Browsing through Barnes and Nobles’ biography shelves over the holiday weekend, I was awed by the array of stories, that between each spine held a life, or at least part of it. We read these biographies and memoirs for a slice of life that is not our own, to gain a new perspective in our own lives, or simply because truth is stranger than fiction.
For as long as I can remember, true stories have beckoned me to them, no matter the format. Made-for-TV movies surged in popularity in the Eighties, anything from Baby Jessica being saved from a well to the McMartin trial. I watched in horror as Tracy Thurman’s husband stomped on her head as a cop stood by doing nothing, when Farrah Fawcett burned the house down with her abusive husband sleeping in bed, when Harry Hamlin and Kelly McGillis blew up their car with them and her young children in it (police later discovered that the children were shot first). No matter if the stories are merely based on truth—a story based on truth is more fascinating than fiction. Dopesick, Baby Reindeer, We Were the Lucky Ones—all phenomenal stories with truth as their basis.
Even the likes of Seinfeld created stories from truth—the Big Salad and Festivus were not a writer’s creation. No one could have made up the soap opera of the OJ Simpson Trial. While Sybil was the fiction of a psychotherapist and her needy patient, the multiple personalities of Sybil could have never existed without a true rare disorder that sounded like something out of a science fiction novel.
I’m currently reading The Next Run: A UC Berkely Student’s Rise to Major ‘60s Pot Smuggler by Tom Jenkins. I’m assuming it’s self-published or through a small publishing house that does not release books with a hard cover. Fascinated as I read each short chapter about the various drug runs, I’m marveling at the effort it took to tell such a story. As an (unpublished) writer myself, I know the time and effort and energy writing takes, even the first draft. But it’s the revising, the darling-killings, the polishing, the editing, and then the defeat because it still sucks even though I’ve now created a book-length story about one aspect of my life. Jenkins, who would be five or six years older than my dad, sat down and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. He had a story to tell, one that focused on smuggling pot across the Mexican border into the States, but yet it reveals so much more about life. All the people we cross paths with, all our good—and bad—decisions, what motivates us (or not), and ultimately that such books guarantee we don’t die when our bodies do.
Perhaps that’s why so many people, especially as they age, feel the need to write down their life stories.
Every Memorial Day I drive all the way to Brooklyn—Iowa, not New York. My dad lives on my mom’s dad’s land, building a home there a few years after my mom died. Everyone I’ve lost—including beloved family pets—reside forever there, buried into the ground of a small Iowa town, one I visited all the time as a child, where both sets of grandparents lived. I create flower bouquets for all the graves, designing a massive spray, usually with shades of pink, for my mother’s monument. Every time I visit my dad, he’s found more and more items stored away in totes. This time, I dug through a tote filled with my mom’s paper stuff, and whatever else was thrown in there. I cringed at the haphazard organization, the lack of separation of stuff into neat files or boxes. Within the tote of paper scraps and files, I found snippets of my grandma—my dad’s mom—and her life story she had started to write.
The only reason I found it at all was the Post-it note my mother had written, a yellow square that stood out amongst the white, containing my mother’s perfect left-handed cursive writing: Thought I would send this back to you so you can continue to write. I think it is very precious information and really enjoyed it. I have copied it and am looking forward to your next installment in your book!
My mother has been dead for 15 years. I don’t recall ever seeing a photocopy of what my grandma had written, which is somewhat moot, considering I had never seen the original until now.
I had no idea Grandma Johnson was an Emily Dickinson, writing on the backs of calendars and other paper scraps. Grandma saved everything, but I didn’t realize she would record her life story using such wayward pieces of paper. The excerpts I found were written on the back of December 2000’s wall calendar, an Inter-County Cable Company letter, the back of the cover of a Christmas card, and three sheets of a notepad campaigning for Tom Sheets for Poweshiek Co. Sheriff. From an Emily Dickinson standpoint, such thriftiness is delightful, museum-quality ephemera filled with my grandma’s cursive writing. From a logical standpoint, my head is simmering with madness, wondering where all the other pages are, how much had she written before abandoning the project? Yet the pieces I found were the most cherished part ever, the part about Bobby’s death.
Bobby would have been my third uncle, had he not died at 8 years old of scarlet fever.
I knew little about Bobby, only that he was some family tragedy that dare not be uttered. He died before my dad and uncles were even born. My sister, cousin, and I knew better than to touch the blue trunk that sat in Grandma’s bedroom. We pilfered her costume jewelry, dug through her closet, and hung out on her bed as if we slept there, but we never opened Bobby’s trunk. Two small, framed pictures of Bobby sat on that trunk: one a cherub cheek toddler with bright smiling eyes and the other a six-year-old dressed in a cowboy outfit. We only knew snippets: our aunt Nancy, who was two years older than Bobby, came down with scarlet fever, which sickened Bobby. He died at eight years old. Nancy survived.
