Epic Living: Imagination and invention
On writing memoirs
From the Creativity at Work Newsletter July 03
By Linda Naiman
In a recent interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Isabel Allende shared an anecdote about her granddaughter, who wrote in a composition for school, “My family's not interesting. The only interesting person in my family is my grandmother, because she has a great imagination." She was seven or eight at the time.
When Allende asked her what a great imagination is, she said, "You can remember what never happened." Allende then explained to Moyers, it is her job as a writer to exaggerate. “I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.”
Allende’s newest memoir My Invented Country is the story of her life in Chile, and her life in exile. She tells Moyers this is not an objective account, it is an exploration of the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping her life, her books, and to her place of origin. What she doesn’t remember, she invents. “I wrote this so that you can fall in love with Chile.”
Allende’s first novel The House of the Spirits started out as a letter to her dying grandfather, and launched her career as a magic realist on par with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read the full interview go to http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_allende.html
Who amongst us doesn’t want to live an epic life? It’s all in the details. Carol Shields a celebrated Canadian novelist who wrote The Stone Diaries, and Unless and who died last week (July 16), revealed that ordinary life is anything but. It’s the substrata details, the acuteness of observation that transform the ordinary to the fascinating.
The Stone Diaries is a fictional auto-biography composed of letters, recipes, and clippings that reveal the remarkable life story of an ordinary woman. George Fetherling of the Vancouver Sun, calls her work “one of the most artistically successful Canadian attempts at a truly polyphonic novel— that is, one driven by the simultaneous but distinct voices of many different characters.”
(Interestingly, Canada is increasingly being recognized on the world stage, for its tolerance of diversity and multi-culturalism. See related article: Paradigm for Pluralism
The Stone Diaries is considered a masterpiece in Canadian literature which won the Governor-General’s award in Canada and the Pulitzer prize in the US.
Available at Amazon
A Mythic Life: Learning to Live our Greater Story by Jean Houston, is a memoir of epic proportions showing readers in the process how to recognize and tap into the mythic themes that shape and inform their own lives. In that context, she discusses her identification with the goddess Athena, her mystical experiences, and her encounters with Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Martin Buber and Fritz Perls. I find her some of her stories hard to believe, but then again the book is about taking one's life to mythic proportions.
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