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Karen as Art:
The Joys and Follies of Writing Memoir
By Karen Favreau
“I wonder how you felt about giving your past to the world,” my friend Naomi inquired after reading my spiritual memoir, Ridiculous Packaging: Or, My Long, Strange Journey From Atheist To Episcopalian, In Two Acts. Various incarnations of this question have been lobbed at me repeatedly in the months since Ridiculous hit the shelves. Some acquaintances have even gone so far as to call me “brave” or “courageous” for turning my life into a proverbial open book, but the labels cause me no small degree of consternation. Despite my friends’ best intentions, I prefer to reserve adjectives like “brave” and “courageous” for cancer survivors, firefighters, and people who have read James Joyce’s Ulysses cover to cover.
So why did I do it? Why did I dredge up drunken escapades, embarrassing obsessions and philosophical peregrinations, type them up, photocopy the pages at Kinko’s and then mail them to agents and editors in crisp, manila envelopes? Surely narcissism and/or masochism can’t be the sole reasons, though I’m sure they’re loitering somewhere on the periphery of an otherwise noble pursuit. No, the main reason I write is quite simple: I write to make sense of what I think. I pound out prose in an effort to organize wildly oscillating thoughts into coherent, user-friendly bundles that can be ripped open and dissected at a later date. Thus, Ridiculous Packaging emerged as an attempt at making sense of an intense, spiritual awakening I’d experienced. It became an exercise in deciphering why I chose to embrace God after having spent most of my life arguing against His existence. Incidentally, this is more or less the same reason that Saint Augustine composed Confessions in the fourth century A.D.
Maya Angelou once stated that “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Yes, my initial motivation for writing Ridiculous Packaging was selfish in nature, a means of exorcising my untold story, but it didn’t take long for altruist intentions to peek through. After all, I couldn’t be the only seeker who’d traveled a twisted path in search of enlightenment. Couldn’t my imperfect, rough-around-the-edges story inspire and guide other pilgrims as they pick and choose from the vast, all-you-can-eat religion buffet that sits before us all? And isn’t storytelling a crucial component of spiritual development, as it provides living proof that God works through us, with us, and in us if we only make room for Him?
When I began to view my early journal ramblings as a means by which to change the way people view their relationship with the Divine and better understand their own unique place in God’s ultimate story, I decided that I had no choice but to share the details of my journey. Like the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, I felt as though “there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”
Or what Maya said.
A funny thing happens when you choose to “give your past to the world.” First and foremost, you upset people. The unconsulted players in your life story will challenge anecdotes by arguing, “I was there, and it did not happen that way!” Some loved ones will berate you for saying too much about them, while others will lament that you didn’t say enough. Regarding the latter, I try to explain to them that “memoir” is not the same as “autobiography”; rather, the genre is often non-linear, selective, and focused on a theme, which is why we end up with “drug addiction memoirs,” “anorexia memoirs,” and “Mom was crazy” memoirs. The characters who figure most prominently in the author’s drug addiction or brush with mental illness take center stage, while many a loving friend or family member is relegated to a supporting role. The same thing happened in Ridiculous Packaging when I chose to focus on those people, places, and events that either pulled me away from God or led me back to Him.
Regardless, before submitting the final draft of your memoir to the publisher, I would highly recommend alerting loved ones to the passages in which they appear. In the second half of Ridiculous Packaging, I rather dismissively refer to an old friend whose less than enthusiastic reaction to my Christian conversion initially upset me.
“Yes, I was a bit stunned by your news because I didn’t see it coming,” she explained. “I had to process the information to make sense of it. But you never mention the fact that I made peace with your conversion and became one of your biggest supporters. That doesn’t seem fair.”
In my eagerness to spread the good news of God’s radical grace, perhaps I wound up transforming certain loved ones into nothing more than convenient literary devices that helped create dramatic tension and jazz up the narrative. That was never my intention. Yet, there exists a thin line between literary courtesy and self-censorship. If every person who appears in one’s story is allowed to influence the finished product, then one ends up writing by committee, and trying to please everyone. And we all know what happens when we try to please everyone.
Memoir is messy. Like electroshock therapy, it is a sketchy and inexact art that can both heal and hurt.
I made the mistake of putting out promotional flyers for an upcoming author appearance at the circulation desk of the library where I work. The patrons I assisted would inevitably glance down at the flyers, look up at me, and then look back at the flyer.
“Is this you?”
“Yes,” I’d reply. “It’s me.”
“You know, I always wanted to write a book, but I just don’t have the time.”
“If something is important enough, you’ll make the time.”
This has become the standard “tough love” advice I dispense to those would-be-writers who are just too busy going to yard sales and watching sitcoms to crank out the next Da Vinci Code.
One woman read who that flyer for Ridiculous Packaging: Or, My Long, Strange Journey From Atheist To Episcopalian, In Two Acts proclaimed, “I went from Christian to I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit.” I wish I could say that I came up with a profound rejoinder, but I just stared at her blankly and mumbled, “You never know where the journey will lead you,” or something equally uninspired. Another customer read the title of my book and proclaimed, “It’s not that far a journey from atheist to Episcopalian, is it?” I smiled politely, excused myself, and removed the rest of the flyers from the desk.
