Essays or memoir? At this point, does it matter?

AWP is an acronym for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. It’s also shorthand for an annual convention of writing folk. What’s great about AWP is that it’s a chance to reconnect with former teachers and old friends. It’s also the perfect time to gather intelligence from writers I admire. Those writers are the reason I think readers would love AWP too. 

I blogged the other day about this year’s convention in Boston at Lisa Romeo Writes, a wonderful resource for fiction and nonfiction writers alike. The following is adapted from the guest post I wrote for Lisa. This excerpt focuses on essays and memoir from the writer’s perspective, but readers will pick up some insider knowledge, not to mention several superb titles for their To Read lists. You can find the entire blog post here.  

Lately I’ve been wondering how to pitch the project I’ve been laboring over for going on three years. Is it an essay collection or a memoir? I know what I think it is and what I want it to be (essays), and I know what several agents have told me it must be (memoir). Until I’m somebody—that is, an author with so much name recognition that a publisher could actually sell an essay collection with my name on it—the argument goes, I’m stuck with the M word. Not that there’s anything wrong with memoir. I would love to publish a memoir, the operative word being publish. I just don’t think that what I read on my pages adds up to one long and connected personal story. Or should. It turned out AWP had organized a panel of established writers with whom I could commiserate. It was called The Godzilla of Nonfiction: Has Memoir Swallowed the Essay?

I’ve read Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum regularly since her first book, My Misspent Youth, a collection of essays on life as a young professional, was published in 2001. During the Godzilla panel, Daum implied that by publishing essays right out of the gate, she’d snuck in under the wire; the trend toward longer narratives had not quite taken hold. She wasn’t so lucky with her most recent book, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (2010). What she wrote as a collection of personal essays around her preoccupation with real estate became memoir when she was informed it would not sell otherwise. Daum applied what she calls “gratuitous connective tissue” to the pieces, ending the book and the property search, a little-too-tidily for her taste, with a wedding. The book, she told us, suffered as a result.

Panelist Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days: Personal Essays (2010) is her fourth book,which I guess makes her somebody. Gordon payed her dues: under pressure from editors, she converted two earlier collections into memoirs. At AWP, Gordon gave a worth-the-price-of-admission tutorial that riffed on the essay as confidence not confession. The writer should think of the reader not as judge or authority figure but as confidante, she said. There should be no coercion in this reader-writer relationship. Trusting that the reader is a friend will help you write the piece. Gordon spoke, too, of how the personal essay can and, to be more effective, probably should contain memoir-like narrative passages in addition to essayistic analyses of events.

It seems author David McGlynn was unconsciously trying to avoid such passages while writing essays about violence. To the audience, he expressed ambivalence about having to convert a collection of these essays to memoir, but he admitted that the act of writing scenes and descriptions of long-ago events following the home invasion and murder of a high school classmate gave him a better understanding of himself. It also became the basis of his memoir A Door in the Ocean (2012). In McGlynn’s case, the pushback from his agent that he write a memoir ultimately made for a more meaningful take on a lifelong obsession.

So has memoir devoured the essay? It seemed as though the panel was saying, Yes, but—as though willing would-be essayists to follow our hearts for as long as we can hold out. It’s a game plan I can live with. Moderator Debra Monroe is the author of the memoir On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain. She offered a sort of end around, a way to avoid the memoir-or-essays tag altogether. Monroe described how author Jo Ann Beard managed this with her nonfiction work The Boys of My Youth, whose cover bears Beard’s name and title, but the title is not followed by a colon or subtitle. On its release in 1999, reviewers came up with their own tags for Boys (which one Godzilla panelist described as a perfect book), some calling it memoir, others referring to it as a collection of personal stories.

“I am drawn to the shagginess of the essay,” Phillip Lopate writes in the introduction to his latest collection, Portrait Inside My Head (2013). I was extremely fortunate to have Phillip as an advisor and workshop instructor at Columbia; he was also one of my thesis readers. I like his description and I like that he calls his latest assortment of essays a “hodgepodge,” a label I wish I could pull off with my own work. And how perfect that Phillip was in the audience that afternoon so that, one after the other, the writers at the panelist table could acknowledge the master.

