How to Write Memoir About the Books You Love

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is a writer and educator. She was the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies department at Columbia University, where she is the William B. Ransford Professor of English Literature. The author of numerous books, she’s also the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her new book, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, is just out from W.W. Norton. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write memoir about the books you love.

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Marion: Welcome Farah.

Farah: Hello.

Marion: Great to have you here. I don’t think we can ever overestimate the value of early training as writers. So I want to start by setting up this book by talking about yours. And being in a house with books is a privilege not everyone knows, of course, and being raised by a parent who loves knowledge is also not available to all. But both of these realities were yours. So talk to us please about your father and the influence he provided early on as a way to set up what this book does.

Farah: Sure. I’m happy to. My father was a voracious reader. I think he was a frustrated teacher. He was actually my first teacher, but I think he enjoyed teaching. One of my earlier toys was actually a blackboard with chalk. He had a way of making learning very entertaining and interesting, fun. And also it was a chance to spend time with him. He was a working class man. He worked nine to five or longer, but when he was home this was a chance to spend some precious time with him. So he made learning a sort of integral part of our relationship.

Marion: So your father shaped the way you thought and saw the world in many ways. Kind of curating for you early on through the world of black writers, political thinkers, painters, musicians, and more. And you say in the book that after he died, African American literature became a spiritual and intellectual companion. And that loss of your father when he was young, and you were nine, is profound. The inheritance that you accept, you say, is one of books, knowledge, and inquiry.

But as you state in the book, in a beautiful phrase, you say, quote, “I chased him in the ideas he bequeathed me.” It’s a remarkable sentence, packed with story. And I’d like to unpack it a little bit if you would, because I teach memoir and I’ve written a lot of memoir, and palpating backwards in our lives is the stuff of memoir writers. So reporting on ourselves is too, but it only comes together successfully with such insights as that one. So can you talk about when you realized that you chased him in the ideas that he bequeathed to you? When that idea occurred to you? And how you started to think about that?

Farah: Well, I think without really understanding it, I knew it very early on. Once I finally accepted that my father was gone, I think children have a difficult time understanding the kind of permanence of death. So it took me a little while to accept that he wasn’t coming back. I knew that I was looking for him or looking for as much as I could hold onto him in the things that he left around, the books that he left around, and his own sort of little scribblings and writings and magazines. I was very curious about him. And so I knew that I was looking for him in that way, even as a child.

And then, later on, I realized it in the ways that it shaped my own intellectual interests. My interests in the kinds of music he liked, the kinds of figures he would’ve been interested in. My curiosity about what he might have thought about someone who I discovered and didn’t have a chance to talk with him about. So I think I always had a sense that I was looking for him in ideas and books, and I just got a stronger sense of how that was shaping my own pursuit of knowledge as I got older.

Marion: Yeah. There’s that lovely line in your new book where you just very declaratively say, “I wish that I knew what my father would have thought of the work of Tony Morrison,” and we really sort of sink into that. And it made me think very hard about the things he did introduce you to, and how you’re are making a very strong point in this book about the role of, the profound role, of the wisdom of black life and literature.

So let’s talk, just a little bit, about the structure because how you weave in all of these cultural references I thought was brilliant and very illuminative. So, you say, right at the beginning of the book, you have a really good note at the opening about the book structure and the purpose of that structure. You say that the very structure of this book has the potential to transcend the differences that divide us. And I see that, as I read it, I got it. Can you just explain a little bit more, and maybe throw in a couple of the references that you use, and show how you chose those? Or how one or two of those has the potential to transcend the differences that divide us, please?

Farah: Yes. I mean, I think that one is the sort of personal story that is unique to me and to my family. But that girls love their dads, right? And that’s something that girls who grew up loving their fathers or loving spending time with their fathers or having been taught by them. No matter where they are in the world or what their race or political affiliation is, that’s something that we have in common. And our fathers might have taught us very different things, but you know what it means to have that feeling. And therefore, you can also feel the loss of a parent. If you’ve lost a parent, you can feel that. You share that in common. What I try to share are the fundamental things that make us human across time and across space.

