Beware what went before

Writing from my old houses opens the forgotten files of memory. What comes up when I look into “New Hampshire”, that darling old Cape Cod in Epping, the first house I owned on my own? (You don’t really own a house if you share title.) Small, it had room for me and my kids, the dog and cat and a pair of guinea pigs, those boring little rodents people eat in South America. Probably taste like chicken, what doesn’t? Oh, and ten acres of worn-out pasture for my mare. All that remained after He went off with his Secretary.

A darling old house, I said. Do I recall stockings hung by the chimney, happiness closing over the wounds of divorce like frosting on a cake? Did we recover our aplomb and move into rosier futures?

No indeed. The events that come to mind are stark and brutal and the feelings these memories evoke are just as strong as thirty, forty years ago. The bleak loneliness of the empty cornfields, the misery of a tangled new growth woods, black as old bones in winter rains. Where was the value?

Oh yes, some jolly evenings by the fire and a very exciting chimney fire where I threw out the fire department and doused the flames myself. Power! In this house I learnt the intoxicating joys of home ownership, learnt that property makes a citizen the fire chief had to obey. Learnt that I could make it alone.

Memoirist, beware. The old dogs you have put to rest are only sleeping between some juicy brain cells. We are all the sum of our days and all the other days of our time here, newspaper headlines, shopping lists, phone calls to people whose names we could not recall even under hypnotism along with the flat tire on a deserted street, the horrible tantrums we threw for no good reason, things we lost, remorse.

Writing a novel must be easier. When those old dogs nip at the novelist’s elbow, she can throw them a little bone, give them a minor role, sleep on it and delete them the next day. Not so with memoir.

Unless you are writing only from the top of your pretty head.

“I grew up in a happy family. Mother and Father did not divorce nor did they bless me with siblings. They gave me everything I ever needed and a lot more.”

Riveting, isn’t it?

No, if you want to write your life, be prepared to suffer the old slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and at the same time suffer the remorse of knowing now how futile it all seems.