Madrid: The Way It Was

I have never met the idol of my younger self, the star of movies I love most, like The Way We Were and Out of Africa. But recently our paths intersected. For a total of no more than three and a half minutes, he and I occupied effectively the same geographic space, first in the lobby of the Hotel Ritz Madrid, and then, a day later, just outside the entrance. We inhaled the same Spanish air, tread on the same carpet and cobblestone, and, most significantly, made eye contact, albeit fleeting. There within a few steps of me was the owner of that exceptionally gorgeous face and impressive canon of ground-breaking movies. 

Serendipity had brought my family to this jewel of a hotel that sits adjacent to the Prado and three blocks from the magnificent Parque del Retiro. Now, some incredible good fortune. Not an hour into our stay, I stopped with my girls at the concierge desk to make dinner plans when he entered through a revolving door. At first I was only conscious that here came another American. Europeans don’t typically (read: never) enter fancy hotels in t-shirts and baseball caps. I looked again. 

“Hubbell Gardiner"

Robert Redford.

I remembered to breathe only when my oldest elbowed me gently in the ribcage.

So, did I have the wherewithal to ask for an autograph or photo? I did not. 

I could have enlisted the help of a go-between. There was, moving alongside Redford, a pretty, in-charge blonde, smart phone in hand, who appeared to be managing the minute details of his comings and goings (e.g. “The elevators are over there, Bob.”). When I saw the woman the next day, she struck me as friendly and approachable in her sneakers and long linen skirt. Redford was nowhere in sight, but I could tell she was waiting for him to exit an elevator or emerge from the lounge. I guessed he was on an important call or enjoying a café con leche. As I see it now, my exchange with the woman would have gone one of two ways. Either she would have absorbed my fawning overture and granted me a (very brief) audience with himself, or she’d have deflected it, sparing me the embarrassment of dismissal by my hero, saying something like, “Oh, dear. Wow. You’re so nice to ask, but unfortunately Bob is running behind schedule already. So very sorry. Safe travels. Bye-bye.” But I was afraid to ask, didn’t want to hear myself babble away at Redford’s assistant as I had at the concierge the afternoon before, grabbing the poor man’s arm, pressing for his understanding of the magnitude of the moment. It was enough that I knew Redford was nearby. I would wait and watch him from a short distance. Two sightings, I assured myself, would be ample souvenirs.

That chilly morning in Madrid, I stood on the sidewalk outside the Ritz and watched Robert Redford leave in a large, black Mercedes, evidently for the airport as the trunk was packed with expensive luggage. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses—Ray-Bans, I decided. So 1970s Redford of him.

It didn’t take long for regret to sink in. For days I hated that I’d lacked the courage to request a picture of the two of us standing, say, side by side in front of an elaborate Christmas display in the Ritz lobby. He was in Madrid to announce the launch of Spain’s version of The Sundance Channel. A press trip, for goodness’ sake. He wouldn’t have denied me. It’s not as though the paparazzi were lined up seven deep pestering him as they’d have done decades ago. No one recognized him—or if they did, like me they kept a polite (or frozen) distance. Both times I saw him, I sensed, or thought I sensed as he glanced around, faint surprise that no one pestered him for anything. But, while we’re on the subject, don’t ask me how well he’s held up or whether he’s as short as they say. As far as I’m concerned it was Hubbell Gardiner striding across that well-appointed foyer. 

I’ve visited and revisited those three and a half minutes many times. That span is approximate of course. It didn’t occur to me to clock the encounters. Very little occurred to me. I do remember thumbing around in my consciousness for something to approach him with, but nothing coherent came together, nothing but hyper-charged feelings I would have to parse later, first for myself and then for the friends and family who excoriated me—How could I deny them this vicarious thrill?—for not exchanging a few superficial words or appealing for a photograph to post on Facebook or shaking his hand and thereby linking in a physical if cursory way, once and for all, my life to Robert Redford’s. 

Nothing but this one concrete thought crystalized as the big black car pulled away: The Ritz is not so unlike The Plaza.