My Very First Memoir

Ripeness is all

card that accompanied the memoir I wrote for my father, Christmas 1977

I was thirteen years old when I wrote my first memoir; it was a Christmas present for my father. When he died and we emptied his house, I found it on a shelf among his art books. It was a bound hardcover notebook, the front mottled with brown age spots. I grabbed it before anyone else could take a look because I remembered this book very well. I was ashamed of it.

I trained as a Victorianist scholar. I have a Ph.D. in English literature. I have published a biography. I taught expository writing to college students for eleven years. I think of myself as a professional writer. This is how (and where) I started:

Introduction

This book is a kid’s attempt at a popular idea– the writing of memoirs. However, having only lived for 13 ½ years I don’t have too many remembrances– the reason for this slim volume. But all the memories I have are in this book because I have, all my life, been obsessed with leaving something behind, I never want to be forgotten and…I like to try and make things easier for my descendants (should I have any) in genealogical research. Any family hunter won’t have many problems with my part of the family. That is a somewhat silly adolescent idea but it’s mine and I can’t shake it off. It’s as much a part of me as the rest of this book – which I give to you, Daddy, because your library needs improving and I’m conceited enough to think my attempt might have value!

12/12/77

Victoria

Clark

Olsen

The rest of the book is like a Victorian commonplace book, though I didn’t know it at the time. I copied handwritten excerpts from my diaries (only a few years worth¹) and bits of school assignments – poems and essays – along with proto-scholarly annotations. I explained names and dates; I added later impressions. (My thirteen-year-old self commented on my ten-year-old self.) In addition to that Introduction, the volume had two dedications: one to my father “because he knows I love him” and one to “everything and everybody who affects me, namely my sisters, my parents, and my family,” both also signed and dated. There is a prefatory note assuring the truthfulness of the text, that the dates are correct, that nothing has been added or changed except for some “helpful comments and notes.”

The first entry is a poem I wrote in the second grade about snow. The last is the journal entry when I come up with the idea for the book (I was meta before my time). The whole project spanned about two weeks of work from start to finish and I confessed that it was a cheap gift too. Indeed the pages are falling out of the book’s binding. The entries span five years and end halfway through the book. I didn’t have enough to fill it; I hadn’t lived enough.

A sample entry, with Notes. I’m all in here.

I addressed the volume to posterity (and Daddy) but now I can hardly bear to share it. My devotion to my father and my eager desire for recognition are too bald. It’s embarrassing to have my (admitted!) conceit on display. I sound childish, which has always been a pejorative word for me. That child was precocious, yes, but now looking back I cringe at the naked self-absorption. Who did I think would be interested in my every thought? Now, I doubt even my father would have been (did he actually read the book? He did keep it). In fact, I am afraid I exhibited on the page what I recognize as some of my father’s own worst traits: self-centeredness and yes, childishness.

Precociousness itself is an uneasy quality. It turns out it comes from the Latin “praecox,” which is to ripen too early (whenever I use the word “early” in my memoir I think of the pun on my father’s name Earle). Its first use in English during the Renaissance referred to plants that flowered too soon. Its clinical use still refers to bodies that develop too soon. Interestingly, when I search for the word, related Google queries wonder whether it is a negative or positive description of a child; the consensus is that being “advanced for one’s age” is usually positive, but can also imply “obnoxious” or “arrogant." I admit that both “childish” and “precocious” feel negative to me; I am ashamed of both qualities in myself. My own precociousness was a consolation prize. I’d rather have my father back. I wanted him to be the adult so I could be the child.

In another post² I examined two even earlier biographies I wrote of each parent, from 1972-3. Somehow, I am not as ashamed of those bits of juvenilia as I am of this one. Those pieces kept some distance, perhaps because they were written as school assignments. Still, all of these were written too soon, too early (the pun!). The transparent, obsessive neediness of the thirteen-year-old, still holding on to her father, the child who felt abandoned, is hard for me to acknowledge now (even in the third person, with clauses). Why did he leave us? I mean, WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME???????? To read my own words is to remember that feeling of desperation whenever he left us at the door of my mother’s apartment, how my sisters and I would cling to his legs and cry. Now that he has died, I hold on to my grief – and his secret – instead.

That early memoir was a first stab at writing for and about my father. He was the Great Artist who had left the family to devote himself to painting. If he was a Great Artist I would be a Great Author. Back then I wrote my life for him, now I write his for a public. We are still intertwined, which itself feels shameful. He has been gone for more than a decade, but I am still processing his life and work, trying to understand him as an artist, a man, and a father. This is the right time, and I am ready now.

To answer the question of “why did he leave us?” I have to delve into our intertwined lives, his art career, and the silences and secret-keeping of midcentury America. Hence the memoir. Hence this Substack. Thank you for reading! This post was hard to write.³ Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

1. I looked up whether “years worth” needed an apostrophe but once I saw there was some dispute I left it as is. Less clutter is better.

2. That piece mentions my fourth-grade teacher, Josh Robison, who commented on one of those biographies. He probably assigned it. I have thought many times of reaching out to him again to tell him what a great teacher he was and how much influence he had on me in those years. But this time, when I went to look him up, I found he had recently and suddenly passed away. I should have tried sooner.

3. A huge thank you to my first readers, Clyde, Andrea, and Susannah, for the gentle steering!