Those of us who feel the call to record the lives of others have to decide the best way to tell our story: first person or third?; present tense or past?; chronologically, episodically, or something else?

The options can seem endless and confusing when we consider them, yet our choices are often constrained–or dictated–by the amount of information at our disposal, our writing skills, and the breadth of our imagination. Some fortunate personal historians are blessed with an abundance of all three, and then it becomes a case of selecting a narrative approach that best capitalizes on the character and personality of the story’s subject.

I’ve been thinking about these issues recently since completing Jeannette Walls’ magnificent Half Broke Horses, a “true-life novel” about her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, the indomitable mother of the memorable hippy-artist “mother” showcased in Wall’s blockbuster memoir The Glass Castle. Everyone I know in the memoir world has read The Glass Castle. It’s the best-selling memoir of all time for good reason, and I’m sure I’ve made Walls a little richer by the number of times I’ve recommended her book to someone struggling with the best way to write about family skeletons and other prickly people–for Walls shows us how in that wonderful book.

Half Broke Horses is a different kind of book. Walls calls her grandmother a character, and she is–a no-nonsense, resilient, courageous, brainy, gun-toting, plane-flying, horse-breaking mother of two, decades ahead of her time. As a family historian, how would you showcase a woman like this without watering her down or making her a caricature? I’m sure Walls pondered this question long and hard.

Lily died when Walls was eight, but, along with her other pursuits, Lily had been a great story teller, continually repeating detailed anecdotes about her life to her daughter, the hippy artist, who then told them to Walls. The author says she tried tracking down the truth of some of those anecdotes and, except for a few details, was never able to disprove them.

Walls had to know she was sitting on a dynamite story, but how to tell it? She could write it from her own point of view: “My fabulous grandmother told me she took flying lessons when she was thirty-nine and began working as a freelance bush pilot. When I didn’t believe her, she showed me pictures of herself sitting in the cockpit of a beat-up twin-engine, crop-duster.”

Or Walls could choose to tell it from the classic, third-person, biographer’s point of view: “When Lily was fifteen, she rode her pony, alone, 500 miles to Red Lake, Arizona, to her first teaching job, taking with her a toothbrush, change of underwear, presentable dress, a comb, canteen, bedroll, and a pearl-handled six-shooter.”

These would have been traditional, acceptable approaches to writing a family history narrative. But Walls, whose mother said was born with her grandmother’s gumption, decided on a different approach. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, Walls explains that she ”saw the book more in the vein of an oral history…and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”

Thinking oral history, Walls fashioned a first-person narrative with the grandmother telling the story in her own voice. Walls says, “I wanted to capture Lily’s distinctive voice, which I clearly recall.” She added, “…since I don’t have the words from Lily herself, and since I have also drawn on my imagination to fill in details that are hazy or missing–and I’ve changed a few names to protect people’s privacy–the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.”

It reads like a legitimate oral history, though. Walls’ memory and substantial storytelling skills created an unforgettable narrative voice that allows Lily Smith to be Lily Smith, with all her no-nonsense, bossy charm. All the way through Half Broke Horses, I kept thinking how short-changed I would have been had Walls chosen a more traditional approach. Listen to Lily’s voice:

“I expected those Brooklyn gals to be tough and smart, and maybe even practicing socialists, but instead they were all ninnies who wore too much makeup and kept complaining about the Arizona heat, the hearse’s uncomfortable buggy seats, and the fact that there was no place in the entire state to get a good egg cream. They had these thick Brooklyn accents, and I had to fight the temptation to correct their atrocious pronunciation.”

Can you imagine the work and creativity required to narrate a life story with a voice like this, staying true to its character to the end?

In case you haven’t guessed, I recommend this book. Add it to your Christmas list. You’ll love Lily Smith, you’ll be inspired by her story, and you’ll be able to assess for yourself the freedom and rewards of a fictionalized approach to family history.

My thanks to personal historian Dan Curtis for including my blog in his list of “Top Personal History Blogs of 2010.” Visit Dan’s site HERE to see what other blogs received this fine distinction.

As long as I’m making announcements, I’d like to mention two useful books I’m currently reading. Despite the fact that I have shelves full of books pertaining to personal history writing, I’m always looking for more ideas and inspiration. These two were recommended to me recently, and I recommend them to you:

• Sven Birkerts’ The Art of Time in Memoir (A small book from a Harvard writing teacher that explores such issues as the difference between “graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure.”)
• Francis Flaherty’s The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Non-Fiction Writing (NY Times author offers 50 rules for creating sparkling and memorable non-fiction stories.)