The other thing is people who enjoy books, people who like to read, who find a certain kind of sense of self and joy and insight in reading. I think that those are things, kind of points of commonality. There are some points of commonality that might be the very history that we share, even though our interpretation of that history might be different. You know, here was a black man in Philadelphia who loved the founding fathers and taught his daughter about them by taking her to Independence Mall. So you don’t expect that to go where it goes in the book. You don’t expect that to go through the level of critique of where it goes, but that’s a starting point I think that many people might also share.

Marion: Yes. And I love your point about those of us who grew up loving their fathers. I loved my father dearly. And he was a writer, and it’s from him that I learned so much about storytelling. And I think that active love that we bring forward from the love of our fathers is so palpable in this book. We see it. And I think it’s also one of the things that fascinates me about the book because I’m a memoir teacher and I’m a memoir coach, and I have literally lost count of the number of times a writer has pitched me the idea of a book of telling her tale based on the book she has read. And how many times I’ve talked to people out of that idea after seeing early drafts that resemble little more than a boastful stroll through somebody’s bookshelves. It’s like, oh, then I read this, and then I read this. And this book is not that at all.

And in part, it’s elevated by the quality of the writing. Absolutely. But I would also argue that it thoroughly bypasses that pothole by you choosing to deconstruct freedom, rage, justice, and more on its pages. As you just referenced. Where we end up with that sort of founding their story, it’s a deconstruction of a lot of things that we’ve been taught. It’s layered like, I don’t know, like a good French pastry, this book. So if you would share with us this decision to layer it with memoir cultural references and personal reflection.

Farah: Right. Oh, well. I think that it was a decision that I made when I decided to bring all of myself to the page. And what I mean by that is I’m a trained academic and a scholar, and trained as a literary scholar and a critic. That comes from a true love of the material. And I’m a teacher and I love teaching. I’m very passionate about teaching and bringing together books from different eras.

I’m also a reader who fell in love with literature long before I ever knew what a college professor was. And that’s a gift that was given to me by my father and my teachers. And so it was really trying to be very honest about who I am in the world on the page because often I separated those identities. And I thought I’m going to bring it all to the page, and believe that readers will be prepared to engage all of what I have to offer. I remember when I first thought that I was going to make this memoir as well as a little bit of cultural history, as well as a way of deconstructing ideas.

My agent, Tanya McKinnon, who is very supportive, she said to me, that’s three books. She was like, that’s three different books. Why don’t we just make it into two books? And you write one about the literature, and then you can write the memoir. I promised her that I would do that, and then I just couldn’t do it, and she stuck by me. And fortunately, my editor agreed that they were ideas, maybe three strands, but that they all belonged in the same book. But I think it was trying to be true to who I was as a person in the world. It was all of those things. And trusting that my reader, if I cared about them, and cared about telling the story, that they would follow along.

Marion: Yeah, and it’s such great advice for a writer. Be true to who you are, be true to what interests you, be true to what you love. We frequently say to people write the book that you want to read, but it’s not bad advice. It’s absolutely, what have you got on you? And what can you annotate? What can you draw from? And I was fascinated in your gorgeous work, a previous book, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II. You’re paraphrasing James Baldwin when you write that the three subjects of that book, the choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, the writer Ann Petry, and the composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, were not willing to forget or wholly forgive America’s historical transgressions. You write, but who are devoted to helping this nation achieve itself. And I just loved that phrase because it seems to me this new book, Read Until You Understand, is very much set on that goal of helping this nation to achieve itself. Which we cannot do until we get our story right.

But you know, that’s me. So by telling this tale… That’s what I think. I wonder by telling this tale, sort of, traveling hand over hand along some of the profound wisdom of black life and literature, was that part of your intent? Or what was your intent? I mean, you say to reveal yourself, but what about for us? What was the transaction you hoped that you’d have with the reader?

