Thanks For The Memoirs

By EMILY MITCHELL

We all have a story to tell. And more and more, we are starting to tell it, speaking into a tape recorder or writing with pen on paper or at a computer. The act of writing about our past, says Kate Hays, a Toronto clinical psychologist, offers valuable "self-reflection, exploration, continuity and discovery." Most important, memoirs are true; they tell what happened. Frank McCourt's 1996 best seller Angela's Ashes kindled interest in the memoirs of ordinary people. Says Adam Sexton, dean of New York City's Gotham Writers' Workshop: "People read McCourt and think, 'I could do that.'" Maybe everyone won't equal his success, but to your family and friends the story you write will be prized above all others.

I'm a kisser, I'm a joke teller, I'm a dancer. I'm a somewhat everything and nothing big. I'm not stuck-up. I don't have none of that thinking that you're better than anybody. I didn't go to college. I didn't have no big great job. I haven't had anything big. I was just down-to-earth and I got along fine. I'm my own person, that's what it is and I'm still moving.

These are the words of Freddie Mae Baxter, born into a poor family in the rural South 75 years ago. When her mother died, the teenage Freddie Mae left for the North, seeking work as a domestic. After a lifetime of caring for others--children and old people--she started talking into a tape recorder at the behest of a writer friend named Gloria Bley Miller, recalling what it was like to grow up in a big family in a little house with no indoor plumbing; to pick cotton; to live in "jivey" 1940s Harlem. Miller edited the reminiscences, and Baxter's unique voice so impressed editors at a major publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, that next month it will bring out her exuberant memoirs, The Seventh Child: A Lucky Life. "I'm the seventh child, so I know I'm lucky," says Baxter. And what better proof than Knopf's literary stamp of approval? That in itself is an extraordinary tale--and a telling one.

Today, more than ever before in modern times, the era of confession is upon us. Vast numbers of people are eager to spill the most minute details of their lives on television talk shows, in poetry, in comedy clubs, in monologues for the theater and, most of all, in books. The range is astonishing, from best-selling works by the celebrated--like the just-out memoirs of Henry Kissinger--to two different views of growing up Irish by brothers Frank and Malachy McCourt, to the modest, self-published stories meant only for a handful of friends and relatives.

With so many people putting their lives on paper, workshops and college extension courses have sprung up from coast to coast to help them with the writing craft. Anyone can start. Looking at old pictures or magazines, remembering the way things tasted, sounded and smelled, and recalling a specific incident, such as the first day of school or the first family car, can bring a flood of memories. Some people write in solitude, while many prefer working with a group. Others want a gentle guide. Along their journey through the past, people discover that what may have seemed an unimportant event has value. They may write to exorcise terrible experiences, complete the grieving process or just give dignity to an everyday life. For most, there is a desire to create a permanent record of their experiences and leave a legacy for their family.

At the University of Wisconsin-Superior, psychotherapist John Kunz directs the International Society for Reminiscence and Life Review, working with older people to put their oral histories on tape. He finds that "as baby boomers age, they say, 'Gee, we want people to value what we've done with our lives.'" Since 1988, Denis Ledoux, an author who lives in Lisbon Falls, Me., has led workshops around the country, helping thousands of people get started on their memoirs. He argues that a sense of continuity between generations has been lost, geographically and emotionally, and that the oral tradition of story-telling has diminished. As an alternative, if children and grandchildren are out of reach, says Ledoux, "you can write out your story."

Allen Greenstone, 75, of Hollywood, Fla., wanted to put his story on paper so that his daughter Adrienne, 50, would know him as more than just her father. The retired Navy fighter pilot was on a training mission in 1943 and watched his wingman's plane go into a tailspin and crash. For half a century, he carried a poem in his head that he had composed about the tragedy: "Spinning, twisting, hurtling down./ Faster, faster, towards the ground./ Wires screaming,/ standing taut./ Metal groaning, anguish wrought./ ...Victim trapped in metal womb/ resisting, wrapped within his tomb." After joining a weekly workshop at a local community center, he finished the poem and began writing the stories that eventually turned into 40 chapters of memoirs. Each week one of the nine students in the workshop reads aloud from a work in progress, and the others comment. Says Greenstone: "We determined early on that we're all grownups. We're critical in a positive way."

A group's encouragement and feedback often spur people on. Since the late 1980s, Joe Hausner, 72, has been part of a memoir-writing group at Northwestern University's Institute for Learning in Retirement in Evanston, Ill. His first writings were an act of exorcism based on terrible events within terrible events. At 17 he was sent to Kaufering, a Nazi labor camp west of Munich. Days before the war ended, guards were herding prisoners onto a train when Allied planes suddenly appeared overhead and strafed it. As he later wrote in his memoirs, "I wanted to get up and shout, 'Stop shooting, you fools! We are not enemies. We are all waiting for you, our liberators!" Slightly injured, he fled into the woods and, along with a hundred other escapees, made his way to freedom.

The scene never left him, and 45 years later he enrolled at Northwestern to write it down. After turning out 30 more stories about the camp, he hired an editor to help shape them into a book and published it himself. Several copies were sent to German groups that maintain Holocaust archives. Hausner was afraid he would run out of things to write about, but he's found support among the group members, and the exchange of ideas keeps them all writing. So far, he has produced dozens of stories about his business careers, his travels and a 55th high school reunion that will probably go into a second self-published book. He carries around a legal pad so that he can jot down ideas for more. Louise DeSalvo, who is the author of Writing as a Way of Healing and teaches memoir writing at New York City's Hunter College, urges her students to note stray thoughts that bubble up from their unconscious minds while they are doing ordinary things like household chores.

Nothing is so mundane that it can't be woven into a memoir. Maureen Murdoch teaches a course titled the Art of the Memoir through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, one of a dozen course offerings that cover everything from novelistic memoirs to personal essays. "As long as the tale has a universal theme, drama and insight," she stresses, "no incident is too small." Exemplifying these qualities are the stories of Yvette Audet, 66, a Maine widow who writes detailed accounts of her childhood: of rising before dawn on cold mornings to pick potatoes on neighboring farms, of kneeling nightly with her family and reciting the Rosary. Before Audet, a mother of six, began taking Ledoux's workshop in Lewiston, she taught herself to type and even went back to school to get a general equivalency diploma. Audet's education was ended after eighth grade so she could care for younger siblings while their parents worked in a mill. She still uses the Smith-Corona she bought in 1990 and keeps it beside her sunny kitchen window.

Finding the truth is one of the most difficult hurdles for a memoirist. Gail Hall Howard, 52, writes memoirs and teaches memoir writing at Connecticut's University of Bridgeport. "There isn't just one version of the truth," she maintains. "We remember certain things in different ways, and our understanding changes over time." Everyone sees childhood through grownup eyes. The memoirist's task is to bring back the reality of the child's view filtered through adult perceptions and make that truth into a compelling story.

Don Anderson of San Francisco set out to write down his past as honestly as he could, but that was only one of his motives. "I wanted to write a good story, and I didn't have any other story to write, so I wrote my own," he says. To transform an ordinary life into extraordinary reading, Anderson, 64, has put in a few hours each day, five days a week, for nine years, and is now polishing a 1,200-page draft. His only brush with formal training was a class 12 years ago at San Francisco State, and he taught himself to type before retiring at age 55 from his job producing instructional material for the Social Security Administration. He studied the writing craft by reading entire shelvesful of books and points to Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, as inspiration.

Putting one's life down on paper is for many a way of healing old wounds. More than 45 years passed before Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, now 75, could explain to anyone why the bark of a dog upset her or why her heart beat faster when she saw a policeman or why she became angry at the sight of food left uneaten on a plate. Only when she asked herself, "If I don't tell my story now, who will tell it for me?" was she able to confront her past. As Heller, who lives in a spacious apartment on New York City's Fifth Avenue, started talking into a tape recorder, all the ghosts from long ago returned. "It was eventually a catharsis, but it was a very painful process," she recalls. The memoir, brought out by KTAV Publishing House in 1993 as Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs, set her free. "I know myself and other people better," Heller says. "I have a little bit more insight and realize I am strong enough to deal with all the pain."