I felt a connection with Bobby because when I was six, I had scarlet fever. Hushed phone calls occurred out of earshot, flashbacks of concerns despite the penicillin I was prescribed. At my young age, I couldn’t grasp the concept of death except the old-fashioned treatment of illnesses that Little House on the Prairie taught me. As a teenager, I understood the magnitude of my condition—had I been born forty years earlier, I may not have survived.
Over the years I learned tidbits here and there, like how Nancy blamed herself for the tragedy. Grandpa dealt with Bobby’s death with alcohol; Grandma became the shrew who had to deal with everything because her husband was too busy drinking. My dad told a mixture of comedic and tragic stories of his father’s drinking: the time when Grandpa came downstairs in only his whitey tighties with a flashlight shining under his chin or the time when Grandma locked him out of the house and he put his hand through the window. By the time we grandkids came along, Grandpa was a functioning alcoholic, never violent or outrageous. I would have never known had my parents not told me.
When the Pandemic hit, Dad said that Auntie Jean had to bring the mail out to Grandma’s house for the mailman refused to do so for fear of catching scarlet fever.
When my own husband became a gambling addict, I understood my grandma more than ever. She had to be the shrew because her husband had checked out; she ran the household while he drank himself into a stupor. Grandma received no thanks for maintaining the household, only criticisms. I wanted to ask her intimate questions about her marriage and about Bobby, but never had the courage to do so. I regret not asking her. She died at 93 years old, moving into a senior living center when her congenital heart disease worsened and she could no longer live on her own.
I was horrified when my parents, and my aunts and uncles, decided for Grandma what would be kept and what would be tossed when she moved into a senior facility. They rifled through her apartment, grabbing what little had remained after she sold the big yellow house on Brooklyn’s main street when I was still in high school. My mom knew what to grab—the metal water pitcher that we used every visit, which Dad said was on the table when he was a child; the small orange salad casserole dish that was only ever used for the orange Jell-O with carrots; and the one item I requested—the mantle clock that rang out a tune at the top of every hour. Someone had already taken the red stuffed kitty and the fairy-tale book. Mom must have grabbed important papers too, the ones Grandma had written her life story on, the ones I finally found about 20 years later.
This is what my grandma wrote about Bobby:
On Feb. 9, 1946 on a Sat morning, Bobby passed away. He was in the hospital 15 days and I was with him the entire time. Other family members were at the hospital and helped to be with Nancy. Tommy and I went home, tired and brokenhearted—and had the terrible experience of funeral home and cemetery decisions.
Out to the cemetery on a cold Feb day we had to decide where to bury him. The East side of the drive had no one buried there. The frozen looks of the place was so heart renching—we were a couple of zombies going thru the motions of planning a funeral. Rex Bromer was the funeral director and he had no small casket on hand so it had to be ordered. The night of the visitation, Bobby had to be on a slab. The casket came in the next morning and the funeral was in the afternoon. Home was horribly quiet—Our dog was gone he was Bobby’s dog and missed us all so much that he left and we never found him.
I have so many questions, yet I have no one to ask for answers. Imagine the horror of seeing your eight-year-old son on a slab—the coldness of the word slab is jarring. Grandma doesn’t even name the dog. Yet she captured key details in just a couple of paragraphs, priceless information that would otherwise be lost forever.
I devour memoirs, craving the stories of people’s lives, gaining perspective of my own. Whether I have a personal connection to the writer usually doesn’t matter. We carry weight around—literally and figuratively—each of our pain, yet we all experience adventure in our own way, giggle at inside jokes, viewing the world around us from our unique perspective.
After my mom died, I found a journal she started in 1983, just after she turned thirty. She only wrote up into her teens and then abruptly stopped, never returning to it. (Upon my insistence, she would type up several chapters of her childhood and teenage years once she had been diagnosed with cancer, but she never wrote a chapter beyond her marriage.) Her first page, her introduction, eloquently states why the average person’s life is important:
I am of the great inner conscience that it is very important that we document our histories. If it is of great earth shattering accomplishments is not important, but rather a documentation of a lifestyle of the times and a minuscule part of the human population is of far greater interest. We all will learn and memorize the great deeds of our days and the days gone by, but the everyday happenings and one family’s accomplishments will be lost in time forever. My past experiences have proven this phenomena as I have searched for an understanding of lives of people past. A finding of births and deaths does not seem to satisfy my hunger. Therefore, this is the purpose of the history that follows, in hopes that whoever might read this in the future will be able to satisfy their hunger.
With every memoir I read, whether self-published or a bestseller, it satisfies a bit of hunger better than a large slice of triple layer chocolate cake.