Crafting the Mini Me in Your Memoir
The voice of the child you remember v. the voice of the child you once were
I’ve been working on a series of personal essays that take me back to grade school and even earlier. It’s a tricky business to get the child’s POV right, but I offered an MFA workshop on this very challenge a few years ago. So I went file diving and found my notes from that class. They contained several useful tips, which I’ve plumped into this post.
I hope this will be helpful not only to you memoirists but also to any fiction writers who are struggling to write a book for grown-ups through the mind of a child.
So, here you are, writing about something that happened when you were three, six, nine, twelve – young enough to talk, think, feel, and react like a kid. Maybe you remember keenly the experience you’re describing. Maybe you remember only the facts but none of the details. Maybe you know that something happened, but everything about that something is hazy.
In any case, you are an adult now and, in many ways, a completely different person – with a very different voice than the child in your story. So how do you do justice to that child’s POV on the page? Do you write as if you were again that child, adopting baby talk and knowing only what that child could know? Or do you give the remembered child the benefit of your adult perspective? Do you write, in other words, with the voice of innocence, the voice of experience, or both?
To answer these questions, I’ve looked to several authors who’ve penned transporting capsules of childhood, meant not for children but for adult readers of literature. Jo Ann Beard in The Boys of My Youth, Patti Smith in Just Kids, and Paula Fox in Borrowed Finery all take us to very different childhood experiences and perspectives, yet all capture the quivering essence of innocence and vulnerability through the magic of memory.
One thing none of them use to express this magic is baby talk. A real toddler’s vocabulary may be filled with words like yummy, tinkle, doggie, and night-night, but they have no place outside of quotes in a memoir, and even within quotation marks, they can be lethal if overused.
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