Time: God’s Gift to the Memoirist

I sometimes joke with memoir clients that God invented time to make our job easier. When trying to decide in what order to tell and/or edit one’s life story, I say: “In the order God gave us, of course. Chronological order.”

The wisdom of this profound insight was brought home to me while reading Bob Smith’s otherwise appealing, chronologically disjointed memoir Hamlet’s Dresser.  

Smith’s story is remarkable: how being raised in a dysfunctional family while taking care of a severely retarded younger sister, often by himself, he fell in love with Shakespeare and—forty years on—found a remarkable calling reading Shakespeare aloud with senior citizen groups in New York City.

Truth to tell, I heard Smith lecture on Shakespeare at a private club about ten years ago. He is a compelling, highly entertaining expert. When I learned that he had written a memoir, I had to look at it.

Unfortunately, Smith plays with time in a way God never intended—cutting back and forth between his childhood and his work with senior citizens, not like a pingpong ball, simply back and forth, but more like a child frog-hopping rocks in a stream, randomly, as though his secret purpose is to lose us in the hopping.

It seems clear that the reason Smith does that is that his own life remains a mystery to him. Fond of quoting Shakespeare throughout the text, he repeats one line that could stand as an epigraph for his story: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” And if he doesn’t know, then how can we?

About halfway through Hamlet’s Dresser, Bob Smith literally becomes Hamlet’s dresser—at the American Shakespeare Festival in his hometown of Stratford, Connecticut. Working backstage on plays written by the poet who has entranced him since he was eleven and hid out from family concerns in the local library, he finds his vocation. Eventually, he will go on the road as dresser to the legendary Bert Lahr for an entire year of cross-country touring.

By that time, Hamlet’s Dresser has taken off and is soaring. All because (to my way of thinking) Smith finally trusts his story (his life) enough to tell it straight.

Over at Goodreads, I gave Hamlet’s Dresser three of five stars. That’s five stars for story, one star for structure. Do the math. And tell your story straight.