Launching Memoirs Chronicle Main Tasks to Grow to Adulthood

The modern memoir movement burst into being around the beginning of the twenty-first century, ushered in by a slew of bestselling stories about growing up such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club. Those books describe the childhood development of their protagonists.

Now the presence of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild on the New York Times Bestseller list signals an interest in the next period of life, called “Launching.” At the beginning of Wild, the young woman is unemployed, sexually active, and confused about her relationship with drugs, men, and life in general. To find herself, she goes on a wilderness hike, during which she ponders her past. With each mile that passes underfoot, she moves farther from her confusion and closer to her future adulthood. Her outer story relies heavily on the struggle with nature, an ancient backdrop for the universal task of becoming an adult.

This period of transition into adulthood is not new. It’s just that Strayed’s memoir is a current favorite, focusing the book buying public on a transition that all of us must undergo. In most memoirs, the transition doesn’t take place in the wilderness. Instead, their authors must sort themselves out amid mundane challenges.

Stephen Markley’s clever memoir Publish This Book, is a great example of a young guy who needs to figure things out. Markley had just finished college and needed a job. His brainstorm to write a book about “publishing this very book” paid off. The outer story is filled with self-aware irony about the absurdities of writing a book about writing a book. The inner story is about Markley’s transition from college grad to adult. To complete that transition, he must establish a career, form a relationship and in general acquire enough oomph to move on to the next step in his life.

At the end of Frank McCourt’s bestselling Angela’s Ashes, the young man has just left home physically but he arrives in New York with no idea of what to do next. In his second memoir, ‘Tis, he describes the next leg of his journey in which he searches for work and attempts to form a relationship.

In Jancee Dunn’s successful memoir, Enough About Me, the outer story is about the adventures of a young celebrity interviewer. But at its heart, Enough About Me describes a young woman trying to figure out how to gain sufficient competency to leave home, form relationships, and get a good job.

Both Jancee Dunn’s and Frank McCourt’s launching memoirs take place in and around New York City, a cultural hotbed, famous as a place to search for that next exciting step into adulthood. Another memoir about trying to make it as an adult in New York is Elna Baker’s New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (NYRMSHD).

After Elna Baker moves away from her parents’ home, she has to figure out how to transform from a youthful adult to a fully functioning one. Her excellent memoir about launching contains an in-depth treatment of the developmental tasks a young adult must undergo in order to make the transition.

In fact, the author describes her transition into adulthood with such crisp, engaging storytelling, I think of NYRMSHD as a quintessential Launching memoir. In it, she offers an in-depth treatment of what I have come to see as the three fundamental tasks required to make this transition.

In addition to the two standard ones of figuring out how to earn a living and how to form a committed relationship, she adds a third. She needs to figure out how much of her parents’ belief system to bring with her into her adult life. I believe that this third task is every bit as important as the first two, but for many reasons, it has not been as prominently covered in memoirs. Elna Baker makes up for that deficiency in a fascinating exploration of her Mormon upbringing and the conflicts it creates in her launching.

In the following posts, I’ll review the way Elna Baker tackles these three aspects of Launching. I hope these posts will give you ideas about how you might be able to shape and share the story of your own transition into adulthood.

Notes
Click here for another article about memoirs whose authors transition into adulthood:

Click here for a New York Times article Long Winding Path to Adulthood

Trauma Passed Through Generations Shared by Writing a Memoir

Linda Appleman Shapiro’s memoir, She’s Not Herself is about a girl whose mother had a serious mental illness. The memoir itself raised many intriguing ideas about the children of trauma survivors, about the secrets parents keep, and about how children manage to find their way despite grave difficulties. In addition to the events that took place inside the book, I am intrigued by how the author continued to develop as an adult. How did she integrate all the emotional upheaval that took place in her childhood, and turn it into a memoir? In this interview, I ask Linda Appleman Shapiro questions that might help aspiring memoir writers, who are looking back toward memories and forward toward turning memories into a story.

Jerry Waxler: As a reader, I cared deeply for the little girl who had to grow up navigating among such complex psychological pressures. Clearly these were traumatic trainings and you had to carry the burden of these memories into your adult years.

Linda Appleman Shapiro: When you say that I had to carry the burden of my early memories into my adult years, I’d have to add that I think it’s much more complicated than that. To carry a burden one has to be aware of the burden. If one succeeds in hiding the truth from himself/herself, the memories remain locked away until one trigger or another sets them loose.

In my case: I knew that my mother became sick several times each year. At such times, I heard my father refer to doctors giving her something he referred to as “shock treatments.” At other times, when she was taken to the hospital, I was left alone with my father or shipped off to one aunt or another. I received no explanation other than “Your mother, she’s not herself today.”

