The Only Second Chance You Get in Life
The Only Second Chance You Get in Life: A Guest Post by Gabrielle Robinson
Telling our story or that of our family brings a host of often unexpected and painful challenges. However, the rewards are powerful, and the very process of writing can help overcome the problems. Memoir allows us to re-evaluate, even re-invent, ourselves and see our lives in a fresh context. "Memoir is the only second chance you get in life" says Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary and Lying. A Metaphorical Memoir. Or as Stephen King notes: “Writing about your life leads to a fresh understanding of it….I write to find out what I think.”
My own experience confirms both the problems and the rewards. Api’s Berlin Diaries. My Quest to Understand my Grandfather’s Nazi Past began with a discovery. After my mother’s death I found diaries my grandfather kept while serving as doctor in Berlin 1945. I read about day and night bombings and streets buried in rubble. Doctors, their aprons covered in blood, had few medications and not even water or light for their patients who lay in cellars on bare cement floors. The naked dead were stacked outside. As I followed Api, who often was at the point of collapse, I remembered how he had taken me in after the war and surrounded me with love and support.
Then I made my second discovery. They were two letters, p and g, Parteigenosse: my beloved Api had been a member of the Nazi party. I immediately buried the diaries deep in my desk, not even telling my husband. I could not expose Api to public shame. Moreover I myself felt ashamed of my German heritage. Silence seemed the only response.
It took me a long time before I found the courage to confront a past I had evaded all my life. I began, hesitantly, to research Api’s past. Soon it seemed as if he were speaking to me across the decades, and memories flooded in. He had been both father and grandfather to me since my father had been killed in the war. As I was attempting to write about his death in 1955 when I was twelve, I struggled with the usual clichés. But then I had the vivid image of his gloves lying at the bottom of the stairs on the night he died. He had discarded them in a hurry trying to reach his bed. The fingers were still bent from his hand, but they looked rigid, dead. The gloves with the bent fingers appeared in my dreams for years after Api’s death.
Telling Api’s story left me with a greater understanding of the political responsibility we all carry as individuals. But despite many explanations why Api had joined the Nazi party, I have no one complete answer. Or only one that may sound simple minded and yet may resonate with us especially today under Covid 19 and the protests against systemic racism. If love and compassion can help us understand, though not excuse, what happened to people like my grandfather, then perhaps they can help us embrace our common humanity and appreciate how it binds us all together.
Many memoir writers are wrestling with troubling discoveries and learn how past family traumas still throw their shadow over them. As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But memoirs also show that telling these stories can be therapeutic, helping to write the pain away.
One of the hardest things may be to get started. The best advice I got is also the simplest: just write, every day if possible, but at least regularly. In that way our minds and hearts fill with our subjects, even when we are not working. I began without a clear idea of the shape of my book and over many months wrote Api’s story in chronological order. I also read many of the histories, eye witness reports and biographies about the Third Reich and used family letters, documents, and pictures to add descriptive detail to my account. After several revisions, the book turned from 7 long chapters into into 62 short ones that ricochet between Api’s story, my life with him as a child, retracing his steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, and reflections on German guilt and political responsibility.
Writing memoir should come naturally since we tell stories about our lives every day, what we saw or felt or what worries us…. We also all think about the meaning of our experiences, already a form of memoir. So it’s just a matter of making the transition from talking and thinking to writing. In the interest of telling a lively story, it is useful to add details beyond our own experience, things we have learnt from others or from books. After all, the line between fiction and nonfiction is fluid. It is justly called “creative nonfiction.” One requirement though is to stay as honest as possible.
I would love to hear from you with any questions or comments. Please contact me at https://www.gabriellerobinson.com/
The Only Second Chance You Get in Life: A Guest Post by Gabrielle Robinson
