Memoirs: They’re Not
Biographies by Dennis Milam Bensie
I just returned from
the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans where I was a presenter. I,
along with a couple of dozen other writers, was given the opportunity to do a
ten minute reading from one of my published books (you were timed and honked if
you went over ten minutes).
This was a big weekend
for me because I had never been to the three day festival, which took place at
the famous Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street. The hotel was the perfect setting
for a writing conference because it had been a hub of literary personalities.
The literary guest list also included Tennessee Williams, WIlliam Faulkner,
Ernest Hemmingway and more recently Ann Rice and John Grishman. Truman Capote
claimed to have been born in the Hotel Monteleone (a fact that was disputed;
his mother was merely pregnant with him while living in the hotel).
I write memoirs. Most
of my short stories could be considered memoirs. One of the many panel
discussions I attended at the festival was called From Life to the Page: Turning Memory Into Narrative. I took many personal notes during all the
seminars last weekend, but the most important notes I took came from quotes I
heard during this memoir driven class.
“...All memories are
fiction.”
It’s true. Everything
you remember is fiction because it is your unique perspective. Your memory of
an event is as individual as a fingerprint. Truman Capote probably wasn’t
intending to lie about the site of his birth. Is it too much of a stretch for
the Capote to think he was born in the symbolic hotel? It’s a better image to
think of him being born at the Monteleone, rather than in a nearby hospital. A
writer of memoirs has permission to rethink the literal usage of the word
“born”.
“...Worry about the
truth. Not the facts.”
A memoir is not to be
confused with a biography. Facts are sometime crucial but should not completely
dictate the Art.
The two quotes I list
completely resonate with me as a memoir writer. I am sometimes asked how I can
write more than one memoir. It’s not that I have had a long life of travel and
adventure. It’s tone, style and perspective on certain events that give birth
to memoirs, not merely where I was and what I did on a certain day.
Another thing that was
discussed in the memory discussion from Saints and Sinners was that sometimes the best writing can spring from the smallest
of events. Its possible to write a wonderful memoir story from something as
simple as watching your mother brush her hair or the neighbor child tying their
shoe. It’s not always necessary to know what Mom’s hair or the kid’s really
looked like in memoir writing. Save the facts for the biography.
I wrote my first
memoir, SHORN: TOYS TO MEN more linear in style. Everything ties together
without any breaks in the book’s theme. It’s approach to storytelling reads
like a fictional novel. Not to say that it reads as untrue or false. I use an
emotional tone to tell the story of growing up with abuse and mental
illness.
ONE GAY
AMERICAN, my second memoir, proved challenging. The book is a bunch of
vignette’s about my life growing up gay in the USA. In a few passages I told
the reader the same story from SHORN. But it was my job to write the overlapped
stories in a different way for each book, despite the fact that the facts were
the same.
One of the biggest story
overlaps in both of my memoirs surrounds my three year marriage when I was
nineteen. I couldn’t just leave it out of the second book because I already
wrote about it in the first.
I spent a simple
paragraph or two in SHORN talking about giving my wife a heirloom bride doll
for our wedding. My approach in ONE GAY AMERICAN was to be more poetic or
symbolic and concentrate on smaller details of the event. I got to elaborate
and write more about what the doll meant. It turned out I was able to expand and
turn the story of the bride doll into a whole vignette of it’s own in my second
memoir using metaphors and other dramatic techniques that I didn’t bother with
in the first book.
My biggest advice for
someone who wants to write their memoir is to
find a great style of
storytelling that suits your life and what you want to say. Try an
experiment:
Take one event or fact
and write three treatments of the same story trying to make it as different as
possible each of the three times. Don’t worry so much about the facts: worry
more about what you want your reader to remember when they finish your story. A
good memoir will stay with it’s reader a long time after the last page is read
and inspire them to think and feel rather than teach them
facts or information.
I happen to choose as
my reading selection for the Saints and Sinners
Literary Festival the haunting chapter
from ONE GAY AMERICAN about the heirloom bride doll. I was impressed that all
the memoirists that read from their books each had very different styles of
telling their personal stories.
I wonder if Ernest
Hemmingway or Tennessee Williams worked on or ever read their memoir at the
Hotel Monteleone. The two author’s styles are, no doubt, very different.
(Dennis Milam Bensie reading from ONE GAY AMERICAN at the Hotel Monteleone on Sunday, May 26,
2013)
About the Author:
Dennis Milam Bensie grew up in Robinson, Illinois where his
interest in the arts began in high school participating in various community
theatre productions. Bensie’s first book, Shorn: Toys to Men was
nominated for the Stonewall Book Award, sponsored by the American Library
Association. It was also a pick in the International gay magazine The
Advocate as “One of the Best Overlooked Books of 2011″. The author’s short
stories have been published by Bay Laurel, Everyday
Fiction, and This Zine Will Change Your Lifeand he has also been a feature
contributor for The Good Men Project. One Gay Americanis his second
book with Coffeetown Press and it was chosen as a finalist in the Next
Generation Indie Book Awards and the Indie Excellence Book Awards. He was a
presenter at the 2013 Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans.
Dennis lives in Seattle with his three dogs.
