“The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr: Cites Conroy’s “Stop-Time” and Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”; implies memoir writers have divided selves and memory gaps

Mary Karr, prize-winning poet, famous author of memoirs, and professor of literature, has taught how to write memoirs. In her classes on memoirs, she has “taught Conroy’s Stop-Time for some thirty years” (1, p. 47) and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory “at least a dozen times” (1, p. 56).

One thing Karr hopes to accomplish with The Art of Memoir is “to prompt some reflection about the reader’s own divided selves” (1, p. xxiii), meaning that memoirs feature divided selves and she assumes that readers probably have divided selves, too. She also says, “Many of us disassociate or check out during awful times” (1, p. 33).

I am only up to page seventy in The Art of Memoir, and I don’t know if it will say anything more about Conroy and Nabokov, but the following past posts are on their memoirs. (Search “Conroy” and “Nabokov” for additional posts on some of their other works.)

1. Mary Karr. The Art of Memoir. New York, HarperCollins, 2015.

September 19, 2016

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy: Amnesia—a multiple personality memory gap—for the building he lived in until he was eight years old.

This memoir is the story of a chaotic, puzzling childhood, which, Conroy says, is “a past I didn’t understand, a past I feared” (1, p. 278).

The key to this psychological mystery is his history of memory gaps, one instance of which I quoted in my previous post, from the beginning of the memoir. Another example is found toward the end of the memoir:

“…I would find myself staring up at that particular building. Because I’d been told, I knew I’d lived there for many years as a child. Passing it my mind became still. All the noises of the world stopped abruptly, like a movie running on without a sound track. I had lived in the building until I was eight years old and yet I lacked memories of it. No image of the apartment, no image of having lived there, no image of myself. It was spooky” (1, p. 212).

This is not ordinary forgetting. It is impossible for Conroy to have had no memories at all of where he lived until he was eight years old. The memories must have been somewhere. If they were not held by his regular personality, then they must have been held by one or more alternate personalities.

If I had interviewed him, I could have brought out and spoken with these alternate personalities. And what they told me could have been corroborated by family, friends, neighbors, and an inspection of the inside of the building itself.

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

September 17, 2016

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy: a childhood memory ends just when the traumatic part begins, which is typical of a multiple personality memory gap.

Ordinary memory tends to remember the most emotionally arousing parts of past events: what was surprising, frightening, etc.

The opposite is typical of memory in multiple personality. If something is starting to happen that is frightening—e.g., signs that a beating or molestation is about to occur—they will automatically switch to the alternate personality who had originated to deal with, and contain the memory of, that kind of experience, leaving the regular personality with a memory gap for the period of time that the alternate personality substituted. And that is what Frank Conroy appears to be describing in this childhood memory:

“The arrival home of my father late one night. I ran down the hall, opened the door, and looked up at him. My last memory is that something was wrong…I’ve been told that on that night he got rough and chased me all over the apartment. When my mother came home I was hiding under the bed, but my memory ceases at the opening of the door. The image is vivid and detailed to the point of remembering the weave of his suit—gray-blue herringbone—and the smell of his breath. Bourbon, but after that, nothing” (1, p. 22).

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

August 6, 2015

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography reports memory gaps like those seen in multiple personality, at age 15 and subsequently

In the summer of 1914, when Nabokov was fifteen, a “numb fury of verse-making first came over me” (1, p. 167). It was when “my first poem began” (1, p. 168).

“…On the physical plane, my intense labors were marked by a number of dim actions or postures, such as walking, sitting, lying…Each of these broke into fragments…for instance, I might be wandering one moment in the depths of the park and the next pacing the rooms of the house. Or, to take the sitting stage, I would suddenly become aware that a plate of something I could not even remember having sampled was being removed and that my mother, her left cheek twitching as it did whenever she worried, was narrowly observing from her place at the top of the long table my moodiness and lack of appetite. I would lift my head to explain — but the table had gone, and I was sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand…

“When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all. With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study. On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet. When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…I relapsed into my private mist, and when I emerged again, the support of my extended body had become a low bench in the park…

“…when the old trance occurs nowadays, I am quite prepared to find myself, when I awaken from it, high up in a certain tree, above the dappled bench of my boyhood, my belly pressed agains a thick, comfortable branch and one arm hanging down among the leaves upon which the shadows of other leaves move” (1, pp. 172-173).

[That first poem] “was indeed a miserable concoction…In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing…’How wonderful, how beautiful,’ [my mother] said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheekbone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass” (1, pp. 175-177).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps because one personality has amnesia for the periods of time that another personality was out. For further discussions of that, search memory gap(s) and dissociative fugue in this blog.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [1947/1967]. Introduction by Brian Boyd. New York, Everyman’s Library, 1999.