Writing About Writing a Memoir But Not Writing a Memoir

Once you have finished your “core dump,” otherwise known as your “pre-first” draft, then you reread what you’ve written and take notes on it. I like to print mine out and scribble right on the pages — things I’d like to add, connections I see between sections, parts I should take out.

Then I go through the material and isolate the turning points of the story. These are the parts of the narrative where things change for the protagonist — either they are beset by an external change, like the introduction of an abusive family member, or they undergo some internal change, like the decision to leave said family. Basically, these are the “events” of one’s life.

Some of the turning points in this narrative:

• I call Adult Protective Services for the first time
• I get a phone call from my mother’s fifth husband telling me she’s dead
• I take my mother to a neurologist to get her back on her Multiple Sclerosis medication
• I try to clean their house myself; all of the specific things I see, how they relate to events of the past, contrast to the present
• The extreme cleaner tells me that nothing can be done, I should give up
• My mother refuses to go to her mother’s funeral; the contrast to my actions w/r/t her memorial (arranging everything, caring the most)
• I go looking for and find an article about her death and the squalid conditions she was found in (intro of “flying maggots” motif — possible title?)
• I meet my mother’s new boyfriend
• My mother hangs up on me
• I write a book about her before she dies, then I write another/the same book after her after she dies, then I am supposedly not writing about her anymore
• The narrator, in the present, has to choose whether to pursue the issue of the time of death and the decomposition of the body, or not
• The narrator, in the past, had a beloved shrink for 17 years, a shrink who fought with the narrator to accept her mother’s profound mental illness and the effect it had on her, the narrator’s, life
• The beloved shrink began displaying symptoms of rapid onset dementia and became another bitter, paranoid, mentally ill woman for the narrator to take care of
• After several almost-attempts at action, the detective at the ASPCA says he will raid my mother’s home and remove the cats on Thursday, but he doesn’t know what time, so I jump on a train to her suburb and set up camp in the station waiting room, ready to get to the house the second he calls, and I spend the whole day there, ashamed of my loitering; compare to being a teenager and being “housing insecure” and needing to sit sheepishly in public places for a long time for lack of anywhere to go; parallel is that my mother “caused” both situations; underlying message is that I have not changed in the 25 years between these scenes
• Ray tracks cat shit through a diner and I am ashamed of him but also protective but also homicidal
• I go to my mother’s fifth wedding and it is weird and sad and anti-climactic
• I decide I can’t write about this anymore
• I decide I can’t write about this anymore
• I decide I can’t write about this anymore
• I write about it some more

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Once you have finished this step, you put these story points in chronological order. You don’t have to write the memoir in chronological order; you don’t have to present it in chronological order. But you have to see it that way, so that you can see the relationships between the events.

This one is easy. I am sad because she was sad. I mean this in two ways.

One. I am a sad person, at times. This sadness stems from being the child of a woman who was herself sad. The father of the child does not get a free pass w/r/t the kid’s sadness but we’re not talking about him here.

Because this sad woman was not cared for and mothered, she was not able to care for or mother her own child. The child’s lonely, unstable, fear-filled early life left lasting scars on the woman she became, a woman who now writes about herself in the third person for rhetorical effect.

Two. I wanted my mother to be happy. My first awareness was that I wanted to be happy, and it was clear that all happiness came from this one source. But the source was not always available; even when she was present, she was not available. She only came to life if you made her happy.

A year and change into Covid, I still wear my mask everywhere. I don’t love it, but I’m used to it. One of the things I miss most is smiling at babies in public. I fucking love smiling at babies and little kids. With babies, I widen my eyes like I’m fourteen years old seeing Adam and the Ants at Radio City, like I am the happiest and most excited I’ve ever been in my life. Like I’m welcoming them to the best party ever. “Hi! Isn’t this great? We have a bounce castle shaped like a cake! And a cake shaped like a bounce castle!”

And I know it’s unfair, it’s non-consensual, it’s like squeezing a toad for its hallucinogenic mucus. But there’s such pure communion in making eye contact with a baby, and when they smile back at you, if you can stand it, it’s like CPR, the way it crushes your chest and restarts your heart.

So imagine being that baby, and seeing the up-close and brilliant smile of the most achingly beautiful, wide-eyed woman shining just for you. This 23-year-old girl who grew up with nothing — no money, no love, no mother of her own — was just handed a little baby that was all hers, and her delight was radiant. Later in life, my mother would use a home heat lamp to maintain her year-round tan, and basking in its glow was like receiving a secret that God loved you best. That was the effect of her full-faced, double-dimpled, open-mouthed smile.

