Jeanette Walls' memoir is full of unbelievable
adventures and twist and turns that left me pondering the difference
between memoir and fiction. It took me asking several
questions, participating in class discussions, an explanation from Elmaz
and re-reading the book to make sense of this literary gem and how to use it to
inform my own writing. In a memoir, the events, characters, time and place
must be true no matter how unfamiliar or unlikely they appear to
be. As Walls states, "I gradually came around to accepting the notion
that whether I liked it or not, this was how it was going to be
(264)," sometimes unbelievable, but true. Walls frames the memoir in childhood memories that resemble
a call a response technique between the child voice and the adult narrator.
This is what maintains the frame and allows the narrator to transition effectively from
adult to child voice.
When Walls recounts the family adventure to the Grand Canyon, the child voice responds, the car can travel, "faster than the speed of light (119)." While this is impossible, in the mind of a child, the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light is real especially, when your father who you adore is driving. Walls holds the reader in the moment creating tension then uses a child voice to respond to the event that is supported by adult descriptions. "We were out in the desert now, the telephone poles snapping past (119)." "The speedometer needle crept past one hundred, the last number on the dial, and pushed into the empty space beyond (119)." "We coasted for a few yards in silence before the car stopped." Following these adult description of the event, the child voice responds, "Don't worry, I said, Dad will fix it (120)." At this moment the adult voice or point of view is lost and the child voice becomes prevalent.
Walls employs tableau and the transition from adult to child voice in one adventure after the other. Always maintain frame, always allowing the child voice to come through. When moving to Wells and meeting Erma for the first time Walls writes, " I thought Dad must have arranged for the weirdest people in town to pretend they were his family. In a few minutes he'd start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we'd go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat (131)." Here the adult voice begins the description and the child voice concludes it.
Walls concludes the memoir with a childhood memory in an adult voice, "I could see Venus on the horizon, up over the dark water, glowing steadily (281)." As a child, she viewed Venus as a start that her father gave her for Christmas. As an adult, it "continues "glowing steadily." The transition is complete, the frame stays intact, the adult voice describes, the child voice responds.
You bring up a good point with the Grand Canyon examples: does the child know what a speedometer is? When you choose to include that detail, what purpose does it serve? I'm judging that it's a voiceless, ageless detail (if there even can be such a thing) - so subtle that it hardly reads like breaking character. That's just what the object is called, and by the time we're adults typing a manuscript, we have acquired the language to communicate it efficiently. Is there such a thing as a true child's voice, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteStacy,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you picked out phrases like "faster than the speed of light (119)." because I too found the separation between the adult and child through simple words and phrases (language) that Walls chose to use. Certainly not by mistake that she depicted the story is way. Although the children are smart, they are still 'children' and there needed to be something to distance them from the adults. I found that choppier sentencing worked well too, as well as wording. From a craft perspective, it helped when there were some awkward sentences. (See my blog for example!)
Smooches!
B