Norman Maclean, Memoirist

If you are past 70 or even 80 and have thought about writing down some memories but haven’t found the time or will or inclination, I have a name to give you strength: Norman Maclean.

You may know him as the author of “A River Runs Through It,” a story about trout-fishing in Montana on which the hit 1999 film was based. (Brad Pitt starred, Robert Redford directed.)

To me Maclean is the role model extraordinaire for the older memoirist.

Maclean (1902–1990) was a beloved professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he was ensconced teaching Milton and Shakespeare for 45 years. (That’s him in the photo, circa 1970.) After his retirement in 1973, having written only academic works on English literature, Maclean undertook to put down some “reminiscent stories.”

His reasons for doing so are interesting to me, as well as a small piece of advice he offered a friend in a letter.

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.

My Favorite Memoirist? You Would Never Guess

I am preparing to teach a seven-week adult education course on Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours. My idea is for students to read and discuss famous memoirs as inspiration and guidance in writing their own.

Students will keep notebooks but they will not be asked to finish writing anything—only to be inspired, only to get started. As a thirty-year professional writer, I know that getting started is half the battle.

Seven weeks is not long enough to write a book about anything. But it is long enough to light a fire.

So in the four months remaining before the course begins, I am reading memoirs by the dozens, intending to select six or seven of these to excerpt for weekly assignments, and several dozen more to be cited as examples. Naturally, I am beginning with memoirs that I already have read and in some cases re-read.

This has brought me to the awareness that the memoirs I feel drawn to say a lot about my own life and how I see it. I imagine that my students will make a similar discovery.

Some examples: