So You Want Your Scenes to Matter? (Memoir Primer Part II of II)

Harnessing the power of reflection in a genre where "meaning" matters more than "what happened"

Last week I wrote a post about staying in scene—about why your vantage point in memoir matters so much. Where and when you enter a given scene establishes a moment in time, a specific date, and how old you were for the reader. From here, you tell your story. You strap your video recorder to your shoulder, and you stay in the shot.

The heavy-lifting of scene is done by that narrative voice I wrote about last week that goes by many names: the “then” narrator; the “I” character; the “embodied self.” This is the version of you having/reliving an experience—whether you were eight, or sixteen, or thirty-three. Sue William Silverman has called this voice the “voice of innocence”—the voice that “describes the event.”

What’s fun—and difficult—about memoir writing is that you’re writing about past events that you understand better now than you did then. The challenge (and skill) is how to integrate what you know now without drifting out of scene, or breaking the fictive dream, or feeling compelled to tell the reader what you did or didn’t know in the moment, as this rarely matters to the story.

The work of this integration is accomplished by the reflective narrator, which arrives on the page as perspective and interpretation, and whose role is to be a guide to your reader. Your reflective narrator has a particular job—and that’s to support your reader in a deeper understanding of why the scenes you’re showing us matter. Importantly, this narrative voice doesn’t need to bog down your writing with what you “remember.” The reflective narrator doesn’t need to say things like: “That’s still my favorite song,” or, “To this day, I remember his kindness.” This narrator is also not you, sitting at your keyboard in 2024. It’s more subtle than that, basically existing in a liminal space where you’re able to write about what “is known” without feeling compelled to qualify when or how you know it. The reflective narrator provides deeper context to your story by exploring feelings and ideas and the meaning of it all.

The very best memoirs are those whose scenes propel the reader through a story, but where the authors’ focus is really on the underpinnings of the story—the themes, the aboutness of your story, the meaning. These are the things that touch readers, and that make a book stay with us long after we’ve read the final page.

Consider that Wild is not really a story about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but rather a story of loss and grief, and Cheryl Strayed’s most powerful scenes on the trail are portals to channel memories of her mother, and to write about observations of how she’s surviving after loss.

In Educated, Tara Westover writes about the transformative power of education in light of having been raised in a strict, survivalist family. The meaning emerges as she shows how she breaks free from her limited understanding of the world, which of course puts her at odds with her family.

In Another Word for Love, which I wrote about last week, too, Carvell Wallace uses love as prism, love as kaleidoscope, love as North Star for his work. His scenes circle love in its many forms—loyal, harsh, sexy, unkind, dying, unconditional, violent. This book features stories about Wallace’s life, yes, but it’s also, intentionally, a mapping of the many manifestations of love.

For newer memoirists, bringing your reflective narrator onto the page right after you’ve written a scene is a good exercise. Ask yourself: What needs to be interpreted here? Why does any of this matter? These questions also provide a good gauge for whether the scenes you’re writing have anything or enough to do with what your book is about. Good reflection stems from your book’s themes, so if you’re struggling to reflect, you might need more clarity on what you’re writing about.

Let’s look at some examples of reflection:

H Is for Hawk

After a scene in which Helen MacDonald writes that she’s sure something is wrong with Mabel, the hawk she’s decided to train in the aftermath of her father’s death, a seeming wild hair of an idea that turns out to become an obsession, spurred by her grief, she writes:

Nothing was wrong with the hawk. She wasn’t sick. She was a baby. She fell asleep because that’s what babies do. I wasn’t sick either. But I was orphaned and desperately suggestible, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. For years I’d scoffed at White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite of passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But while the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

Note how she interprets here. This block of text begins to unpack for us “why it matters” that she’s training Mabel, and there’s much more to come. We learn throughout that this exercise she’s going through is about grief, and about being reborn a different person on the other side of loss.

The Story Game

In one of my favorite books of last year, Shze-Hui Tjoa writes an extraordinarily creative and brave chapter in which “Body” is the stand-in for “I.” Since this is a chapter that shares a story of physical abuse, this technique is both distancing and poignant. This excerpt follows a scene in which “Body” is shown having to play the piano till it nearly breaks, all because Tjoa’s parents have decided she’s a prodigy and this will be her ticket to future success:

Sometimes, when the pain gets especially bad, Body wonders: Will I die here? Body doesn’t know the answer to this question. It only knows that if it cries, or trembles, or slumps, or says no, the pain that it experiences escalates dramatically. Body soon learns not to cry. Body soon learns not to slump. Body soon forgets the feeling of “no”—the way that specific word once tasted in its mouth. Body just sits still on the piano stool. It stops asking for rest and play. It stops wishing that it was somewhere else.

Body just tries to survive.

This reflection exists to show the reader the consequence of these long hours of piano practice on a small body, how she endured, how she shut down. This is also the end of the scene, and as such it summarizes the effects of what we’ve just read—giving context and deeper meaning to the story she’s wanting to tell.

The Tender Bar

This final example is a classic I share in my six-month memoir class because this short excerpt shows how the “I” narrator and the reflective narrator can be seamlessly interwoven:

One Saturday, helping my mother unpack the last boxes of our belongings sent by Grandma, I found a two-foot blue device that looked like a piston with a handle at each end. It was a Miracle Chest Enhancer, according to the package in which it came. I gave it a try.

“What the heck are you doing?” my mother said when she saw me, shirtless, squeezing the device in front of a mirror.

“Enhancing my chest.”

“That’s for ladies,” she said. “It doesn’t give you the kind of enhancement you want. Hand it over.” She took the device and frowned. I saw in her face that I could occasionally be as much a mystery to my mother as she was to me.

The boldfaced line is the reflection. Moehringer doesn’t break the fictive dream or pop us out of scene as he could have. He did not feel the need to write, “Today I understand that I could be as much a mystery to my mother as she was to me.”

Good reflection is tethered to the point of view (and age) of the “I” character in the scene. It’s true that this line is perhaps sophisticated for an eleven-year-old, more all-knowing than Moehringer was in that moment, but this is the point. The reflective narrator is not you today inserting what you know “now.” Rather, your reflective narrator expresses “what is known.”

When you stay in scene, you hold your reader in a moment and an experience. When you reflect from “what is known,” you deepen the scene and provide context and meaning. One narrator is responsible for sharing the experience, the other for delivering the meaning. Keep this front of mind, and watch your memoir get deeper and more meaningful as you write.