Have you heard the expression “There is no there there”? Do you understand the meaning?
In 1937, American author Gertrude Stein published the book Everybody's Autobiography. In Chapter 4, Stein recounts returning to her home town of Oakland, California, while on a lecture tour in 1935. The city had grown and changed enormously since her childhood there. When she tried to find her childhood home, she learned that it had been demolished and new structures had been built on the land. She called the realization “painful nostalgia.”
Here is the full quote:
… I kept searching for the next new city where I would truly find myself, where I would be content in my own skin. But, of course, I eventually realized that, no matter where I went, there was no “there” there.
Today, according to Urban Dictionary, the expression “There is no there there” means “an utter lack of substance or veracity as it pertains to the subject under discussion.” The website yourdictionary.com defines it as, “The indicated thing, person, or other matter has no distinctive identity, no significant characteristics, or no functional center point.”
Does your memoir have a there?
I did a little Googling about the expression “there is no there there” because I keep hearing it in conversation and I wasn’t sure I truly understood what it means. After reading numerous definitions, such as the two provided, it struck me that this expression could be used to describe a challenge faced by many novice memoir writers: their memoir manuscript does not have a clear and obvious there. As a memoir writing coach, sussing out the central, core point of a memoir is the most crucial and yet the most difficult aspect of memoir writing.
This is another way of saying, a memoir must have a clear theme (point or argument) that every scene, every story told, must support. In her latest book, Blueprint for a Memoir, author Jennie Nash breaks down the essential way a memoir should be constructed. Her approach consists of Scene, Point, Impact. According to Nash, the Impact (in which you make it clear why the reader should care about the scene and how it connects to the larger theme) is missing in memoirs that don’t work. Without it being crystal clear why you have included a story in your memoir, why the story is essential to the overarching argument you are making, you have failed to provide meaning-making for the reader. If readers ask themselves, “Why are you telling me this?” and you don’t provide an answer, your memoir loses its power and appeal.
Can you find the there of your memoir?
Think about Gertrude Stein going in search of her childhood home, longing for the joy the sight would bring her, only to find the house gone and all trace of it extinguished. Such a disappointment. Such painful nostalgia. She was left feeling anchorless, adrift. As you craft your memoir, keep Stein’s story in mind. In your memoir, will you bring the readers to the place you want to show them? Or will there be no there there?
Postscript
Prolific writer Gertrude Stein wrote Everyone’s Autobiography as a continuation of the memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in 1933. In addition to her now-famous quote, “There is no there there,” Stein wrote another oft-quoted line, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in the1913 poem “Sacred Emily.”
Jennie Nash’s book Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace was published in 2023 by Tree Farm Books, Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of twelve books in three genres.
Hello all. This is the first of what will be a long-term series of interviews with memoir authors who turned their stories into activism.
As you might know, I co-authored a book, Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism, with my friend Dr. Terri Lyon. Activism is important to me. Many of the memoir authors I have coached or edited have aspirations to make social change happen through their memoirs. David Pruitt is one such author. He and I talked recently for the first of this new series, Memoir as Activism. Here's what he had to say.
Trish: Hi, David. First, let me congratulate you on your brilliant memoir Relative Distance. It was my great pleasure to serve as your copyeditor. The book is a journey story I will never forget. I’d like to talk with you about Relative Distance. I know it was published in October 2022. When did you start writing it?
David: Thanks, Trish. As always, I appreciate your support for Relative Distance!
I began writing in earnest in the spring of 2018. My retirement and finding my older brother who’d vanished for twenty-seven years (much of it traveling across America as a homeless person), were the triggering events that got me started. I took my time. It was important to me to tell the story well.
Trish: Does the book tell the story you originally set out to tell? Did the memoir change shape and direction as you wrote? If so, were you surprised by that change?
David: The purpose of the book evolved. As a youth, I was told I would never amount to anything. The three of us were brutally beaten. My mentally ill mother abandoned us. I watched my siblings struggle as teens and adults. I had struggles of my own, but somehow my life worked out. I became a first-generation college graduate, a CPA, a CFO, and a CEO in Corporate America. I’ve been married to my best friend for thirty-four years now. My kids have done well, one’s doing his residency in cardiology and the other works successfully in Artificial Intelligence – more importantly they’re good human beings. I retired relatively young and financially secure. I say all this not to tout my good fortune but to describe my state of mind at the beginning of the writing process. I felt deep gratitude - and slightly bewildered at the positive direction my life took after such a difficult beginning. Instinctively I knew I was an exception to some sort of rule. The question became why had my life gone the way it had while my siblings struggled? I’m certainly no better than them, and we endured the same trials in our youth. After a time, as I wrote, it became clear to me the “trials” we endured were the larger issue.
Through additional research, I learned there are approximately thirty million adults in America who endured some form of dysfunctional upbringing. And children are still suffering today – there are four million reports made to child protective services annually. At some point, my purpose switched from answering my personal existential question to telling two very different stories (my older sibling and mine) of successfully moving beyond a dysfunctional upbringing.
