Reading Rec: The Art of Time in Memoir
Sven Birkerts’ Can’t-Miss Craft Book for CNF Writers
Dearest writers of Creative Nonfiction (CNF), I highly recommend this slender craft book, The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts. I just adore it, and I clung to it in grad school. Although the book is beneficial to CNF writers in myriad ways, in reading it, I was most struck by Birkerts’ impassioned argument for the worth, the art, and the “glory” of the genre. For Birkerts, the glory of CNF arrives when the memoirist succeeds in her search to discover patterns and draw connections within her own life. By revealing these patterns and finding these connections, the memoirist is able to uncover her life’s meaning. Of the writers he includes in his book, Birkerts writes, “their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove.” This “certain resolve” is the retrospective voice. Within the telling of past events, within the sharing of memories, memoirists must weave in their present-day perspective. It is the writers’ reflection that imbues the storytelling with meaning.
Not to spoil it for you, but here is the book’s conclusion: “The writing is in every case propelled by the need to find closure in the self, to make pattern from contingency, and to enact the drama of claiming a self from the chaos of possibility. For this reason, inescapably, memoir requires that a balance be struck between then and now, event and understanding. The manipulation of perspectives is but the means for achieving this. It reflects the restless search for sense that is universal, but which achieves its most realized expression in the artistic memoir.”
Tremendous, yes? If you’re writing your own story and any of this stumps you or you’re struggling with the retrospective voice, I gotta tell you, I’m your gal. I love this shit. I’d love to help you discover the “glory of your story.”