How and Where to Look in the Hall of Mirrors That's Your Memoir

Writing, relationship, and reflection

Photo by VENUS MAJOR on Unsplash

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Hi everyone,

Some of you may recall that one of my original plans when I launched MFA Lore was to revisit my MFA packet letters — the monthly notes I sent to students about their thesis work— and to identify the issues that seemed to crop up most frequently, then address those issues with you.

This week I return to that plan. The resulting post, while most germane to memoirists, is a natural sibling to my mid-week stack about intimacy [and if anyone here can explain that one’s huge # of views, please tell me!], because both center on the need to focus on relationship in all creative writing.

The Key to Writing Intimacy Lies in the Spaces that Make Us Weep

Our subject here is the element of reflection that turns the multiple relationships within a memoir into a hall of mirrors.

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Memoir as intersecting reflections

A few months ago, I concluded a post about primal yearning and dread in literature with this evocative quote from the end of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight [emphases mine]:

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually toward you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

Confronting the Primal Core of Literature and Life

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I’ve read this passage many times, resonating so strongly with this idea of the orphan state and memoir as a lost inheritance that comes “almost casually” toward you once you have no fear of or for the people who are reflected in your personal hall of mirrors.

What Ondaatje highlights is the fact that memoir is never about Me but always about Us. Not a single one of us is truly singular. We are all the product of relationships that preceded and still surround us in reflection. Relationships both that we participated in directly and that seemingly had nothing to do with us. Which is why, when we write a memoir, we must enter that orphan state, meaning that all those other relations are ghosts who can no longer dispute or constrain us, but only mirror aspects of us— good, bad, and indifferent— which we need, indeed long, to understand.

Nothing about this is easy. Our natural tendency as memoirists is to write what we “know,” meaning what we remember seeing, hearing, and feeling from our own highly limited point of view. We strive to reenact poignant and powerful memories, to “tell it like it was.” But as anyone with siblings knows, how it “was” for you may be nothing like how it was for anyone else involved in the moment in question. Forget about the “truth.”

Ondaatje’s point is that the deeper, more revealing, memoir encompasses those other perspectives and more. Glances of shame. Hints of conflict. Tremors of tenderness. Shadows of absence and loss, or secrets and lies that have sent distorted images “rhyming” down generations.

A young writer in the audience of a talk I moderated this week with Percival Everett and David Mas Masumoto asked why all three of us write about family secrets. I answered first that secrets are mysteries, and who can resist a true mystery? But my more serious reply was that secrets reverberate through families, causing ripples of pain, confusion, frustration, and often dysfunction that everyone can feel but no one can see or comprehend. They distort each person’s hall of mirrors until some brave orphan ventures in and traces the reflections back to the “lost inheritance” of that buried secret and hold it up to the light.

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Family Photos Can Change You

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That, at least, is what I’ve been trying to do in the memoir/essays I’ve been writing on and off since my father died— taking the bulk of his secrets with him. Now a real orphan, I don’t fear leaning into my imagination to penetrate his hall of mirrors. I can meet my father’s ghost in dreams and acknowledge the rhyme in our reflections. I cannot “know” his truth now any more than I could when he was alive, but I can let it approach me, telling me where to look— at his Chinese scholar father and American pioneer mother, between the lines of his story as a Eurasian boy growing up in the cauldron of bigotry that was Old Shanghai, in the passive-aggressive corrugations between him and my mother, my brother, and me. In the resounding din of shame and grief that only in retrospect do I hear echoing through his life and rhyming in me.

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Navigating the reflections

Long before Ondaatje penned his summary of the memoirist’s orphan state, I was working with students who were either lost in or resisting it. Lacking Ondaatje’s eloquence, I offered rather more straightforward advice but not, I think, inconsistent with his core idea, which is that all storytelling, but especially memoir, is an enterprise of reflection twinned with multiple simultaneous relationships. Relationships not only with other people but also with oneself at different points in time and, too, with the reader.

The journey of discovery in a memoir, then, can be likened to the navigation of multiple intersecting halls of mirrors, each of which adds new dimension and clarity to the author’s reflection so that, by the end of the book, the narrator’s self-portrait is transformed, shimmering with added complexity yet also clearer and more authentic: the unique product of all who came before.

Here, in direct quotes from my MFA process letters, is how I parsed all this for my students: