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This past Wednesday afternoon and evening I had the distinct pleasure of spending time in the company of the great essayist and Columbia University professor (and head of the graduate nonfiction program), Phillip Lopate, his wife, his daughter, and members of the Bryn Mawr University creative writing program.

(Thank you, Cyndi Reeves and Daniel Torday, for allowing me to crash the party.)

Between the cracks of many deadlines here, I've been reading from the books I bought that evening. I have, of course, read Lopate through the years; who can teach nonfiction without owning Lopate volumes? But I did not own, until this Wednesday night, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which is, in a word, a glory. Perhaps it is because I agree so steadily with Lopate's many helpful assertions, perhaps it is because I, in my own way, attempt to teach and, in books like Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, carry forward these ideals about the rounded I, the obligation to the universal, the curious mind, the trace-able pursuit of questions, that I sometimes read with tears in my eyes passages like this one, from "Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story:"

In attempting any autobiographical prose, the writer knows what has happened—that is the great relief, one is given the story to begin with—but not necessarily what to make of it. It is like being handed a text in cuneiform: you have to translate, at first awkwardly, inexpertly, slowly, and uncertainly. To think on the page, retrospectively or otherwise, is, in the last analysis, difficult. But the writer's struggle to master that which initially may appear too hard to do, that which only the dead and the great seem to have pulled off with ease, is a moving spectacle in itself, and well worth the undertaking. 

There are just two more weeks left in this semester at Penn. My beautiful honors thesis students are finalizing their work and, soon, will not just hold their glorious books in their hands, but have the time to reflect back on all the lessons learned. My Creative Nonfiction students are writing letters, Coates and Parker and Rilke style, to those they feel must hear them, while also working on 600-word portraits of one another. Joan Wickersham, the extraordinary writer of both nonfiction and fiction is headed to our campus, Tuesday evening, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House—and if you are anywhere near, I strongly suggest you make the time. She is a national treasure.

Teaching is exhausting, exhilarating, necessary, confounding, essential. I learn that again, year upon year. I stagger away—made smarter, in so many ways, by the students I teach.

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Every year we lose twice the number of parents, children, grandparents, friends, neighbors, colleagues to suicide than we lose to murder. "Murder attacks the future, suicide the past," a brilliant writer offered to me, just this week, in email. Yes.

When Joan Wickersham's father decided to end his own life early one morning—he had dressed, collected the paper, made a cup of coffee for his wife, sat down in a favorite chair, crossed his feet on the foot rest, and fired one shot. He left behind the unsolvable riddle, the countless mathematically imbalanced paradoxes that all suicides leave in their wake. For years the author tried to sort the facts and un-numb, tried to understand who her father really was and how to make the entirely unacceptable somehow acceptable, so that she could live not past it, but with it. Hadn't he loved her? How could he? Hadn't he himself been against suicide as a philosophical concept, a life choice? So then what happened? Didn't he know that taking his life in his house would make so much impossible for the wife, and was that the point, after all, and why, in the immediate aftermath, was there so much strange conversation among the family members, so many wrong things first noticed, a hint, even, of laughter?

Wickersham wrote her book in pieces. She wrote it as fiction, she wrote it as memoir hung on the hanger of chronology, and finally she wrote it as an index, The Suicide Index: Putting My father's Death in Order. The book was a National Book Award finalist in 2008. It wholly deserved the citation.

Chapter titles:

Suicide:
act of
attempt to imagine
bare-bones account
immediate aftermath

anger about

attitude toward
his,
mine,

belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning

You understand. You can image that Wickersham moves across pronouns, point of views, facts, assertions, incompatible parallels. You can trust that this book is honest and also unsparing—because a book about one person's suicide is also necessarily a book about the people who either did not anticipate or somehow caused (does anyone cause? can anyone anticipate?) the terrifying, tragic act.

There are lessons for memoirists in this book about structure and form. About lacerating honesty, as in: If you are going to be laceratingly honest, you must also be lacerating about yourself. About not making life too orderly for the pages of a book. Here is Wickersham, for example, offering instruction by way of notes to herself:

Biography, in the case of someone who commits suicide, is particularly dangerous, misleading. It looks at a life through the lens of a death. Every time a bad thing happens, the temptation is to say, "Aha!"

I have to be careful not to make it too orderly.

Here is Wickersham offering instructions on life:

I am convinced that in real life suicide can't be the backdrop, dwarfed by something else. It is the foreground: itself inevitably the thing that changes people's lives. There is no other plot, and no resolution. And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the absorption of a bruise.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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