Trish: We learn that your father was a violent, physically abusive man. What emotions did you experience as you relived your childhood?
David: First and foremost, I didn’t hate my father. I loved him. He passed on his strong work ethic and sense of responsibility. I made sure he was properly cared for until his death. But the hard things he did to us never left me. At times, my severe anxieties and wavering self-doubt, the fears that were borne into me as a child, were my biggest obstacles to success. It’s a struggle to this day. Sometimes as I wrote or read a particular passage to my patient wife, the tears came. But I don’t hate and I don’t resent. I do, however, feel a sense of loss. My brothers and I missed out on the unconditional parental love that is critically important to the development of a child purposefully raised to meet their full potential.
Trish: We also learned your mother had a mental illness that prevented her from protecting and comforting you and your brothers. When did you first recognize that your mother did not behave as a healthy, supportive mother should? What do you think of her today?
David: The truth is my mother never took a meaningful, active role in raising me or my brothers. When she went to the hospital for electroshock therapy - and then locked herself away in her bedroom for days at a time, I figured it out - I was on my own. I think my brothers already knew. I was eight years old at the time. As you know from the book, we had a pivotal, final encounter when I was in college, and, as a result, I unequivocally cut her out of my life.
As an adult with a better understanding of mental illness, in her case schizophrenia, and the associated symptoms, I regret what I did. It was an act of self-protection and festering resentment. In retrospect, I would’ve been more of a help to her in later life. But, when I see how wonderful a mother my wife is to our two sons, I do miss the idea of what a loving, engaged mother might’ve felt like. Sadly, we never formed a meaningful mother-son bond.
Trish: Your two older brothers suffered a fate as a result of your dysfunctional upbringing far harsher than your own. What conclusion have you come to about why your childhoods so adversely affected them? What is it about your personality or choices that saved you from a similar fate?
David: First, I’m very proud of both of my brothers today. They are financially independent and good men. I’m particularly proud of my brother who spent over twenty years traveling the backroads of America as a homeless person. He somehow survived and came out the other side as a decent human being carrying a profound faith that today is a cornerstone of his life.
To answer your question, I think I benefited as the youngest of three siblings. I saw their struggles brought on by the verbal and physical abuse we absorbed in our adolescence. I saw options narrowing, doors closing and their challenging early lives living homeless on the streets of Greensboro, North
Carolina – our hometown. It scared me and motivated me to set aside my fear and expectation of failure. I decided to reach for something better. It made me try. It drove me to persist.
In the end, life choices matter, the mix of genes matter (two parents, multiple children), individual wants and desires matter, and circle of friends matter but the gift of youth and a watchful observant eye made a meaningful difference in my life.
Trish: After working on Relative Distance as your editor, I got a sense that you were doing two things: first, paying loving tribute to your brothers and their struggles throughout life. And also, trying to come to grips with how differently—you say blessed—your life turned out. Since memoir is the story of a life transformation, a transcendence, what is the takeaway your readers will receive at the end of Relative Distance? What is the gift you are giving your readers with this memoir?
David: A victim of child abuse will find a viable, achievable path to their most productive life. An interested reader will learn more about the lifelong implications of early child abuse and a better understanding of the homeless plight. A lover of books who reads to be educated and emotionally moved by well-considered words will find both in Relative Distance.
Trish: Writing about abuse can be cathartic if someone is ready to tackle the issue. Would you encourage those who have experienced abuse or neglect to write about these experiences as part of a healing process?
David: It can be cathartic but I’m sure it could also be painful for some. To each his own. My thought is to, early on, proceed slowly and mindfully. See how you feel.
I’m not sure it profoundly changed me. Once I got ahold of where I was going, I wrote with a mission in mind. It became less internal, less self-oriented, and much more an attempt to make some small positive difference in the world. It remains that. All proceeds from the book go to the Center For Child and Family Health in Durham, NC. I’m building a relationship with them that I hope will allow me to help abused kids and dysfunctional families even more in the future.
Trish: Thank you, David.
You can buy Relative Distance at Amazon and all major bookstores and online booksellers. Let me know what you think of David's story.
I feel sorry for the creative nonfiction subgenre of memoir. It is so misunderstood. Even I didn’t fully understand what a proper memoir was until I decided to take a deep dive into it about four years ago. I’ve said in earlier blog posts that I blame libraries and bookstores, whether online or brick and mortar, for perpetuating this confusion. Memoir is always lumped together with biography and autobiography. Now, if you are coming at memoir simply as a reader, this distinction might seem petty. You’ll get your hands on a memoir, biography, or autobiography and learn something about someone. If your goal is to learn everything you can about a person’s life, then biography and autobiography are what you want. I’ll show you.
Here are the first two paragraphs from Nelson Mandela’s bestselling autobiography Long Walk to Freedom:
Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, Rolihlahla literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but its colloquial meaning more accurately would be "troublemaker." I do not believe that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years, friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name the many storms I have both caused and weathered. My more familiar English or Christian name was not given to me until my first day of school. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I was born on the eighteenth of July, 1918, at Mvezo, a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River in the district of Umtata, the capital of the Transkei. The year of my birth marked the end of the Great War; the outbreak of an influenza epidemic that killed millions throughout the world; and the visit of a delegation of the Afriçan National Congress to the Versailles peace conference to voice the grievances of the African people of South Africa. Mvezo, however, was a place apart, a tiny precinct removed from the world of great events, where life was lived much as it had been for hundreds of years.
Mandela’s opening paragraphs are classic autobiography—a quick jump into the facts about the beginnings of his life. Here’s another to make my point. These are the first two paragraphs from Love, Lucy, Lucille Ball’s autobiography:
I'm a Leo. I was born on a Sunday, August 6, 1911. Unfortunately, everybody knows my birth date because I told the truth when I first came to Hollywood. I grew up not on the sidewalks of New York City, as some people think, but in the beautiful resort area of Lake Chautauqua, New York, near the green, wooded Allegheny wilderness. I used to say I was born in Butte, Montana--I thought it sounded more glamorous than western New York.
I was conceived in Montana when my father was working for his father as a lineman at Independent Telephone Company in Anaconda. But I was born at my grandparents' apartment on Stewart Street in Jamestown, New York, where I was delivered by my grandmother Flora Belle Hunt.
Do you see a pattern? When and where they were born. Their birth name. Grandparents and parents. That’s classic biography and autobiography—chronological life facts. You read a biography or autobiography to learn everything about a person—99.9% of the time, a famous person.
That is not the role of memoir.
Now, here are the first two paragraphs from the glorious, bestselling memoir Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, about her twenty-one-year love affair with alcohol:
I drank. I drank Fumé Blanc at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point. Toward the end I kept two bottles of Cognac in my house: the bottle for show, which I kept on the counter, and the real bottle, which I kept in the back of a cupboard beside an old toaster. The level of liquid in the show bottle was fairly consistent, decreasing by an inch or so, perhaps less, each week. The liquid in the real bottle disappeared quickly, sometimes within days. I was living alone at the time, when I did this, but I did it anyway and it didn't occur to me not to: it was always important to maintain appearances.
I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often. I started to raid my parents' liquor cabinet the year my father was dying. He'd be in the back of their house in Cambridge, lying in the hospital bed in their bedroom, and I'd steal into the front hall bathroom and pull out a bottle of Old Grand-Dad that I'd hidden behind the toilet. It tasted vile--the bottle must have been fifteen years old--but my father was dying, dying very slowly and gradually from a brain tumor, so I drank it anyway and it helped.
Let me tell you, that’s a brilliant opening to a memoir. And I can’t imagine I need to spend much time explaining the stylistic differences between the start of Mandela’s and Ball’s autobiographies and the opening of Knapp’s memoir. The closest Knapp gets to offering family history is:
Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape. . . . In some families, alcohol washes across whole generations, a liquid plague.
Her family history, mentioned briefly, is important to her memoir only to demonstrate that alcohol consumption is often a family tradition, or as she puts it, “It’s encoded in your DNA, embedded in your history. . . .” Knapp’s theme—what her memoir is about—is analyzing her early attraction to drinking (age fourteen), the adverse effects drinking had on her education, career, and relationships, and how she emerged triumphant from its grip.
Memoir as a Kind of Novel
As a memoir writing coach, potential clients are often surprised when I say that a memoir should be written like a novel, not like an autobiography. And some don’t like it and don’t want to hear it. But, at the very least, a memoir must have a point; if it doesn’t, well then, it’s not really a memoir.
At this point, I’m nearly overcome with the urge to repeat everything I wrote in my February 2022 post Memoir is a Journey Story and my March 2022 post Three-act Structure for Memoir Ensures the Best Read. What’s different about this post is, I always say memoir is not autobiography but I’ve never offered excerpts as examples. Now I have and I could do this all day long. I’ll prove it; here's the second paragraph from the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi:
Ota Gandhi [his grandfather] married a second time, having lost his first wife. He had four sons by his first wife and two by his second wife. I do not think that in my childhood I ever felt or knew that these sons of Ota Gandhi were not all of the same mother. The fifth of these six brothers was Karamchand Gandhi, alias Kaba Gandhi, and the sixth was Tulsidas Gandhi. Both these brothers were Prime Ministers in Porbandar, one after the other. Kaba Gandhi was my father. He was a member of the Rajasthanik Court. It is now extinct, but in those days it was a very influential body for settling disputes between the chiefs and their fellow clansmen. He was for some time Prime Minister in Rajkot and then in Vankaner. He was a pensioner of the Rajkot State when he died.
Gandhi was a brilliant freedom fighter and moral activist, but a few pages of this and I’m in dreamland. It is classic autobiography, though.
To close this out, I will repeat the point I most want you to remember:
A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection. . . . No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.
Let me know if I can help you craft your memoir.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
