What’s at stake
for the memoirist at the beginning of her journey? What’s at stake for the reader? Why should he or she invest time reading your
memoir?
Aside from the humor and
occasional reversal of parent/child roles, my college memoir needs to
demonstrate the importance for the mother to attend each class and in fact
finish her educational journey. But
there needs to be more. There needs to
be risk.
The possibility of failure is a
part of any worthwhile journey. If it isn’t,
the journey becomes boring. It’s fine to
enjoy a mother’s struggles through college, how she copes, how she discovers
ways to succeed. But to add tension,
Failure must be an active player, and in my memoir she is.
But is the fear of failure enough to
hold the reader’s attention? How about
the possibilities in succeeding? Could I
possess a fear of failure and a fear of success? I was terrified when my community college put
the Ivy League within my reach. How could
I not attend when I had been awarded a
scholarship? Everyone was proud of me
and excited for me. I wanted to hide
under my bed until everyone forgot about it.
Right now my memoir is a
collection of scenes, a progression through college, but to be a successful
memoir, it needs to be something more. Therein
lays the reason for reading memoirs and writing help books. To discover how to make my college journey
more than a sum of its educational parts.
One thing I have discovered in writing
my college memoir is that I am forever learning. It’s just where I’m learning that has
changed. I am hip deep in Beth Kephart’s
wonderful writing reference book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. I
highly recommend it to any budding memoirist.