Farah: Oh, it was absolutely part of my intent. I mean, I think that on the one hand I wanted to tell the story about my father and my relationship to him. But so I had a particular understanding about the history of the nation and about the books that I wanted to write about. And that understanding was as informed by my father as it was by any of my education, formal education or training. I started writing this book during the 2016 election and partly-

Marion: Oh, Yes.

Farah: …exactly. And partly it was because I thought, uh-oh wait. I think that we don’t really understand what democracy is. I think that we play lip service to it, but we don’t really understand it. And that a lot of people have things to teach us about democracy. That ideal that we strive for. And we could learn it from the veterans of World War II. We could learn it from previous presidents. And we could learn it from anonymous groups of African Americans who have struggled to try to make the nation live up to its ideals.

And I thought, if I ask that body of work, the famous writers, the not so famous people who were in movements, what do you have to teach us about the value and the importance of democracy? Which even in 2016, I felt like we might be losing. That was one of the driving forces of the book. It was one of the questions that I asked of the books and the authors and the songwriters and the people who I wanted to share on the pages of the book.

Marion: Good. And I have to tell you, reading this book caused me to quill together my own cultural references in a new way. And re-appreciate the black American writers and musicians whose work populate my very self. I was reading it and suddenly I was literally hurled back to this moment in my big sister’s bedroom, listening to her stereo when she deemed me like old enough, or cool enough, or in need enough to read her copy of the paperback of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. And I remember how in her estimation, when I was finished with that, she said, “okay, now it’s time for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” And these were not books I was given in school. And how at the time she also introduced me the music of Sonny Rollins. I even remember the song, “Playing in the Yard,” right? So all of this came back to me as I was reading your book and I thought, wow, that memory’s coming to me whole cloth.

In other words, your book reawakened for me, the impact of reading outside my very white life and how that tipped me into a sort of different form of inquiry in this world. And while I doubt you had me in particular in mind while you were writing this book, your idea and execution of that idea had a really profound effect.

So let’s talk about the need for susceptibility on the part of the writer. I think that’s the word I mean, susceptibility. We have these ideas. Like you had this idea, I’m going to write from my very full self, my holistic view of me. I’m going to write about this America. I’m going to write starting in 2016. This idea that the story of America needs to be told as a memoir that combines your loss of your father with these profound works from black life and literature, we have to be susceptible to these ideas or else we’ll never write. So maybe you wouldn’t use this word susceptible. Maybe you’d use the word open, but can you talk a little bit about being susceptible to one’s own ideas, please? And how you give yourself permission to say yes.

Farah: Oh yes. First, let me say I’m just thrilled that it sent you back to your own experiences and references, and that’s the other thing that I would hope that it would do. So I do think that one has to be open. You have to be completely open. You have to be open to the ideas as they come to you. You have to be open to things changing. Your understanding changing when you play very close attention to them. There’s a vulnerability, and even a fear, that you have when you do this kind of writing, but you have to trust it.

I just felt that I had to trust the process of where it was leading me. And sometimes, it led me to tell things about my family or my community that I didn’t initially feel comfortable saying on the page, but I knew that the story demanded that I do it. It had me think about ideas that I had taken for granted and have to look back and say, well, maybe I got that wrong. Maybe, I didn’t fully understand it. Or now that I look at it from this vantage point, I see it differently. I think susceptibility and openness is the exact word. It’s one of the most important parts of the process.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think it is too. We have these ideas and we kind of look around and we think, is that just crazy? Or can I do that? Or-

Farah: Right.

Marion: … I’m always fascinated by those moments and who you pitch it to first. Just to make sure you’ve not lost your mind entirely, or it’s too farfetched. Who’d you pitch this to first? This idea of this book?

Farah: Wow. I guess I had been talking about it to my husband, who’s also a writer, and he definitely got the memoir more part. I don’t think he really got what I wanted to do with the literature until he was able to read some of it. So he got it. I talked about it to my agent, who’s also a friend.

