who started it.

Marion:  Absolutely. The single greatest portal to self-understanding is writing about your life and going in there and really getting it. And while in the first couple of drafts, it may resemble nothing more than a series of Polaroids, in other words, you just give us this image, this image, this image. As you move through it, you will learn about yourself.

This is what I always say to my students is be prepared because your argument is going to change as you write your book. It better because you’re about to learn a great deal about yourself, and while you thought this was a story of mercy, it’s really about the complexities of forgiveness. And this is a very different story than just granting somebody mercy. It’s about how damn difficult it is to do so. And the steps along the way to that are what you go discover if you do a little reporting. Remembering how hurt you were or remembering how damaged you were by somebody else’s behavior can be ascertained by talking to friends. How crazy was I in my 20s you might ask somebody.

Marion:   Now, that being said, you’ve got to remember to take what some people say with a grain of salt. I was at a dinner party recently. My sister was there and I was telling a story and suddenly she says, none of that is true, none of that happened.

David:   I was there, I saw it, it happened.

Marion:  Right. I said to her, you know, and this is what I always say to the memoir writers with whom I work, from that moment on, you are allowed to say, or from this moment on, you’re allowed to say to anyone who says that, you’re right, that’s not the way it happened to you. That’s the way it happened to me. But she and I had this standing joke that my second grade best friend was is imaginary and he’s not imaginary. I can drive you to his house. But she will never relent on this topic. And one of these days I’m going to stuff her in the car and drive to drive to his house and reacquaint myself with him.

But it is a fascinating world as we try to gather our details for our stories. And honestly, in the years, many, many years, more than 20 years of working with writers, I have rarely been as touched as I was by your mother’s life.

David:  That’s wonderful, thank you.

Marion:  And how deeply it led, but it also, I mean not to beat this metaphor to death, it allowed us to cut through what the extraneous aspects of that story and pair down to this glorious thing, which is also the same story in the wall stove, which is that you did begin to find your true home when you recognized what food and cooking meant to you and when you reclaimed that and then repurposed it to be David’s cooking and not the cooking that was just done in that wall stove or the cooking that was just done with your mother with that one knife. There’s an act three to that story and it’s what David did with that cooking and that’s when those details are recalled by the reader and it becomes the two plus two plus two equals this, this current writer who has inhabited his Portuguese self, inhabited his bipolar self, inhabited his gay self, all through the ability to say I am a cook.

David: And all of that came, to our initial point, it all comes from that literary forensics of however you get to that point, whether it be through photographs, interviews of friends, records, medical records, walking through schools, walking through towns, all that is what builds and gets you as a writer.

And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Until next time, thank you for listening.

Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page. 

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