Prompt 109: Memoir Madness

I have been hard at work, these last few weeks, figuring out the syllabi for the two courses I’ll teach at Bennington College this spring. One of these is a 4000-level creative writing course. That one, I feel, I hope, I have to trust, will be a piece of cake. I’ve been teaching creative writing since I, myself, was a graduate student in creative writing, more than a decade ago. I feel like, when it comes to creative instruction, I basically know the landscape, and have experience guiding students through it.

The other class, though, is more on the outer edges of my comfort zone. It’s a 2000-level, but it’s a literature class, not a creative writing seminar, and I’m realizing now, rather too late, probably, that it’s kind of an ambitious project. I’m calling it “A Collective Portrait of America: Literary Memoir Since the Civil War,” setting the stage with St. Augustine and Rousseau, moving into Frederick Douglass and Henry Adams, proceeding into the twentieth century with Twain, Stein, Hemingway, and the Fitzgeralds to Angelou, Dillard, Baldwin, Didion, and Gornick, stopping briefly in Vietnam with Wolff and O’Brien, getting into the 90s with Wojnarowicz and Patti Smith, and concluding with the likes of Laymon, Chee, Febos, Maggie Nelson, and Tommy Pico. I mean . . . whew. We’ll see how it goes.

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Meanwhile, the challenges of getting literally anything done while parenting two young children, even when one spends four days a week at a truly heavenly little pre-pre-school, remain real and taxing and troubling. I have spent literally months querying daycares and sitters in our area. Every day care has a waitlist; a few have closed due to untenable new state regulations and guidelines. Recent au pair laws in Massachusetts make au pairs an option for only the state’s wealthiest citizens. Local nannies and sitters are few and far between. I have only just, finally, with the help of, count them, three generous friends and neighbors, cobbled together a patchwork of childcare to cover my absence during the two days a week I’ll soon be in Vermont, teaching. That’s three people for approximately fourteen hours, including the commute; the work I will do outside of the classroom — reading, grading, meeting with students over Zoom, designing assignments, writing letters of feedback, etc. — will have to happen during naps, after kid bedtime, and on weekends, when my partner can “take the babies,” as we put it in this house. 

(Though, I have to say, even when he does take over, the children — like, famously, life — will find a way. Let me sketch you a quick illustration. A winter Sunday. I am attempting to type one-handed while nursing. Attempting to ignore the baby’s intermittent, blood-curdling scream sessions after I give her back to her dad. Attempting to explain, kindly and lovingly, to the toddler who breaks into my office every fifteen minutes — “Hi, Mommy!” — that I’m trying to concentrate, before he is corralled away again by Dad. Attempting to ignore his tantrums.)

Anyway. I am not saying anything anyone, including me, hasn’t said a million times before. I’m just saying it’s bananas. I have huffed and puffed and fumed and raged about the childcare crisis in this country, and structural misogyny. I am also aware that I am lucky: I have a spouse who can help, and adequate resources, including neighbors and friends who are willing to help out. I have the proverbial village it takes. But even I, privileged as I am — even I, for whom “going back to work” is a choice, and will actually mean clocking in less than two days per week — have found the scarcity of childcare, in this wealthiest of countries, enraging. I spent $50 for the time it took to draft this Substack post. It will cost me approximately $250 per week to go back to work at a job in an industry that famously underpays, and that is not counting the $150/week we already spend on childcare for the other kid.

Meanwhile, as I prep for my class, deep in memoir madness, I have been marveling at how the America in the memoirs I am assigning has changed, during the last 150-200 years. One of the texts I’ve become interested in — though it is not generally considered “literary,” given all that loaded word implies — is the autobiography of workers rights activist Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. From a contemporary perspective, even for someone with a (very) general understanding of American history and the labor movement, Mother Jones’ stories about working conditions in the Industrial Era United States — particularly for children, who were routinely paid between $3 and $6/week — are shocking. What shocks, and continues to shock, even on my second and third and eleventh read (and particularly after revisiting the Narrative of Frederick Douglass), is how human bodies have been used, abused, and disenfranchised, by our country and other empires, in the name of industry. (Have you watched Andor?) What shocks is how, in this capitalist system, those of us who possess the least capital have been routinely reduced to nothing more than bodies, and disposable bodies at that.

Take Jones’ chapter “The March of the Mill Children,” which describes, essentially, a publicity stunt she undertook in the summer of 1903, when she paraded a bunch of little children, “some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle . . . stooped little things, round shouldered and skinny . . . [many] not over ten years of age” from Pennsylvania to New York, with stops in between, to show people the toll that factory labor had taken on these kids:

I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the future citizens of the nation.

The officials of the city hall were standing in the open windows. I held the little ones of the mills high up above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were light to lift. . . .

The children carried knapsacks on their backs in which was a knife and fork, a tin cup and plate. We took along a wash boiler in which to cook the food on the road. One little fellow had a drum and another had a fife. That was our band. We carried banners that said, “We want more schools and less hospitals.” “We want time to play.” “Prosperity is here. Where is ours?”

