The Nine Stories Your New Friend Needs

Recently the brilliant memoirist Deborah Taffa visited with me and my students and amongst the many gems she laid out before us was the idea that a memoir process could start off like this: imagine that your best friend has died. And that you are trying to build a relationship with a new best friend. And your new best friend needs some stories from your past to understand you better.

I’m riffing a bit here but she said, What are the nine stories you’d need to tell so that your new best friend would understand your intensities, your reactions to events, your joys, your ambitions, your pleasures, your sorrows?

There would be some urgency within you as you told these stories - because you’d have just lost a best friend, you’d know what that closeness was like, you’d want to remake that closeness, and your stories would get you there. What are those nine stories that, in the absence of being told, a person couldn’t really understand you?

And then she said, Ask yourself, how many of these stories turn on you, turn on your moral education and psychology development? Can you find your own culpability in the problems you encountered? How did you have agency, how were you co-involved? And as you tell the story now, is there an irony you hadn’t seen before? Dig for those moments, she said - if you get lucky you will make a discovery about yourself which will give the storytelling spark.

It’s a terrific way to organize a very early draft of a memoir. Because eventually a great memoir is about so much more than your personal stories - but that early engine of urgency and intimacy is often what holds a memoir together.

If you’d like to take my next memoir and personal essay class on Zoom, it begins in October and you can register here. Space is limited and it will fill up.

Deborah Taffa is a great presence and a great speaker, in addition to being a great writer. If you ever have the chance to hear her lecture, take it. Her memoir, Whiskey Tender, is available in my nonprofit bookshop.

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Recommendations

Dance: New Yorkers, there’s still another week of tap sensation Ayodele Casel at The Joyce. This year’s program features a lot of super fun music from the 90s and is described by the very dour Gia Kourlas as a mood lifter. You can buy tickets here.

Doc: Obviously I recommend the Paul Reubens doc on Max. I was pretty riveted by tales from his avant garde training and his stratospheric rise to fame. Those Pee-Wee’s Playhouse episodes were radical. And his habit of being a pain in the ass as a collaborator? Juicy. But it was his survival from several gigantic, public, homophobic nightmares that will stay with me. Thank God somebody who embraces complexity - Matt Wolf - made this with Paul who is so very smart and complicated. (Note to writers, more than twenty years ago Matt Wolf made a doc short about Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.”)

A Public Elementary School for Your Kids or Your Friend’s Kids: My kids’ awesome public, progressive school with brilliant, devoted teachers has places available for more K/1 students in the Fall! They can come from anywhere in the city because it is a non districted school! The kids have a robust and beautiful garden, a gorgeous library, a terrific playground, a student-run newspaper, a monthly family sing-a-long, a mind blowing talent show, free specialists for learning and medical disabilities - I could go on and on, I mean, this week the kids’ LGTBQ committee organized a Human Rights Rally march to Tompkins Square Park. Being part of all of this is one of the big giant fantastic ongoing surprising rewards to raising children. And it’s only 65k per year - just kidding! It is free. Here’s the website. It’s not too late! And I can make a personal introduction - just ask me.

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Art works by Eva Lake whose show is on view now at Frosch & Co.

Thanks for reading and thanks especially to my paying subscribers.

And I will leave you with this gem.

xo Lizzie