“I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.” - Dorothy Allison

2. 1. Make a list of the primary and secondary characters in your book.
2. Choose one scene in which we meet a major character. Where does that first
impression come from – what that person directly says or does, or how the
narrator describes them? If it’s not currently active, what can change to let the
person express themselves?
3. What is unique about your protagonist that keeps them from being a genre
trope/stereotype? Are there scenes where your flaws or mistakes make you
human and relatable? Is your behavior consistent with the ways you describe
yourself?
4. What is the antagonist’s goal? Why are they seeking something other than what
your protagonist wants, and why do they believe their actions are right?
5. How does your protagonist demonstrate agency throughout the memoir? Are
there places where things happen to them instead of because of them? Do they
drive the changes that lead to the resolution?
6. How does your protagonist change emotionally over the course of the book?
7. Does each secondary character serve a unique role? Is the level of detail about
them appropriate to their role in the plot?

3. “I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.”
- Dorothy Allison

6. Death means that the dinner reservation you made for a party of seven needs to be
upped to ten, then lowered to nine and then upped again, this time to fourteen.
Eighteen will ultimately show up, so you will have to sit at a four-top on the other
side of the room with people you just vaguely remember, listening as the fun table,
the one with your sparkling sister at it, laughs and laughs. You, meanwhile, have to
hear things like “Well, I know that your father did his best.”
People love saying this when a parent dies. It’s the first thing they reach for. A
man can beat his wife with car antennas, can trade his children for drugs or
motorcycles, but still, when he finally, mercifully, dies, his survivors will have to hear
from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner that he did his best. This, I’m
guessing, is based on the premise that we all give 110 percent all the time, regarding
everything: our careers, our relationships, the attention we pay to our appearance,
etc.
“Look around,” I want to say. “Very few people are actually doing the best they
can. That’s why they get fired from their jobs. That’s why they get arrested and
divorced. It’s why their teeth fall out. Do you think the ‘chef’ responsible for this
waterlogged spanakopita is giving it his all? Is sitting across from me, spouting
clichés and platitudes, honestly the best you can do?” . . . .
“He’ll always be with you” is another tiresome chestnut I’d be happy never to
hear again. In response to it, I say, “What if I don’t want him with me?” What if sixty-
four years of constant criticism and belittlement were enough, and I’m actually fine
with my father and me going our separate ways, him in a cooler at the funeral home
and me here at the kids’ table? He won’t be in his grave for another few days. Is that
the “better place” you’ve been assuring me he’s headed to—the cemetery we pass
on our way to the airport? The plot with a view of the Roy Rogers parking lot? And
what exactly is it better than? This restaurant, clearly, but what else? This state? This
country? This earth?

7. When I told my kids I was going to my father’s funeral, they had a lot of questions. I hadn’t
gone into much detail with them about my childhood, but they knew why my father wasn’t in
their lives. So they rightfully wanted to know, why would I go all the way to California for the
funeral if he was so mean? If he’d hurt their Grandma so much and broke my nose? ….
Going to my father’s funeral was a way to show my kids what it means to respect a
parent, no matter what happened and what they’ve done. I wanted them to have that example.
It was also a way to acknowledge that I could only control my end of the relationship.
“But he was mean,” Shirley said.
I couldn’t argue with that. But I knew there was always a bigger story being told. “He
was,” I told her, because I don’t lie to my kids. “But sometimes only the Lord knows what was
going on in him. All I know is the Lord chose this man to be my father, and the rest isn’t for me
to judge. So I have to go to California.”
Kenny stayed home with the kids. My mom, wisely, chose not to attend. And so when I
went to the funeral home early on the morning of the service, I was by myself.
The funeral director was a guy I’d gone to high school with, but hadn’t seen in a long time.
Chuck and I had a good chat and caught up, and then I side-eyed the casket.
“Is he really in there?” I asked.
Chuck just laughed, but he knew what I meant.
“I”m serious,” I told him. “My daddy was a hustler, he always had a game. He’s the kind of
person who might not really be dead. He might be in the witness protection program or
something.” Where did that come from? I guess some part of me still held onto that scared-to-
death child, and she was worried that William Smith might start popping up again.
Chuck nodded. “I wondered the same thing. I checked. He’s in there.”
“Show me,” I told him.
And while it was probably breaking some kind of funeral home law or protocol, Chuck did
just that. I saw with my own two eyes that my father was dead. He was never coming back.

9.  Emotional tone can be overwritten.
 Emotion can be uneven.

10. “If you are going to write memoir, if you are going to share a story that matters, then
you must be willing to do the thing that so few people are willing to do. You must be
human, at once whole and incomplete. And if you do this well and honestly, we just
might let you share some deeper truth.”
-- Jeff Goins

11. “I don’t want a memoir to be the means by
which an author figures themselves out, and
oftentimes that’s the case. [The author] had
substantially figured herself out. She didn’t
hold back. She pushes herself harder than
almost anyone else I know in my personal and
professional life.”
- Eamon Dolan, editor at Simon & Schuster

12.  There’s not enough insight or clarity.
 There’s so much reflection that the reader
gets lost.

14. “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when
the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the
experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is
the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”
-- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

16. 1. At what point in your life are you telling this story? How much
time has passed since the events you’re writing about? What do
you know now that you didn’t know then?
2. If you had to describe your narrator’s emotional tone in no more
than three words, what would they be?
3. Are there places in your current manuscript that don’t reflect that
tone? If it slips away, what can you do to bring it back?
4. Do you feel like you have enough distance to let your narrator
craft a compelling and consistent reader-focused story? If you still
carrying a lot of emotions about the experiences you’re writing
about, what are you doing to bring them to the page in ways that
still offer self reflection?
5. As you consider the protagonist, does your narrator present them
in a way that acknowledges their uniqueness? Have you stepped
back enough to describe and reflect your personality that the
reader can see how you are different than others? Are you
highlighting those aspects of your personality that lead to
contradictions, ambivalence or emotion?

17. 6. Take one scene from the middle of your
work in progress (or just one paragraph, if it’s
a busy month) and deepen the narrator’s
presence and perspective. Think about the
choice of words your narrator uses, or the
specific things they notice. How does it change
how the reader sees and understands them?

18. Next Class: April 20, 2024
9:00am – 12:00pm
bethjusino@gmail.com