Now imagine being that baby and waiting for that smile. It is your personal sun; without it, everything is cold night. There she is, the woman who smells like comfort and satiety, but no smile. No beam from her eyes, no connection to be had. It’s over. She doesn’t love you anymore. There will never be sun again.

I had to make her happy or she would let me die.

I want to be happy, but I won’t be happy, ’til I make you happy too…

That’s from 1936’s “I Want to be Happy” (Youmans & Caesar), a.k.a. The Co-Dependent’s Anthem.

Imagine me on the stage of a black and white nightclub, wearing a blonde fingerwave and a sparkling cocktail dress, with a bird-like V of comely young women dancing behind me, holding ostrich-feather fans in front of their half-naked bodies. The crackle of the old recording, even as I sing live. Those big hammy open vowels: I waaaaan too bee haaappy…

This is what is written in Latin on my family crest. Volo beatus esse sed non felicibus donec te felix nimis.

I want to be happy, but it is impossible for me to be happy if I know that you are unhappy, so entwined are our fortunes and our lives.

I want to be happy, but you’re ruining it for me and everybody else by not being happy, so stop being selfish and fix your shit attitude.

How dare you be happy when I am not happy. Is my unhappiness unimportant to you? Am I unimportant to you? Because I assure you, you are ten times less important to me. In fact, you can fuck right off with your selfish idiot happiness. Nobody wants you here anyway.

Has nobody heard the saying, “If Mamma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy?” You think that was invented out of nowhere? You think that was made up from sawdust and molasses in the back of some theoretical barn? That is based on actual Mammas. That is a fucking fact.

Everybody I’ve lived with in my life has had an involuntary mirror face, that is, a microexpression they reflexively display when confronted with their own living image in a mirror. My husband looks briefly stern. My upper lip fattens just a skosh. An old friend of mine widens her eyes, as she has since high school. The man I thought I was going to marry lifted his chin and frowned.

My mother broke into her smile. She spent hours in the mirror, setting her hair in rollers, applying layers of makeup, always with the cigarette burning on the edge of the sink. So much Aqua-Net. She sprayed it on her face to set her make-up. My old shrink Judith flipped out when she heard this detail. You never know which detail is going to stick with someone.

“She sprays her face with hairspray? She points the can at her face and just sprays it?”

Fortunately, my current shrink watches RuPaul’s Drag Race, so she knows that setting your face with hairspray is a time-honored trick of stage performers and gender illusionists.

I’m also, frankly, peeved that my mother never brought me into her routine. She never showed me how she did her hair, how she measured out the part that swooped over her high forehead, something that afflicts me too. How she flattened it with a brush and pins and spray; how she positioned each curler on the crown of her head, cigarette in mouth, squinting through her smoke.

She never said, “Look, Janice, here’s where I start. I take a cotton ball, you see? And I put a little of this Ten-O-Six lotion on it — here, smell it. Then I rub it allll over my face. And see? Even though I washed my face, the cotton ball still picked up a little dirt. This is called toner. It makes your skin feel good and it makes the make-up go on better.”

I could have sat on the closed lid of the toilet and watched and talked for hours. I could have learned how to paint on my own eyebrows. She could have taught me how to deal with the frizz I still can’t control, the frizz that makes me feel like I will never pass as a Serious Person.

But this was her time. Her nightly ritual and her morning routine. She could not be distracted. She was focused on her reflection and her artistry. I could bring her the best jokes, the most fascinating information I had, and she would stay non-committal until she finally got annoyed with me crowding up her space. “Jan, I’m trying to get ready in here.”

Quick note: Do not call me Jan. I will respond poorly. You don’t know me like that. Only two people in the world can call me Jan, and one of them is dead.

So I would slink out of the bathroom, acrid with acetate, my throat and eyeballs dry from her cigarette. More snakish than sheepish. Slither back to my bedroom, put my thumb in my mouth, maybe read a book.

Meanwhile, she yanked her real eyebrows out of her face, one by one, with a tweezer. She applied her liquid liner with a steady, practiced hand. She patted beige foundation on her lips before adding a touch of color. And every time she stepped back from the mirror to admire her handiwork, my mother beamed at herself like a young bride.