Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook
by Laura Kalpakian
University of New Mexico Press, 2021 $19.95
Review by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson
When reading Laura Kalpakian’s short bio on the back of her newest book, Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), I was a bit skeptical about the quality of advice within the guide given Kalpakian’s writing résumé largely consists of novels and short story collections. However, one would be unwise to dismiss this insightful and useful craft text for writing creative nonfiction.
Creative writing handbooks are familiar to me. In addition to my personal reading, I’ve taught Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir and Lee Gutkind’s You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, as well as referred students to excerpts from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz’s Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, and Dinty W. Moore’s The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction and Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing in Creative Nonfiction.
While all those texts have been informative, none of them felt so practical as Kalpakian’s book.
I like to familiarize myself with a book before digging into the meat of it. That orientation usually means thoroughly engaging with the front and end matter as available: reading the summary and blurbs on the back cover, inside flaps, or front pages along with the author’s bio, list of previous works, acknowledgements, notes, list of works mentioned and / or list of recommended reading, and the table of contents.
It may seem strange to say it, but Kalpakian’s table of contents is what sucked me into her book.
Her table of contents reminds me of an annotated bibliography in form: it guides the reader on where to find information via the expected chapter name and starting page, but then it summarizes the segment, sometimes including an excerpt from a key passage. I don’t think I’ve ever penciled notes in a book’s table of contents before, but they were the first place I marked the creamy pages of Memory into Memoir.
I didn’t stop there though. In flipping through the pages now, I seem to have annotated more pages in Kalpakian’s book than not, and the ones I didn’t comment on are largely excerpts which she follows with analysis (that I marked up).
Her chapters each focus on a different element of craft in creative nonfiction and are an effective mix of context, prompts, and illuminating excerpts with follow-up analysis. While that formula has been used in other texts noted above, none were so engaging to me as Kalpakian’s. In the middle of chapters I wanted to pause and work on drafts or record new ideas she’d provoked.
Even as many of her discussion points were familiar to me—memoir is the writer’s truth, dialogue doesn’t have to be remembered word-for-word, present tense makes the writing more engaging, characters need to be fully realized—I found her discussion to have more depth and breadth. For example, her chapter on dialogue is twenty-plus pages long and notes foundations of dialogue, potentially needed modifications, and how to put dialogue on the page.
In the texts I listed above, Kephart’s is the only one that spent more than a handful of pages on dialogue, logging nine pages. Certainly, every craft text will discuss different topics and devote fluctuating page amounts to those topics: Moore’s Crafting the Personal Essay discusses various subgenres of creative nonfiction (travel writing, nature writing, gastronomical writing, etc.), which Kalpakian hardly recognizes, and yet, hers is the text that left me feeling confident in moving forward rather than irresolute.
As I continue trying to place my finger on what makes her text different from others I’ve read, I wonder if Kalpakian’s belief in imagination is key: “Both memoir and fiction rely on imagination. Writing a memoir is not simply an act of preservation, but an act of invention, because the fabric of the past is never clean, hemmed, pressed, folded, and stacked chronologically. The past comes to us in fragments finished off by imagination” (prologue, xiii). While I lean heavily on truth in creative nonfiction and encourage disclaimers for any liberties taken in recreating the past, I also push students to trust their perceptions and knowledge of family and friends’ habits and speech. Perhaps this rationale laid out in Kalpakian’s passage, as differentiated from other handbooks’ emphasis on truth, is the lynchpin to her success.
My one point of (moderated) criticism is many of Kalpakian’s example excerpts come from her own writing (often fiction) or her mother’s memoir. I acknowledge she also used examples from her students’ creative nonfiction writing in addition to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which she notes was excerpted given its recent entry into the public domain, as well as (I suspect) reader’s familiarity with it. However, while the examples serve her well, a wider variety of writers would have further enhanced the text. I’ll speculate copyright costs limited what she could excerpt, given the lengthy list of works mentioned indicates her familiarity with many quality models.
That said, I’d be remiss to not applaud her prompts throughout the book as well as her chapters on revision, research, and publication advice, which are needed points of discussion in undergraduate courses I teach. As a (former) first-generation college student, I know what it’s like to not know what I don’t know and as a result, not know what questions to ask. Kalpakian’s book can serve as a foundation for students and make space for their questions.
In sum, Memory into Memoir will be on my required reading list the next time I teach a creative nonfiction course.
Whitney (Walters) Jacobson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Punctuate, Feminine Collective, Up North Lit, After the Pause, and In the Words of Womyn International, among other publications. She is currently working on a collection of essays exploring skills, objects, and traits passed on (or not) from generation to generation. She maintains a curiosity in memoir and the themes of feminism, water, inheritance, blue-collar work, and grief.