But there were also a group of women who invited me to join a writing group that they were part of, it was for four women, who had been meeting for years. I was the new person and they had written in many genres, including memoir. And I think it was the fact that it didn’t seem crazy to of them. I’d start off with telling a story about my father and I’d share that piece. And then I’d have a little piece about James Baldwin and I’m like, this is from the same book. And they were like, keep going. Keep going, it works. And I think that really helped me. And it was a very kind of intimate and safe space to do that.

And then my mother, I talked with her about what I wanted to do and shared it with her. And she said that she loved the way it sounds, the writing sound as I read it to her, and she was ready for me to tell parts of our story in the way that I did. So yeah. I had a different group kind of moving, moving pieces, all who I checked in with occasionally.

Marion: Oh, that’s lovely. And your mother is a beautiful character in this book. Near the end of the book, late in the book, we see her sewing and we see that sewing mimics what you say, what notebook stationary and writing pens do for you. They bring you, as you say, that quiet high, that engulfs you both and you’re separate, but similar activities.

So just to dig a little deeper in that whole, is this nuts or what? Kind of moment when we have as writers, let’s talk about that realization for a second. About those realizations, like that deliver to the soul of the reader, the permission to see ourselves here too in our own inheritances, and what we do with them as we live. Because I think of these as far more important inheritances than any teacup or piece of silver. This real laying on of hands.

So if you remember that moment, when you realized that continuum from her sewing to your writing, for instance. Like, were you writing on the subway and did you scribble it down? Were you chopping vegetables? I mean, do you remember maybe that moment or some other moment? Cause I’d be just interested in helping young writers know that sometimes times you’re chopping vegetables when this stuff comes to you. You’ve got to be ready.

Farah: Oh yeah. You got to be ready. It comes to you. And this is what I always say. Okay, there’s the writing you’re doing when you are sitting at the computer or you have your pencil and your pad, that’s definitely writing. But sometimes the best moments come to me, I love what you said about where you’re sitting on the subway, they come at those times. They come when you’re sitting on the subway. They come when you’re sitting in a movie theater, they come when you’re sitting at a concert. And I was finishing this book during the pandemic, so I was very isolated. I’d get out and go for wall walks. And I tell you, the very last paragraph of the last page came to me on one of those walks. And I sat down on a bench in an empty park and I wrote it on my phone. Like typing it on my phone. You know?

Marion: Yep.

Farah: And so, you’re always writing and sometimes the best things come to you, the best realizations, a sentence. You don’t know how you’re going to get to that sentence, but it’s there and you know that you’ve got to get there. That’s the way that last paragraph came to me. And I think it’s the little kind of mundane things when you’re writing about your life or you’re writing memoir that can be most insightful.

So what did all of those hours sitting there or watching my mother when she seemed to just be in the zone when she was sewing. And the closest I could come to ever feeling that way because I don’t sew was how I feel when I reach a certain place writing. And I’ve known that for a long, long time. I used to call it just being in a flow. And I think there is a science to it where you know, the adrenaline is flowing or something. But those realizations and moments come to you. When you’re going for a walk, you’re writing. When you’re looking at the tree, you’re writing. When you’re daydreaming, you’re writing. It’s all there.

Marion: It is. I find it comes to me when I’m engaged in some fairly dangerous activities, like driving a car or chopping vegetables. I have this one knife that’s so scary. And every time I take it out, I think maybe I’ll write something really good while I’m almost taking the end of my fingers off because you’re so concentrated on not taking your fingers off that the artistic part seems to be flying around doing stuff. It’s great, but you’ve got to be ready.

