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Writing memoir can feel as daunting as stepping into a cold, dark river in hopes of grasping an eel with your bare hands. Pivotal moments in personal history are often experienced before we fully have words to explain them — and the task of the memoirist is to plunge in, pulling the long arc into a shape that might offer meaning and beauty. “Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create,” by Elissa Altman.
Godine. $30 Elissa Altman serves as a guide of sorts across this river. “Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create” mines her years of experience as a writer and teacher to offer aspiring memoirists insightful perspective on the form’s rewards and pitfalls.
Ranging freely between a craft guide and a personal history, “Permission” uses a dramatic event in Altman’s own life to illustrate broader concerns — including story ownership, evaluating risks and how to navigate tension, silence and shame. Altman lives in Connecticut and has three lauded memoirs under her belt; she regularly teaches workshops for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Her family history has ample drama, and writing about one piece of it had extraordinary, unforeseen consequences: “Every family has a core legend, a koan — a defining, foundational, sometimes cryptic narrative around which its generations are coiled.
Left unresolved, it will pop relentlessly back to the surface like a rubber bath toy.” In Altman’s case, it was the fact that her paternal grandmother, a gifted pianist and “a comely, frosted-haired, thick-browed, elfin woman who left her Central European country in 1900 ..
. and lit Sabbath candles every Friday night,” abandoned her young children for a time, disappearing from the family for several years. This unexplained absence formed and obsessed Altman’s father, who spoke frequently about it.
But his older sister, Altman’s aunt, considered it shameful and long buried — when Altman briefly mentioned it in her first book, all hell broke loose. For her perceived betrayal, Altman was cut off by her aunt and extended family, a painful ostracism that had adverse effects on her work and health. But she emerged with a clearer sense of how to approach the tricky art of memoir.
“If you write a story that conflicts with the established party line,” Altman cautions, “or a secret that nobody bothered to mention to you is a secret, you will very definitely hear about it, even if what you have done is simply told the truth as you know it to be. Especially if.” In Altman’s view, evaluating the risks of whether and when to write the story — and telling it with scrupulous integrity — are issues that every would-be memoirist must grapple with.
As she puts it, quoting a friend: “No one ever says, Yay! There’s a memoirist in the family.” If Altman’s family expulsion sounds over the top and unique, think again. Many memoirists have faced blowback after excavating uncomfortable truths.
Tara Westover’s brilliant, harrowing memoir, “Educated,” details a rural upbringing in a tight-knit family of fundamentalist home schoolers, her turn to formal education as a means of escape, and her subsequent banishment. “If we are to write, or create at all,” Altman declares, “we must do the very thing that is scariest: we must honor our creative hearts to overcome the greatest challenge that every artist faces, be it societal, cultural, or personal: the words you are not allowed.” On the other hand, not every story is a memoirist’s for the taking.
Altman draws a hard line between writing about history that affects her own life versus claiming stories that “are compelling, touching, devastating, but whose lives have not touched our own ...
that is not memoir; that is biography.” She had a great-uncle with schizophrenia who spent decades institutionalized, a life so buried that she only learned of his existence in her early fifties: “Are all rocks meant to be turned over?” Altman believes his story is too removed, not hers to tell. (Some memoirists might disagree, mining the family silence for fruitful revelations; and wherever there’s a gap in fact you’ll find a fiction writer, uncapping a pen to begin imagining herself toward a measure of understanding).
“Permission” ranges far beyond issues of story ownership, offering memoirists hard-won wisdom on the challenges of perfectionism, aspiration, envy, humility, carving out time and mental bandwidth to write, and the importance of assessing intent and motivation. Revenge writing has no place in the work, Altman warns, comparing it to “Bach’s cello suites played hard and angry and a little sharp, all of their sweetness siphoned out like gasoline from an old car.” She encourages fellow memoirists to take a rigorous inventory of the writing impulse — what’s driving and impeding it — so that each story can reach its fullest potential.
Altman’s prose has verve and wit to spare, and she peppers the book with quotes from notables ranging from Mark Doty to Victoria Chang to Ursula K. Le Guin. About her third memoir, “Motherland,” which is a riveting account of her fascinating parent, she recalls, “my purpose in the writing was not complex: put these two startlingly different, hotheaded women with a long history of enmity together—a hyper-heterosexual glam-queen former television-singer mother and her bookish, taciturn, chubby, lesbian daughter — and make sense of it.
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And always bear in mind those words of wisdom spoken by Dorothy Allison: If you’re going to write a character as an a—, you’d better be prepared to write yourself the same way.” Even going in with eyes wide open, Altman counsels, memoirists will encounter “land mines everywhere.” In other words, if you’re going to go there, you should have a sense of where you’re heading — and why.
“Permission” is an engaging guide to the often rewarding, sometimes risky work of writing the stories that make us who we are. Genanne Walsh is the author of a novel, “Twister,” and a creative nonfiction chapbook, “Eggs in Purgatory.” She lives in Portland.
WHAT: Writer Elissa Altman in conversation with Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Executive Director Gibson Fay-LeBlanc about “Permission” WHERE: Mechanics Hall, 519 Congress St., Portland WHEN: 7-8:15 p.m.
May 8 TICKETS: $7 to $35 (with a copy of the book), buy on Eventbrite We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers. At its best, our comments sections can be a productive platform for readers to engage with our journalism, offer thoughts on coverage and issues, and drive conversation in a respectful, solutions-based way. It’s a form of open discourse that can be useful to our community, public officials, journalists and others.
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