Cady's Critical Reflection Essay

The most poignant thing I learned from trying to write this memoir is that writing memoirs is extremely difficult. I was wondering if it was just me, if maybe some flaw in my design made memoir-writing harder for me than it is for my fellow writers, but after reading a passage by author and writing guide William Zinsser about the art of writing the memoir, and a selection by David Sedaris from his book Me Talk Pretty One Day, I realized that I'm not alone. I discovered through this process that there is no single, foolproof way to write your own history, no one type of event that you could be told to write on, because experience is different for everyone. However, there are hints and tips and skills that can significantly help with adapting what has happened in your life into a story that others can relate to, and these two pieces helped me significantly in doing so.
The Zinsser passage explained a few truths common to all memoirists. For example, he explained that one could not possibly include everything that one wants to in a memoir, because there won't be a clear enough story for the reader to follow. This was difficult for me to grasp, because I felt like the theme of my memoir (the collection of souvenirs and what they mean looking back) is so prevalent, and can really encompass a lot of small events in my life. This was one of my main problems in writing the memoir: finding a coherent line of thought and including only the details that would further it, not hold it back.
In the piece, Zinsser suggests, "You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control". For me, this meant not allowing the details and the small parts that meant so much to me when they happened start writing the story by their own accord. By including too much in the rough draft, the message I was trying to get across was getting lost in the details. In the end, I found a "narrative trajectory" that I wanted to maintain, and cut out almost 50% of what I had intended to include, because they were holding me back from connecting with my readers on the message I was trying to portray. It was hard because it was, as my professor would say, "killing my darlings", but it was necessary. My story feels better, lighter, and more coherent. I didn't get rid of all of the small things, and Zinsser says this is also important: "On the contrary, many of the chapters of my book are about small episodes that were not objectively 'important' but that were important to me." I didn't want to get rid of the details that were especially vivid to me, because if they struck a chord with me, I felt that they would strike a chord with the people reading the memoir. Seemingly silly aspects were kept in, just ones that I felt furthered the story and elaborated on the theme of the overall memoir.
In David Sedaris's piece, the title work from his best-selling book Me Talk Pretty One Day, he uses a very comic and sarcastic tone, but the reader still connects with it on a deeper level. Although I attempt to use a more reflective and somber tone, I wanted to get a connection that went beyond that, which I tried to do by really explaining the personalities of the two characters I center my work around. I wanted whoever read it to be able to understand who these people were in the world, and what that meant in relation to my story about them. Sedaris also includes little charming aspects that, while not necessarily furthering his story, really put the reader in the scene. The details of his tragic attempts at trying to establish himself in his French class and the change in his peers from excitedly speaking of their summer vacations in French to explaining how they cry themselves to sleep at night in improperly conjugated terms is, though not personally relatable to my own experiences, understandable in his own terms. At no point did I lose Sedaris's voice, and at no point did I want to stop reading. I vowed to try to make my story that compelling, hopefully by providing enough of the scene (as Sedaris does) that the audience feels that they are personally involved and thus must know what happens next.
Memoir writing is extremely difficult. My main problems were getting so connected to the story as it happened that I overshot and wanted to explain my entire life to the reader so that they knew exactly where I was coming from. As I learned from these articles, readers connect with pieces not because they know everything about the writer or the scenario being described, but because they relate to emotions evoked from situations. I realized that I had to remind my reader of their own lives, what it is to miss and love people, and the need to try to hold onto things when they slip away. No elaborate details are necessary to remind somebody of their experience, just the emotions those experiences evoked.