Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

dealing with the murky bits in flash memoir

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

“Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed.’ Our soul is an abode.” ~Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 

"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection." ~ Oliver Sacks

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Hi friends,

I’m currently pulling together a collection along the themes of time and memory, and how slippery they both are. My older brother seems to have a photographic memory for all the details of our childhood. Me? Not so much. Even for those like my brother, memory can be tricky, unreliable. There’s so much we can’t be sure of. All my current writing is an attempt to get at the elusive parts of moving through life and time. My story, “Alligator,” in Northwest Review is an example of what I’ve been up to lately.

How does a writer deal with the missing parts and still create a lucid, cohesive, engaging narrative? How much creative license do we have? And if we’re getting too creative, are we then blurring the lines, crossing into the realm of fiction? The craft piece below, along with a linked article and published examples, and writing prompt, are excerpted from my popular Weekend Flash Memoir class. Hope you enjoy!

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My feeling is that your pondering and reflecting as you excavate your past and write your life is another part of who you are. I think as writers we can be candid with our readers about what we simply do not know. By openly admitting to conjecture, we’re maintaining the reader’s trust, allowing them into the conversation. This is speculation or what has been called “perhapsing.” 

In an essay entitled, “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction,” writer Lisa Knopp says:

"Perhapsing can be particularly useful when writing about childhood memories, which are often incomplete because of a child’s limited understanding at the time of the event, and the loss of details and clarity due to the passage of time.”

My (fictional) story, “Sway,” published in F(r)iction, uses perhapsing as a storytelling tool:

“What I don’t know is where she went that night. Who she saw, what she did, if she ever found my father, or if she was even looking for him. I don’t know why she abandoned our Ford Falcon somewhere on Fourth Street, so far from home. Maybe it was only a matter of wanting to see for herself, of wanting to get just a little bit closer, to find out what raindrops do to the soft flowing surface of a river."

Here’s memoirist Mary Karr perhapsing in her book The Liar’s Club:

“Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene…the French doors on that scene never swung open…Mother herself was clipped from my memory. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that.”

Some writers take a bolder approach to admitting what they don’t know. Here’s Harry Crews from his memoir, A Childhood:

“My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.”

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“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Jacqueline Doyle in SugarSugarSalt magazine is a piece that's considered ”speculative memoir" as it speculates, perhapses.

Allow your writing to be guided by this quote by Natalie Goldberg from Writing Down the Bones:

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instance we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”

YOUR PROMPT

You guessed it. Today, let’s write a flash memoir piece that openly admits to the reader the parts you’re unsure of, don’t remember at all, or do not have the full context for. 

You may certainly go back to a piece or fragment you’ve already written before, expanding upon those unclear parts, and speculating about what might have been as you saw in the excerpts from Mary Karr and Harry Crews (and the excerpt from my fiction piece, “Sway”). 

Feel free to go full-on Harry Crews for this exercise, wildly speculating in impossible, though entertaining ways!

Consider what might inform your "perhapsing":

• The benefit of hindsight ("if I'd known what I know now...")

• Folding in new facts that have come to light.

• The context as you see it now (i.e., “the times” though caveat: “the times” is of course never an excuse for ignorance, bigotry, or abuse). 

Use all the tools of good storytelling at your disposal. This means including sensory detail, specific details (yes, you can speculate on both of these as long as the reader knows you’re speculating). Bring your piece to life as you would your fiction and trust your reader’s intelligence and empathy (i.e., don’t tell us what to think and feel). 

Thanks so much, friends! With love and gratitude,

Kathy