It was a beautiful little house, with cheery green shutters and a
perky, pointy, red-shingled roof and little blue trains painted on the
windowsills in Benny’s room. It was a beautiful little house.
And I hated it.
Here we have the first three sentences of my memoir. Yes, that memoir, the one I've been threatening to write for three years now. The tentative title is "Too Small to Succeed" and it's about how the Killer Robot Family changed their lives and barely avoided bankruptcy as the country slid into recession.
I don't know much about writing a memoir, but I've read a few, and some of them I actually liked. My memoir covers one year, from March 2007 to March 2008. I'm still amazed we got through that year; we were definitely walking a tightrope without a net. We had both good luck and bad — the bad luck was always expensive. Heck, even the good luck was expensive. What am I saying: We live in San Francisco — everything is expensive.
As I see it, memoirs generally fall into four categories: My Time Living Abroad ("Eat, Pray, Love"), My Famous Life (Meredith Baxter's "Untied"), My Kicky Concept ("Julie and Julia") and My Horrific, Traumatic Childhood ("Angela's Ashes"). The recession has bred a fifth category: My Financial Train Wreck. I'm trying not to read any of them, despite the advice in writers' magazines, since I'll probably get discouraged. The one I did glance at ("Made for You and Me") promised commentary on the loss of our small towns, homelessness, joblessness and the increasing economic divisions between Americans. My memoir makes no such promises, although I can guarantee a few meltdowns in the "Julie and Julia" style. Anyway, I find browsing memoirs kind of a depressing experience as I find myself looking at the book jackets of "Unwanted" and "A Child Called 'It'".
Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.
To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.
The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state. I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)
"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.
MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.
What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.
So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.
Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.
To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.
The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state. I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)
"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.
MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.
What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.
So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.
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