Memoir Writing Tip of the Week: The Role of the Retrospective Voice in Crafting Memoir
One of the things that makes a memoir a memoir is the use of the retrospective voice. You tell the story you want to tell, as it happened in the past, but then you also reflect back on that experience from your point of view now.
You reflect on who you were at the time, the circumstances you were in, the choices you made, what you knew or didn't know at the time, and how you perceive the whole thing now, with wisdom (hopefully) and hindsight.
We call this retrospective voice the "musing" voice. And as you continue to read other people's memoirs, you can now start to look for it. To get you started, here are a few examples:
"I have recently come to understand something about myself, which is that I am-as my uncle Hilal might say-a hopeless case. Even if I had somehow, down the line, brought myself to have babies and to stay in my hometown in a house with an easy, wide-hipped porch, none of that would have made any difference to the sleepless part of me. Like a second, invisible body, I sit up out of my sleep at night, wander across the room, stop beside a darkened window, and dream my way through the glass....
"We grow into the curve of what we know; for me, that was my family's rootlessness and my father's control and scrutiny-movement and confinement. I am as surely a Bedouin as anyone who has traveled in a desert caravan. A reluctant Bedouin-I miss and I long for every place, every country, I have ever lived-and frequently even the places my friends and my family have lived and talked about as well-and I never want to leave any of these places."
--Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava
"Of course, I also now know where the massive, tectonic shifts in John's worldview would eventually take him-and me. Adam's arrival transformed our relationship to work more dramatically than any other area of our lives. It is amazing to live with someone who genuinely couldn't care less about Getting Ahead, someone who is absolutely committed to finding joy in the present moment. The belief John and I shared before Adam came along-that rigidly disciplined, distasteful work was the one and only path to a good life-now seems both horrible and downright silly, like believing we could make it rain by performing human sacrifices. Adam's birth convinced us that fat was quite capable of crushing our best-laid plans like so many dead beetles. In the face of such uncertainty, the only things that seem to us worth doing are the ones that allow us to experience the strange and eventful journey of life in all its richness."
--Martha Beck, Expecting Adam
Ready to write your own memoir? Join me November 4th-6th at a beautiful retreat center in Soquel, California for a special Memoir Weekend Retreat. Click below to learn more.