And I don’t think that’s illegitimate. I think that’s real. I think that’s writing, and I think that’s what you just said, which I just so appreciate. And so you mentioned the end of the book, and you end the book with a gorgeous look at gardening. And I garden, and it’s the ultimate laying on of hands with plants divided and given to family and friends. My whole garden is an annotation of my life. This one came from my sister. This one came from the neighbor next door. This, Emily Dickinson grew, this one … whatever. And gardens reflect our community, and I cannot imagine a better place to end this book as it lands us rather gently on this very troubled earth with the promise of what we can yet grow if we get to work. That’s how it felt to me.

So getting out of this book cannot have been easy. There are so many other cultural references you might have wanted to make. So can you talk about that decision to end in the shared experience of the soil?

Farah: So when I started the book, I knew that I wanted to end on the concept of grace. I knew that’s where it was going. And I had a feeling that I was going to end with gardens, with the gardens of the women in my family. I knew that was important. I had no idea that I was going to end with my mother’s garden in the pandemic because we didn’t see the pandemic. Who knew?

Marion: Right.

Farah: But it seemed to be perfect because it was the subject of the chapter and because it brought together so many threads, and I wanted to end on that sort of image of a community. A chosen family, both biological kin and neighbors. A multiracial group of people who are helping this older woman create her pandemic garden, those were all the threads. It seemed like a gift. It was a gift to bring those things together.

And I also wanted to end on something very sort of local and mundane. It was a grand idea. The concept of grace is a grand idea. But this little urban garden in a woman’s backyard, where she is gifted all of these things to grow. Where she’s reminded of her loved ones who have passed on, that’s something that we could all touch. No matter who we are or where we are, that’s something that we could all touch. And it was important to me to end in that way.

Marion: Oh, yes. And it works perfectly. It just leaves us in the best place of our own inquiry, I think. And I was so grateful, and I was really surprised too. I was really surprised, and that was delightful. To be surprised at the end of this book. And I’ve interviewed a lot of memoirists, and it turns out I end up asking this question of all of them. And I think it has to do with strategies and what we ask of a memoir writer when she mines a trauma in her life.

And you open this book and bring your father all the way through this book early in the book, you recollect the death of your father and the mercy that was, and was not, shown to him and your family as he lay in desperate need of medical help. You witnessed a great deal of this. So when we go back and look, as writers, are we reanimating our lives? Or does the act of writing about it require that we keep our distance and have a look at it from here? In other words, what advice would you give to young writers who are going back to have a look?

Farah: That’s such a good question. Oh my goodness. My experience is that we are doing both. That on the one hand, you go back, and you do relive a part of it. It’s very painful. It’s not as painful as it was when it happened, but it does take you back to that. Writing about it gives you some modicum of control over it. And I think though that it absolutely requires a kind of stepping back and a distance so that you, sort of, look at yourself. It’s sort of a practice that I learned with meditation, trying to quiet and still my mind. I used to think, oh, I’m trying to get a blank mind. And then I realized I’m never going to get a blank mind, but what I can do is-

Marion: Yeah.

Farah: …I can watch it. Right? I can watch it like a movie. That’s what I can do. Like, “Oh, isn’t that interesting. Look at that. Oh, okay.” Instead of being caught up in the whirlwind of it. I can actually sit back and kind of just watch it, and it will pass by, and then there’ll be some quiet, and then something else will come. And so, that’s what I think happens is that in writing it, you allow yourself the distance to step back and watch yourself during this very traumatic period or very joyful period. You do need that distance, but it’s a distance, for me, that came after sort of reentering the reality of that moment.

Marion: Oh, that is the perfect answer. And I’m so grateful for it and for you. I’ll wrap it up there, and thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the book. Thank you for the very wise conversation, and the help you’ve been giving to writers who are going to be clinging to every word. Thank you, Farah, and good luck with the book. I just hope you sell a billion copies of it, and I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Farah: Well, thank you so much. I’ve so enjoyed this conversation.

Marion: You’re most welcome. The writer was Farah Jasmine Griffin, whose book, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, is just out from W.W. Norton. Follow her on Twitter at F Jasmine G.

I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty on any of the available platforms and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.