ANOTHER FAKED MEMOIR. This time it’s Herman Rosenblat’s book, Angel at the Fence, a story with a story line that was simply too good to be true. Here’s the plot: A boy imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II is kept from starving by apples thrown over the camp’s fence. The angel? A lovely young girl who years later reconnects with Rosenblat on a blind date in New York City. They marry and live happily almost-ever-after, until the groom gets caught palming off his faked memoir to a relentlessly unsuspecting public. Do I sound unsympathetic to all concerned? I am. But not for the reasons that you might expect.
It’s a perfectly good story–for fiction. It would have sold as fiction. It sold to the movies, after all. So, no, the story line is not my problem. And Oprah being duped again? She did call it the greatest love story ever to be aired on her show, but Oprah’s Book Club does such good service to America’s readers and writers that I just can’t fault her; tout enough books and these things are going to happen. And I’m not angry only because it’s just another writer trying to land a better book deal.
I’m mad because just like the three recent bad-ass-lying writers I can name off the top of my head—James Frey (A Million Little Pieces), J.T. Le Roy (Sarah) and Margaret B. Jones/Margaret Seltzer (Love and Consequences; the lie was exposed by her sister)—Rosenblat was wrong about life itself. In life, it’s not the big stuff that forms us, changes us, or teaches us anything real. It’s in the small moments that life is truly lived. And just like not having to sweat the small stuff, you also don’t have to make it up to make it interesting.
When small moments can yield such big lessons, why invent such big drama in what’s meant to be memoir?
Don’t believe me? Consider two sisters coming back together after a long, hard battle over a parent’s illness. Nothing rips apart families quite like a sick parent. Margaret and I did 15 unsteady years with our mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, and among the things I learned during that time was that only in the movies does some huge gift or near-death of one of the sisters reunite an estranged pair of exhausted caregivers. What really happens is that over yet another hushed shared meal, or one more otherwise silent drive to the airport, one sister laughs at the other’s joke, one reaches for a suitcase and gently touches the other’s forearm and in that, and in other tiny gestures, the knitting together begins again.
Let’s look back on the other memoir posts here. Does this theory prove true? In my very first memoir post, “Side Dishes”, Linda talks about her grandmother’s funeral. That’s a big event. Hmmm. But what small moment amid that event begins the reuniting between sisters? See if you can spot it.
S SIMILARLY, IN the memoir post I called “A List That Helps With Loss,” we have Joely’s astonishing tale of the death of her friend Mary. But it is told in the form of a list or three lists, really: What she took, what she heard, and what she said when she went to say good-bye to her best friend. The death was a huge experience, of course, but the things Joely took, heard and said are small, intimate characterizations of the love between the two women. There are no huge secrets, or uber bracelet packed in among these details. In the small stuff presented to us we see the large picture of how we live, love and lose. Later on in the comments on that same post we learn from Zephyr the value of a joke at the deathbed, and from Paul, the enormity of the unsaid.
Small moments, big lessons.
What are some of yours? Got some? Share them here.
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I am thinking of my mother-in-law. She had no sister, but she treated me like a daughter and a friend. The night she died we stayed at the hospital all night since we had been told she didn’t have much time left. I was sitting next to her holding her hand while my husband caught a few minutes of sleep — she was only semi-conscious by this point and I remember the sound of the monitor tracking her slowly fading heartbeat. Every now and then I thought I saw an expression on her face and I was worried that she was in some kind of distress, so I just stroked her hand. Then, and I don’t know why I did this, I told her it was okay to go because I would always take care of her son. I don’t know if she heard me. She lived through the night and died late the next morning. I think about that promise a lot. In a strange way, I feel like that was the moment when I really got married.
Oh, Sandy: That is lovely, as well as exactly on point. And it’s an even larger story than we expect. We are amazed by the idea that for you, that small moment in a huge event signaled your true connection to your husband. Exactly. A marvelous scene in memoir because it is small and because it is true. Thank you for the fine example.