After reading Ridiculous, my colleague Jennifer bemoaned that the balance between us had become skewed—she now knew much more about my life than I knew about hers. Such is a consequence of giving your past to the world. Yes, doing so has created an odd dynamic between me and my casual acquaintances, but it’s also created a tremendous sense of relief on my part. Why? Because I no longer have to explain myself to anyone; it’s all there for only $13.95, plus tax. In the beginning was Karen, and this is what she did, and this is why she turned out the way she did. You know what you’re getting.
One old acquaintance clearly did not like what she was getting. I hadn’t spoken to Joanne in over fifteen years, but, just for giggles, I Googled her during a spate of nostalgia. I discovered that she’s a sociology professor at a college in New England, and proceeded to send her a “here’s what I’ve been doing since 1991” e-mail.
“So, I’m guess from the title of your book that you’ve found religion,” she replied with regard to my mention of Ridiculous. “That’s blowing my mind a bit, I must say.”
I responded in a rather flip manner:
“Don’t worry, I’m not out there handling snakes or picketing abortion clinics. I’m an Episcopalian, which means I’ve embraced a denomination that is theologically liberal and intellectually challenging.”
I then copied a blurb from my memoir that I thought addressed the whole “mind blowing” aspect of my born-again experience in a succinct, non-controversial manner:
Transformation is a beautiful thing. Scary, yes, and a bit messy at times, but beautiful nonetheless. I’m sure that some of my artsy friends will be embarrassed by my very public embrace of a religion . . . after all, hearing a friend tell you that he or she has just FOUND GOD can be as unsettling as hearing a loved one utter I’VE STARTED WRITING POETRY. These phrases make us uncomfortable because the poet and proselytizer are so embarrassingly sincere about what they’re willing to share. We squirm because our friends have suddenly changed, speaking in a manner that stands in stark contrast to the reserved and closely guarded ways in which we’re used to hearing them communicate. So get ready to squirm . . .
From the response I received, one would think that I’d just refuted the historical legitimacy of the Holocaust. Joanne congratulated me on my prose and promised to buy the book before hissing, “I don’t buy your analogy for a second, though. And that’s not because I feel religious folk who have FOUND GOD are doing anything wrong, or weird or anti-social, but because, so far as I can tell, poetry has never cause a war . . . and the Christian church has a long history of crimes against humanity, in my opinion.”
She went on to bash my adopted faith every which way ’til Tuesday while reprimanding me for assuming that my old friends would be uncomfortable regarding my Christian identity. I refrained from responding to Joanne for at least twenty-four hours so I could catch my breath and conjure up a reply.
“True, poetry has never killed anyone,” I began my e-mail the next morning, “though Jewel’s A Night Without Armor has made many readers wish they were dead.”
Ba-dum-bump.
I am well aware that the institutional Church has been involved in a number of less-than-savory actions. I realize that numerous folks who claim to follow Jesus haven’t done a very good job of practicing that whole “love your neighbor” thing. And I understand that, when one puts his or her faith on a platter for the whole world to devour, he or she must be prepared for the flurry of unsolicited comments and suggestions that will pour in from those who’ve read the book, and those who have no intention of doing so. Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why The Right Is Wrong And The Left Doesn’t Get It, came up with a clever means of disarming a critic during a lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As soon as Jim brought up the “God” word, the critic in question referenced the Spanish Inquisition.
“Well,” Jim asserted, tongue firmly in cheek, “I was against it at the time. And I’m still opposed to it. Unless you want me to raise the specter of the Communist butcher Pol Pot and his brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia every time you talk about the need for a comprehensive national health plan, why don’t we move on to a better discussion?”
Oh, if only I’d read God’s Politics before Googling Joanne.
Memoir used to be the domain of ex-presidents, retired generals and beloved philanthropists. Yet, the genre has been co-opted in recent years by the common man, everyday Janes and Joes who blather on about spiritual awakenings, conjugal relations with rock stars, drug addiction, and hardscrabble childhoods. As Patrick Smith observes, contemporary memoir “represents the democratization of the written word, because everyone has a story and, as with the harmonic, anyone can make noise.”
There’s a whole lot of noise being made these days, and I’ve proudly embraced the cacophony, sometimes as an audience member, and sometimes by playing first harmonica in the autobiography orchestra. And I keep embracing the noise because, ultimately, we read and write memoirs to better understand our own lives. We read and write memoirs to make peace with the inexplicable nature of suffering and to feel connected in a sprawling, disconnected world. We grapple with ghosts and delve into the dark corners of lives lived imperfectly, hoping all the while that this grappling in the dark will help us stumble upon something bigger than our own imperfect stories, something akin to truth.
And we’ll probably piss somebody off in the process.
Karen Favreau is a librarian, musician, and freelance writer from Greensboro, North Carolina. Her spiritual memoir, Ridiculous Packaging: or, my long, strange journey from atheist to Episcopalian, in two acts, was released by Cowley Publications in 2005. It can be purchased by clicking here. Karen may be reached at rinny_k@yahoo.com.
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