. . . The children were very happy, having plenty to eat, taking baths in the brooks and rivers every day. I thought when the strike is over and they go back to the mills, they will never have another holiday like this. . . .

[At] Twentieth Street [in New York City]. I told an immense crowd of the horrors of child labor. . . . The next day we went to Coney Island at the invitation of Mr. Bostick who owned the wild animal show. The children had a wonderful day such as they never had in all their lives. After the exhibition of the trained animals, Mr. Bostick let me speak to the audience. There was a back drop to the tiny stage of the Roman Coliseum with the audience painted in and two Roman emperors down in front with their thumbs down. Right in front of the emperors were the empty iron cages of the animals. I put my little children in the cages and they clung to the iron bars while I talked[:] . . .

“In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone? . . . I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. . .” The people sat stone still and out in the rear a lion roared. . . .

The march of the maimed and malnourished children. Their delight at stopping to splash in a cold stream. The image of them holding mournfully, theatrically, to the bars of the animal cages at Coney Island, while their ringleader gives her impassioned speech to the crowd. The soundtrack of miserable animals. It is all so evocative. So cinematic. Jones concludes that “the president refused to see us . . . but our march had done its work”: soon afterward, Pennsylvania passed a child labor law that kept children “from entering the factory until they were fourteen years of age.”

Fourteen. Progress!

Slavery had been abolished only 38 years before.

I am not a historian. I’m barely a college professor. Really I am just a novelist, with one book out and another in the works. To the extent that I am a reader and analyzer of texts, I tend to approach such work from a creative perspective. That said, I’ve found, in the process of designing this syllabus, that against the historical backdrop of stories like Jones’s — or, even more so, Douglass’s — contemporary personal narratives, even those that recount traumas of the body, such as, say, rape narratives, or narratives of physical abuse and addiction — feel . . . very different. Not less powerful, exactly. In fact, the rhetorical power, literary quality, and formal inventiveness of memoirs and personal essays has generally soared, right?, in the decades since, say, Maya Angelou, and the idea that “the personal is political”; and then Mary Karr, and the proliferation of memoir in the literary marketplace; and then, well, reality TV, and social media, and the rise of the so-called “MFA industrial complex,” and the complete saturation of personal stories, perspectives, opinions, and beliefs in publications, news, and entertainment, online and otherwise, today.

As sophisticated as contemporary personal narratives have become — by necessity, I’d argue, in such a crowded marketplace, where we are bombarded, what, weekly?, with the publication of memoirs that nobody asked for, with biopics about randos we barely know, but love to hate — they have also become increasingly apolitical. Or, more accurately, their political concerns are no longer their raisons d’être. In academic contexts we learn to read them through various “lenses,” among which the political are only a few (e.g. feminist lenses, social justice lenses). In a broader, cultural context, we consume so many personal narratives, daily, many times a day, that we have become experts at analyzing the performative. We are all, now, connoisseurs of the authentic.

Sometimes, during college admissions season, I volunteer to do alumni interviews with young people who are applying to my alma mater. In that context I spoke last week to an impressive young high schooler, a native of China who has lived in the US intermittently, but, all told, for most of her life. She is interested in social justice; she wants to be a writer. In the course of our conversation, she described how strange it was to have watched Black Lives Matter protests on television (she must have been fourteen or fifteen), and to have read in the news about anti-Asian hate crimes here, while she was in China during Covid lockdown, planning to return to the States. Gently, she said she’d become worried, then, that when she returned to the US it would not be a safe place for her mother and sister. I asked her, more out of curiosity than for the purposes of our interview, how politically engaged her peers are, generally speaking. She described a tendency to focus more on “raising awareness,” which is to say posting on social media, than on taking concrete action toward substantive change.

This performative engagement she described felt, to me, like a liability not only for activism, but for storytelling more generally (and for memoir, by extension). For truth itself — whose subjectivity has become such a topic of conversation, these last few years.

At any rate, even as I recount, above, my own small story, which is of such minor significance, generally speaking (but major significance to me!), I have been reflecting on its (perhaps tangential, perhaps substantive) relevance to this larger American narrative I’m hoping to explore with my students this spring: a narrative about work and selfhood, about structural failures and exploitation, about what it means to pursue happiness as an individual in this wealthy, democratic, capitalist empire — and, of course and always, whose stories get to be told and heard, and published and considered “literary,” and why. After all, we are all in this together. “The Rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.” Wink, wink.

So I guess your prompt today, if that’s what you came here for, is to consider your own story in the context of the larger narrative(s) of your environment. Maybe that means the country you live in, maybe it means your family and ancestors, or your city, or our planet. Whatever it is, however big or small your context, don’t let it dwarf your personal story — or, on the other hand, infuse it with undue self-importance. Let it inform and be informed by. Let it, simply, connect to the larger whole.

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