Just as I was entering adolescence and the woman in me began to identify with my mother that fear for myself had begun to set in. I became conscious of living in a daily state of hyper vigilance and beyond that I was also beginning to lose my footing. Emotional swings that take place in every normal adolescent’s life soon became exaggerated nightmares in mine.

Jerry: You’ve done an incredible job in the memoir, sharing that whole journey with your readers. Now, as a memoir writer, you have clearly been on a very different journey. Memoir writers must reach back into their memories and turn them into a story.

It must have been painful to go back and look at those times, with so much confusion, suffering, and secrets. How did you face all of that when you were looking back?

Linda: I think what saved me from myself as I started to sort out disturbing memories occurred years before writing this memoir. It came from the therapy I sought in my early life when I was becoming more and more aware that the role I played in our family was interfering with my adult relationships, especially with my first love experience. I write about that in detail in the book.

I received invaluable tools from skilled professionals and for 30+ years have been a behavioral psychotherapist/addictions counselor. Based on this background, I wanted to make sense of the effects of multigenerational traumas, providing readers with hope from whatever wisdom I have as someone who has examined human vulnerability in its many disguises and has moved through and beyond trauma.

Jerry: Say more about the process of actually writing it. How long did it take? Did you love writing it or dread it?

Linda: The entire process was one of about twenty years while working full-time as a psychotherapist, living life within our family, with our daughters, in our community, and later with our grandchildren.

Throughout, I remained committed and determined to peel away the onion that was my life. There was never a time that I set writing aside. In fact, once I began, the writing seemed to write itself. As one memory emerged, others came forth . . . and there were many times when a memory was so horrific that I questioned if what I believed I was remembering actually did occur. But that didn’t stop me from writing or examining and exposing all that did happen. As one witness to human vulnerability and human strength, the process of writing it all was not cathartic. It was grueling because I forced myself to remain as authentic as possible.

By creating scenes and dialogue between my parents and writing about each of the memories they shared with me about life in war-torn Russia before emigrating to America, I got to know them on a far deeper level than I ever did while they were alive. As characters in my memoir, I respected and loved them more with each page that I wrote.

Of course, I also learned a great deal more about myself. The patterns of my life that popped off certain pages (revealing an ever present need to rescue a person or a moment, even at my own expense) caused me to feel the same concerns for that little girl who was the me that you felt concerned about.

Jerry: Now that your memoir has been published you have come a very long way, from a little girl on Brighton Beach, through your young adulthood, trying to sort out these disturbing memories, to an older adult who has crafted the story of that little girl and shared it with the world. Congratulations! What can you share about the feeling of having written a memoir that is now being read by strangers. Was it satisfying? Healing? Invigorating? Did you miss it once it was over?

With regard to how I feel about strangers reading my memoir, I have a one word response: HONORED. Actually, I believe that story telling is a part of my genetic inheritance. My father did not share many personal stories, but as an immigrant, he always tried to fit in to a new world. He supported his family by being a salesman, and he learned early on with each joke and every story he could tell to distract a customer, he’d gain a sale. Mother’s stories were all personal. She shared all of her memories with me – probably too many for a child to integrate and not feel as though I was a part of that world in Russia, reliving it all with her each time she told me yet another story. Yet, at the same time, from as early as I can remember, Mother always said that everyone’s life is worthy of a book and that if she were a writer she’d tell her story if it could help just one person.

So, to answer your question I’d have to say that I know she would be proud to know that in telling her story and mine, we are helping people take secrets out of their closet and not feel ashamed to seek the best help available for their family . . . and though much more funding is needed to deal with the epidemic numbers of young suicides and mental illness, in general, there is certainly much more help and acceptance available today than when I was growing up.

To answer the next part of your question: Every aspect of having published my memoir is “satisfying, healing, and invigorating.” Though it took me many, many years to teach myself how to write, since I never allowed myself to consider writing creatively because my brother was a writer and that role had been taken in the family. . . I am now able to identify myself as a writer.

This memoir was a labor of love and tenacity and I do miss not writing. Once I completed writing the book, I definitely experienced writer’s withdrawal and, in the hope of fulfilling my need to continue writing, I do plan to revive a blog that I’d written for three years, “A Psychotherapist’s Journey,” for which Wellsphere named me the Top Blogger in the area of mental health.

Knowing that I have speaking engagements lined up and I’m currently in the process of this blog tour, it’s not “over.” Without being overly sentimental, I’d add that it is as life itself, a work that will continue to be in process.

Two-Memoir Series about Youth, Midlife, and Responsibility

This is the second part of a review of David Berner’s Any Road Will Take You There. Click here to read the first part.

In Accidental Lessons, David Berner’s first memoir, a middle-aged man looks for himself in the wider world. From one point of view, it’s the classic midlife abandonment, leaving his wife and kids. But there’s a twist. Instead of running away from responsibility, he takes a job as a school teacher and helps students grow.

