Marion Roach Smith’s alternate sisterly reality, with Margaret Roach.
WHAT MAKES GOOD MEMOIR? I get this question all the time when I teach. And reading your comments on this makes me think it’s time to limn that line between what is merely some great scene versus a scene that is ready for the writing. [click to continue…]
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ARE YOU WRITING SOMETHING? Oh, come on. You can tell me. Everyone else is writing about their lives. You can, too. But which story? And how to tell it? I teach memoir, and while my class is off for the summer, I’ll continue posting memoir tips here on TSP, hoping you can find the time to get to your story and that I can be of some help. My theory is that anyone who survived childhood has enough material for several books. So let’s get to it. Here’s an exercise; read along and let’s see if it gets you going.
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MY SISTER’S VERSION IS NOT MINE. Different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of it, our looks back on life can be seen through one lens or the other–or both. Even the simplest stuff can have two versions, I’ve discovered, and while I’m getting more accustomed to the idea, I am deeply moved by the truth that for long periods of our lives I held my version against hers as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth. Take for instance those early traumatic experiences. I suspect we may differ, even on those. I don’t know.
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THREE MALE FRIENDS. Each, for his own reason, needs to learn to cook right now. One is coming to terms with his New York lifestyle which, in the recession, requires he scale back from his diner existence of three take-out meals a day. One just lost his partner in such a tragic death that we celebrate that he’s tying his own shoes. And one just saw his wife of 20 years walk out. [click to continue…]
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THE RULES HAVE CHANGED. The Sisters on the Sidelines have been given our orders and they are not pretty. We’re pretty, thank you very much. The orders are not. We sisters on the sidelines sit through game after game, slowly developing a bond, getting know one another, identifying each other at first by the child we come to cheer on the field, track, court, or in the pools. But soon we identify one another by who we really are, as is defined by the length of the leash on which our children place us. [click to continue…]
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On May 10, HBO begins airing a three-part series on Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a subject that the TSP sisters know something about. In 1983, Marion wrote the first, first-person account of the illness ever published, in The New York Times Magazine. This week, she wrote an opinion column about it in The Los Angeles Times.
I LOVED HER. It was as simple and as complicated as that. My sister didn’t love her, or she did until she didn’t, but then our mother got sick, we had to care for her, and then things got complicated for everybody. We cared for two different mothers. That’s the shortest explanation for what happened to us. The longer story is far more complex. [click to continue…]
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JUST A GLASS SLIDE. That was all I had when I started out. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and somehow it connected me to other people who were mine, as well. [click to continue…]
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IF YOU KNEW US only for an instant, you might think us to be something that we’re not. That’s because I’m the loud sister. Always have been. And loud gets mistaken for tough, especially in women. But Margaret is the tough one, hand-down. Don’t believe me? See what she sent me in the recent ice storm.
As I said in my reply to her post, that characterizes her. No mere basket of cheer for Margaret; when her sister was in trouble, that sister sent power tools. She’s tough, and never tougher than on gifts, though not only in the giving. [click to continue…]
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D O YOUR SISTER and you see things differently? Of course you do. Even as little girls, my sister, Margaret, and I didn’t agree on everything. I loved church and she did not. I was a jock. She was not. When she was a quiet 10-year-old, I (then 8) gladly bounced out of bed to perform my Louis Armstrong imitation at our parents’ raucous dinner parties. Goggled-eyed and oggling me from our sunken living room, the adult din would pipe down only long enough for me to belt out, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” from the steps above. Margaret is nowhere in these scenes.
This kind of separate experience under the same roof is common. I’ve taught memoir writing for more than 10 years, and always marvel as much at what is absent from some tales as I do at what the writer offers up as the main players in each scene, finding myself imagining how and when the other members of the family veered off or out of the story. And that’s how this blog began: thinking about how at each emotional fork in the road, sisters can choose separate paths. [click to continue…]
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MARION LOVES WATER, Margaret (left) earth.
First time here? Here's the idea: The Sister Project is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in friendship or in feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top on our homepage says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: Learn more about TSP, and how to find your way around. And oh—a giant, sisterly welcome.
And Now, It’s Your Turn
by marionroach on May 12, 2009
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