Not all memoirists, however, keep to the narrow path they set out on. That is part of the discovery process. After Diana Douglas Darrid's house was destroyed in the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, she stayed with her son, actor Michael Douglas, and his family while her home was being rebuilt. Long since divorced from Kirk Douglas, she was the widow of William Darrid, a writer and producer, to whom she had been married for 36 years. Michael urged her to start her memoirs as a legacy for her grandson Cameron, and Darrid began to write. The result, In the Wings, will be published this summer by Barricade Books. It is an account of her days as a stage actress, her romances before meeting Kirk, their marriage and subsequent divorce, and the happy years spent with her second husband. While writing, Darrid realized that even though her husband died in 1992, she had not finished grieving. The memoir became a healing balm.

Like Darrid and Heller, many find a sense of relief through recalling the events of life. "Maybe all memoirs are therapeutic to a degree," muses Dr. Robert Butler of the International Longevity Center in New York City. Through his work with older people, Butler has come to appreciate the positive values of reminiscing--or what is often called a life review. He says most people "do a silent life review or share it with a spouse or children, but writing it may be more meaningful and powerful." Indeed, the overall benefits of writing memoirs are just beginning to be studied. James Pennebaker is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, and his 1997 book, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, is widely used by psychologists and teachers. He points to a number of recent studies that present the remarkable finding that people who talk about their life experiences have lower blood pressure and a stronger immune system.

Certainly the longer we live--and statistics indicate a trend toward greater longevity--the more there will be to write about. Hunter College's DeSalvo insists that it is never too late. "If you're 55 or 60, and you haven't yet written," she remarks, "you've got all this past, and it's thrilling." As a witness to the 20th century, Brooklyn-born Grace Pierson Lewis has an exceptional past to record. At 101 she remembers what it was to live without refrigeration and electric streetlights, without automobiles and antibiotics, without talking movies and airplanes. She has lived through two world wars and met Annie Oakley, Pope Benedict XV and Benito Mussolini. Ten years ago, she enlisted her granddaughter, Anne Lewis Drake, to help with her life story. Organizing events by decade, Lewis made an outline and, just as Freddie Mae Baxter did, talked into a tape recorder. Occasionally she would hand Drake a tape that was blank because she had pressed the wrong button. "But she would just sit down and do it all over again," Drake says with admiration. "She was very dogged." As each decade was recorded, Drake would transcribe and edit it. When her grandmother finished, Drake printed and bound 100 copies of the manuscript, complete with family photographs. They were proudly presented as gifts at a family reunion. Says Lewis, who lives in the Osborn retirement community in Rye, N.Y.: "I did it for my children and grandchildren so they would know where I'd been and what I'd done, and it would encourage them to do the same or reach for more." There could be no better legacy.

--With reporting by Michelle Adelman, Adrianne Navon and Megan Rutherford/New York, Erik Gunn/Kenosha and Timothy Roche/Pensacola [BOX]

GRACE P. LEWIS A century of remarkable experiences

In March of 1919, I went with Mama and Dad to Pinehurst, to the Carolina Hotel... Staying at the hotel was Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter. She was there to instruct some of the ladies at the hotel how to shoot and so I joined the group. She was a quiet, little person--nothing like you would imagine. One night there was a costume ball and I thought it would be fun to impersonate her. She was delighted to loan me the outfit she wore from her days touring with Buffalo Bill! It was a fringed leather jacket and skirt with a hat that had a six-inch-wide brim. I won the prize.

With reporting by Michelle Adelman, Adrianne Navon and Megan Rutherford/New York, Erik Gunn/Kenosha and Timothy Roche/Pensacola