4 Great Memoirs

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O” made its American debut as short fiction in the January 1943 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The story involves a French-speaking Swiss governess, who, as Nabokov revealed in the earlier French version, was a woman drawn from his own life. “Mademoiselle O” was later collected in Nabokov’s Nine Stories and then, in a twist, appeared as the fifth chapter of his autobiography, Speak, Memory. Was the piece fiction or memoir? Readers and critics were confused.

The boundary between fiction and memoir is marked, perhaps, by restraint. The memoirist sets out to recall and reflect on events and not to create them. But the potential loss of pleasure in the freedom of imagination that fiction affords is more than made up for by the vision through which otherwise transitory lives and events earn a possible share of immortality. The storyteller’s role, whether the work is fiction or fact, is to illuminate those things that might otherwise be lost. The four memoirists here are fiction writers as well, and in terms of the storytelling art at play in both forms, we make little distinction. The goal in each form is to reach the essential truth.

Lynn Ahrens’s homage to her photographer father takes place primarily on the basement floor of her childhood home, long after her father’s death, as she does for him what he was temperamentally unable to do for himself. She selects the best of his life’s work and, with words of appreciation, lets the rest go. In Donald Hall’s “Eleven Days,” a title that marks his wife Jane Kenyon’s final, losing struggle with leukemia, husband and wife—poets, lovers—select the works for her posthumous collection, the dress for her funeral, and the words for her obituary, and the painfulness of each moment becomes an occasion for fullness and pleasure. Maud Newton’s “Conversations You Have at Twenty” boldly reveals the person she once was, when, like all of us, she wasn’t sure who or what to be. She recalls making love with her boyfriend in a hotel bed with his mother awake in the same room, and with an understatement that both acknowledges and removes shame, she confesses that she’d like to think she and her boyfriend tried to be quiet. Finally, in “Riding the Dawg,” Robert Stone takes us back to the 1960s, when he was not long out of the Merchant Marine, a Stegner writing fellow, and hanging out with Ken Kesey’s prankster crowd, while writing a first novel, Hall of Mirrors, which would firmly launch him, though he couldn’t have known that at the time. As another of our beloved authors, James Salter, whose memoir Burning the Days is essential reading, has observed: A life may be wonderful when looking in reverse but not always when looking forward. Here, we have the benefit of both views.