I also gave myself the following memoirs for Christmas:

• Gail Straub’s Returning to My Mother’s House (Haven’t read yet.)
• May Sarton’s Journal of Solitude (Haven’t read yet.)
• Phyllis Theroux’ The Journal Keeper (I’ve read this and love it. Theroux’ graceful, thoughtful prose had me underlining passages and flagging pages throughout.)

Thank you, Dan Curtis. Thank you, Amazon.com!

I just finished reading Mary Karr’s Lit, a memoir I admire as much as The Liars Club, her earlier bestselling memoir. Her latest book chronicles her descent into alcohol addiction and then shows how good friends help her cast aside her life-long atheism to embrace a faith that turns her life around. The book is a difficult read in some places, for Karr brings readers along through her raw, darkest moments. I felt her pain, but I also felt her transforming sense of peace and joy when her faith began to heal her. Anyone struggling with addictions of any kind will find inspiration from Karr’s tale of physical, mental, and spiritual redemption.

The famed memoirist Tobias Wolff was Karr’s teacher in grad school. Lucky her. This was “before he was a big deal,” as she puts it, before This Boy’s Life put him on the literary map. When Karr was writing The Liar’s Club, she contacted her friend and mentor “Toby” for advice. He sent her the following note:

Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit… Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed… Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.[1]

Wolff practiced what he preached in This Boy’s Life, though the above note suggests he struggled to shed barriers that often keep us from writing with complete candor. But he succeeded, as far and I could  tell, and it’s that unflinching honesty that makes his book so powerful—and a bestseller—and it’s also what makes Karr’s memoirs grab you in the heart and gut.

In an interview printed in the back of my copy of Lit, Karr discusses her arduous process to achieve the effect she was after, even discarding large sections of early versions of her story. Her remarks reveal that it’s not easy for anyone, even the pros:

Well, in the first draft it’s not that the events were so different. The sentences just weren’t good enough, and I’d made my husband particularly saintly and myself particularly dastardly. So the emotional cant was way off—it felt emotionally untrue to the lived experience. It lacked emotional depth and so seemed false…. The early pages about spiritual stuff sound very proselytizing. I was telling several anecdotes to prove the same thing…. You don’t want to reiterate character points ad nauseum. That’s what bad memoirs are like, you know: I got hit over the head with a brick every day of my life, sophomore year it sucked, junior year it sucked, senior year it sucked, and then I moved out.[2]

As you write your personal history, you’ll puzzle over how much of yourself to reveal. It’s your story, of course, and you have to live with the fallout over what you write. Know, though, that if you’re brave and write with emotional honesty, you’ll write with more power and authenticity than ever before. Your readers will feel it in their bones and hang with you to the very last page.

Note: For more information about Mary Karr and Lit, read her interesting Huffington Post interview, where she describes her writing process and discusses the years she spent “lit.” Interview part1 and Interview part 2.

[2] “A Conversation with Mary Karr,” from Lit (appendix), p. 6.

I’m always looking for examples of creative ways people write family histories that breathe life into ancestors long gone. I have posted a list of books I particularly admire in the Toolbox section of my website, www.MemoirMentor.com. I recently finished another family history I’d like to recommend to you, one that will surely go on the top of my list. It’s The Journey Takers, written by Leslie Albrecht Huber. I am impressed with the way Huber structured her family history and told her story, and I’ve picked up some ideas I’d like to implement in the Parrett family history I’m writing.

Huber’s narrative traces the lives of several families on her paternal line who made the brave choice to forsake their homeland–in this case, Germany, England, and Sweden–to immigrate to America. Hence, the title, The Journey Takers. This is an interesting focus, one that provides a unified theme to the varied individual life stories. My husband and I have frequently discussed writing a joint family history about all of our immigrant ancestors who came to America. Huber has beat us to the punch and provided a superb template to boot.

The Journey Takers is also about Huber’s own journey, actually several journeys, including research trips to her ancestral homelands to comb through archives, talk to the locals, and walk the land her people called their own. While researching for this book–a ten-year project, she tells us–her own young family is also in a state of flux. Educational pursuits and job responsibilities require the Hubers to move to several different states and spend a year in Spain. She recounts these different experiences in an engaging way, candidly telling us about her difficult pregnancies, parenting adjustments, and frustrations about being sidetracked from her research and writing goals. Her children are her top priority, she tells us, but she’s also ambitious and driven to complete this book. The worst thing she can imagine, she thinks, would be to lead an ordinary life. A woman so driven finds ways to fulfill her goals. I had to smile at some of her solutions: bouncing a restless toddler on her hip at the Family History Library, juggling babysitters, toting her mother and pre-school-age children with her as she navigates the Oregon Trail. I felt like I knew this woman and could relate to her conflicted desires. 

