Developing My Syllabus

As I’ve written, I am teaching a course on memoir for the first time this fall. My approach is for students to read one or two short excerpts from published memoirs each week; to discuss these in class; then to apply the lessons learned by writing reflective personal pieces about their own lives, as short as a single paragraph.

We will introduce the course by reading a “complete” memoir by my favorite non-fiction writer, Norman Maclean. Titled “Retrievers: Good and Bad,” the piece manages to tell the story of the writer’s upbringing, along with key developments in his family’s life, all in eight pages. It does so by looking at the past through a singular lens: the retriever dogs Maclean’s father used for hunting.

From here on, the course will fall into three sections, reflecting three phases of one’s life—and therefore of one’s memoir: The Gift, The Call, and The Return. I have selected four memoirs for each of the three phases and plan to draw from others in class.

In part 1, The Gift, we will read from:

Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
Thérese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
Samuel Eliot Morison, One Boy‘s Boston
U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs

These four books pair up nicely. Karr’s memoir about growing up with alcoholic parents in east Texas was published in 1995, exactly one hundred years after St. Thérèse began writing down her early memories in a French Carmelite convent. Each was “given” a family and was shaped by that gift. There is an obvious contrast but a deeper message. In a century, our understanding of “memoir” has been revolutionized.

Morison and Grant were both born in the nineteenth century. Each was extremely proud of his heritage. But there the similarities end. Morison was a Boston Brahmin intellectual, Grant a hardscrabble-farmer-turned-lieutenant general.

Each of these four authors celebrates the gifts that he or she was given, although gift may be stretching it in the case of Karr. Her troubled childhood was a gift that she had to refine and forgive by writing about it.

In part 2 of the course, The Call, we will read from:

St. Augustine, The Confessions
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Bob Smith, Hamlet’s Dresser
Calvin Trillin, About Alice

The Confessions of St. Augustine is arguably the first memoir ever and contains a “call” scene that is hard to top. The saint literally heard a voice calling to him and the voice changed his life—and the history of the Catholic Church. Day’s memoir is also Catholic, though written fifteen hundred years later. A one-time Communist sympathizer and leftist writer, she too received a literal call (a stranger at her door); and as a result, she became the founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper and a worldwide network of “houses of hospitality,” or homeless shelters.

The calls received by Smith and Trillin were secular: one man found his life’s work backstage at the American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut; the other met the love of his life “by stumbling into the right party.”

In part 3 of the course, The Return, I have a provisional list of four books that may be refined as the October start date grows closer. The books are, for now:

Edwidge Danticat (pictured above), Brother, I’m Dying
Bob Smith, Hamlet’s Dresser
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Tony Hendra, Brother Joe

Yes, I plan to use the Smith book again here. It has a wonderful chapter of “return,” which can mean many things in a memoir—return home, financial return, giving back. A memoir is itself finally a return: to one’s experience in an effort to make new, fresh sense of it.

More to come. Reviews for most of these books can be found in the Goodreads link in the right column of this blog.