David Berner’s second memoir, Any Road Will Take You There, seems to follow a similar thread. Again, he leaves home to find meaning. But again, Berner is not exactly running away. This time he hits the road, but in a motor home. And he takes his sons with him.

The characters in Any Road Will Take You There are supposedly following the path of the beat generation of fifty years earlier, when young rebels flaunted the values of society. But during this updated version, a middle-aged man celebrates social responsibility. By taking his sons along for the ride, Berner attempts to inspire them with the same book that inspired him in his youth. Passing along social values to one’s sons is the very definition of “tradition” and a fabulous sendup of Jack Kerouac’s rebellion. The interplay of the two forces, running away and returning, creates fascinating harmonics.

Within the container of the road trip, Berner is able to ponder the rebelliousness of his youth, and place those youthful impulses within the context of his mid-life crisis. With each passing mile, he moves farther and farther into his commitment to his children. Instead of renewing his commitment to self-indulgence, the way mid-life crises are expected to do, Berner renews his commitment to care for others.

Leaving Home is Only the First Half of the Hero’s Journey
According to Joseph Campbell’s influential book, Hero of a Thousand Faces, the story of the young warrior leaving home to find his place in the world is at the heart of civilization. Campbell finds some variation of this image of “going forth” in every culture on earth.

This desire to find truths somewhere else is not just ancient history. In modernity we continue to travel outward as if our lives depend on it. That spirit drove Europeans west across the American frontier. Jack Kerouac updated the image to a new generation. On the Road was like a starter pistol that launched ten thousand cars. When I drove to San Francisco in 1969, I was not simply looking for good weather. By rejecting my parents’ values, and even their presence in my life, I was following this exciting idea — find truth by abandoning everything you know and believe.

A decade later, most of us former hippies figured out how to establish our adult lives. To do so, we had to reconcile an important flaw in our idealism. By leaving everything behind we had fostered a valueless, chaotic society. But how had we been so misled by the universal myth of the hero? Surely a fundamental guideline of human experience couldn’t have been so out of kilter.

At the time, I couldn’t make sense of how far off track I’d gone, but I kept asking the question. Now, the Memoir Revolution is providing answers. When David Berner looks back across his life, the outward bound passion of our youthful rebellion is shown in a new light. David Berner and other middle-aged chroniclers of the social experimentation of the sixties are helping us update the Hero’s Journey to the twenty first century. Or more accurately, we are rediscovering that the Hero’s Journey has contained that deeper wisdom all along.

It turns out that by celebrating the “going forth” part of the Hero’s Journey, modern cultures have been glossing over the crucial outcome of the Hero’s Journey. At the end of the classic story, the hero returns home. As a returned adventurer, the ultimate goal of the hero is not to conquer the unknown. In the next leg of the journey, the goal is to bring back wisdom to share with the community. In its complete form, the Hero’s Journey is about building and sustaining communities.

David Berner’s memoir Any Road Will Take You There reminds us of this necessary completion of the Hero’s Journey. He springboards from Kerouac’s image of leaving home, but Berner’s variation on this journey has a wonderful twist. He exposes mid-life, not as a time to leave home, but as a time to reevaluate and renew his commitment to his community. As a teacher to his students and his sons, Berner reminds us that the hero’s journey ends with wisdom that will help maintain social values and raise responsible children.

Mid-life crisis corrected
In middle age, it’s natural to fear the whispers of one’s own mortality. As long as our culture only values the “going forth” half of the Hero’s Journey, these fears might prod us to renew our youthful attempt to leave everything, as if by going outward we can become heroes again. But by prolonging the adventuresome half of the journey, we miss the reward offered to us throughout the history of civilization. Instead of going out again, we can find peace and fulfillment by accepting the call to return.

David Berner’s story offers us that image. Instead of focusing on the first half of the Hero’s Journey, he glorifies the second. By returning to his children, and the students in his school, he offers his wisdom to young people so that they can live wiser lives, themselves.

The story of Any Road Will Take You There is seductively simple. Rent a van and go on holiday. However, Berner’s apparently simple send up of On the Road creates a complex backdrop. His first memoir Accidental Lessons adds even more context. Through his two memoirs, the author transforms his midlife crisis into a meditation about generations, about the responsibilities of fathers, about the power of literature to transform individual lives.

On The Road was Jack Kerouac’s roman a clef, that is a novel based on the adventures of one of the great reporters of the Beat Generation. David Berner has done an excellent job updating that message with a true life message of his own. By writing his memoir, Berner compares the “going forth” of the Beat movement in the sixties with the “return home” of the Memoir Revolution in the twenty-first century. In our era, we can complete the cycle: grow up, learn about the world, then by writing a memoir, bring our wisdom to the next generation.