Three Stories

E.M. Forster, Toni Morrison, and the grief plot

Olsen family tombstone, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago.

Here are three versions of my family story:

In the mid-twentieth century my grandfather Andrew P. Olsen designed ads and packages for consumer clients like Kimberly-Clark and Planters Peanuts. My father Earle went to art school in Chicago, then moved to New York City, where he married, had three children, and worked as a picture framer until he retired upstate to paint.

Andrew P. Olsen made a small fortune as a commercial designer in mid-century Chicago. His iconic Kleenex box was exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1949. In 1952, just out of art school, his son Earle moved from Chicago to New York City to make it as an artist. He sold a work to the Whitney Museum, then his career stalled around 1960; he married and had three children in quick succession, then divorced. His three daughters all ended up with careers in the arts.

Andrew married his childhood sweetheart and raised two sons in Chicago. His eldest son died in World War II; he, his wife Elsie, and his surviving son Earle were devastated. After Elsie died in 1968, Andrew spent a last lonely decade in Florida. Soon after his mother’s death, Earle left his wife. Even though he stayed in his daughters’ lives, they felt angry and abandoned. Or I did. I should only speak for myself.

These were the stories I thought I was telling in my family memoir. I was wrong.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster famously differentiated between plot and story: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” For Forster, a story was a series of events in time, a bare minimum requirement for novels, whereas plot became the novel’s core backbone. Story could be reduced to “and then…and then,” whereas “a plot demands intelligence and memory also.” In short, a story offers a series of events with implied connections between them; a plot fills in those implied connections with causation. In this example, that causation is also an emotion: grief. Forster understood that death haunts every story: it makes time matter and sequence significant (a plot is also a grave). A death would haunt my father’s family; my father’s death more than ten years ago haunts my memoir. But people don’t, in fact, die of grief, except in fiction.

The king died, and then the princess wrote his biography.

As a novelist, Forster applied his definitions to fiction, but they can be applied to nonfiction just as well. History, we know, is not just a line with an arrow at either end, but a maelstrom of interacting forces. My memoir would be about the relationship of art and family, about the impact of secrets on a family, about a creative career in the closet, about how success and failure is defined over a lifetime. But if I had started out with three versions, now they were multiplying all over.

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That excerpt lands early in my memoir. You can tell: it’s a set up, defining terms. The three family stories I open with shift progressively from the neutral to the more personal, then to the more emotional. None of them actually belongs in my memoir, though that is where they were born. They are not scenes; they are all telling, not showing. Nor are they suitable for a book jacket summary or a marketing plan. By Forster’s definition, only the last one has a “plot”: it adds some emotional causation with the words “devastated,” “lonely,” “angry” and “abandoned.” People (characters!) respond to events with feelings, which in turn drive new actions. That third version finally shows my cards, so to speak, which needs to happen sometime in a memoir, explicitly or implicitly. That seems to me to be the first condition of most writing— having a stake, or what lawyers call standing, in the process. Emotions give you a stake, automatically.

But memoirs need something else too.

In The Pieces I Am, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary about Toni Morrison, Morrison mentions that The Bluest Eye emerged from a childhood memory. She remembered a scene from her own past, when a Black friend said she didn’t believe in God because she had prayed and prayed for blue eyes and God never granted her wish. That story stayed with Morrison, and she wrote her first book because she wanted to understand how racism impacted girls like her friend. “Can you imagine,” she asks the interviewer/viewer in this clip, “that kind of pain?”

The (specific) feelings and memory and the (more general) question percolated through her imagination to create the plot of the novel. I have evocative memories too—so do you, so does everyone—but the related, universalizing question is just as necessary for a compelling narrative. My memoir includes foundational memories, like my parents announcing their divorce, and rich veins of research, but I struggled to find a clear overarching question. Honestly, I’m still not sure what it is. The universal subjects I list at the end of the excerpt— the relationship of art and family, the impact of secrets on a family, the creative career in the closet, how success and failure is defined over a lifetime— are topics or themes, not quite questions.

As I revised, the project swung from biography to memoir and back again; it was about my father, about me, about us. The king died, and then the princess wrote his biography, I wrote above. There’s another theme here, which I should elaborate on. Remember my first analogy, in one of my very first posts: my father as King Lear orbited by his three daughters? Loyalty has always been at stake. But the phrase also implies a bigger question: Why? It is not at all inevitable for the daughter to feel that kind of loyalty, if that’s what it is, and then go through this arduous process of searching and sifting and describing and evaluating on the page. To return to Forster and Morrison, it seems to be a kind of grieving, both holding on and letting go.

As I worked through my own grief (as both feeling and plot), the memoir stalled (the word I used to describe my father’s art career in Story #2). I restarted. I gradually got better at writing scenes, with characters and action and emotion. I looked at the mistakes I had made over four years (four years!) of researching, drafting, and editing and critiqued them, turning my memoir into this anti-memoir, a guide for how not to write a memoir. It may be that the perspective I had sought wasn’t possible when I wrote as a daughter, but I hope writing as a reader and teacher unlocks a bigger picture, with clearer stakes. That story isn’t finished yet.

(I am still contemplating when to turn on paid subscriptions…. ) In the meantime, thank you for reading! I appreciate any likes, shares, or comments— and feel free to try out the exercise below, if helpful.

Exercise: Write three different versions of your life story, each under 100 words. Use a different tone or approach for each one. Where do you sense emotional stakes, implicitly or explicitly? Name them. Where do you sense a central or universal question beyond your own experience? Name that too. Where does this exercise leave you?

Resources:

• You can find e-texts of Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which includes the discussion of plot and story, here.

• You can stream The Pieces I Am from various channels here, as well as on Netflix. It’s very moving.

• There is a flourishing sub-genre of father-daughter memoirs. I mentioned Jamie Bernstein’s Famous Father Girl last week and I’ve already recommended

  Lilly Dancyger
  ’s Negative Space in a post too. Here I’ll add Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me to this list. I could go on, but feel free to suggest other recs in the comments!