The sections about Huber are told in first person, of course, and are also written in the present tense, which makes them feel both personal and immediate. The ancestral narratives are told in the past tense and third person. Huber has done her reseach, in both primary documents and social history, which she combines in an interesting, seamless way, documented inobtrusively with endnotes that appear at the back of the book.

Here’s the best part, however. The book is full of scenes…and you know how I like scenes. The book is worth reading just to convince yourself that scenes infuse lifeless names and facts with flesh and bones–and a heart and soul. Huber does a fine job with this creative form of writing, inbuing her scenes with engaging detail, dialogue, and emotion.

I love the slick way she transitions into scenes. For example, after describing horrible conditions on board an 1861 immigrant ship bound for America from Sweden, she writes the following:

When I think of Karsti’s voyage across the ocean, one image stands out in my mind.

Karsti hurries down the steps leading below deck in the semi-dark as the massive, angry sea tossed the ship back and forth. Behind her, she hears the hatch door slam shut with a resounding thud. She reminds herself that this is to protect the passengers–to keep the water out, not to make them miserable. A few lanterns give off a dim glow, the only light available. She searches for something to hold on to in order to steady herself against the relentless motion of the ship. Around her, she sees other passengers gripping their beds, their faces white.

The scene carries on in this vein for several more paragraphs, helping us visualize what Huber clearly visualized from her reseach about that voyage. It’s all done to good effect. I include below several more  examples showing how Huber transitions from narriative to scene. 

Sometimes I imagine Karsti at Castle Gardens. She stacks her luggage, which represents all her possessions, around her. She rolls up a piece of clothing and places it under her head….

In my mind, I can see James stopping to knock on a door. A few seconds later, Elizabeth answers. Her long, brown hair is pulled up neatly on top of her head….

I picture their wagon bumping over the parched ground as John guides the horses along the dirt trail lined with sagebrush.

The book contains many other fine examples of this type. We can learn a lot by reading books similar to the ones we want to write. This is no ordinary book, written by no ordinary writer and genealogist. Leslie Albrecht Huber has nothing to worry about. 

Leslie Ann Huber, The Journey Takers, Foundation Books, 2010, 332 pages, 6 x 9, with appendix and bibliography. ISBN 2010924144, $19.95 (paperback). The book can be ordered through Leslie’s website, http://www.thejourneytakers.com/.

Next post: A bit about my glorious Baltic Cruise

I’m always looking for interesting ways to write a family history that brings ancestors to life. I found an excellent example in Linda Tate’s Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative, published in 2009 by Ohio University Press. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a way to combine research with imagination to create complex, lifelike characters that will grip readers’ hearts from the get-go.

Tate spent 14 years writing this book after seven years of exhaustive research that involved combing through genealogical records, interviewing relatives she’d never met before, and spending summers in the area where her family lived. She began her research in 1988, prompted by a recurring dream about a grandmother who died when she was five. She begins her story with this provocative statement: “Grandma Fannie died when I was five, but now I get word that she is still alive.” Who wouldn’t want to read more?

Her family history focuses primarily on two interesting women, Tate’s grandmother Fannie, and her great-great-grandmother Louisiana, who tell their own stories with the speech patterns and vocabulary of their Appalachian culture. Tate is a scholar in Appalachian literature and grew up in a family who used many of the speech patterns of their ancestors. These women feel real, and you will soon realize that they reveal themselves, flaws and all, through their compelling, often painful, stories. In addition to the character narratives, several chapters include Tate’s account of her childhood relationships with some of these people, as well as her research efforts and discoveries. Readers learn a lot about the process of putting together a family history of this magnitude.

Tate provides an unflinching view of complicated, deeply flawed individuals, who inflict a great deal of pain on their families. At the same time, she maintains a tone of fairness and understanding, and in the end she shows how knowledge and honesty can heal the psyche. We see all sides of people and come away with a greater comprehension of a unique American culture through multiple generations . I guarantee this book will get under your skin, as it did mine. To learn more, you’ll find an interview with the author here.