The Linked Essays Dilemma

On memoirs-in-essays, commemorative plaques, and a forthcoming book.

My latest book, How to Change History: A Salvage Project can be described variously as a collection of linked essays or a memoir-in-essays, a tricky form no matter what you call it. I say it’s tricky because it implies (though doesn’t quite admit) that the essays were written separately as stand-alones rather than written with the intentionality of a book. That’s not to say that the essays were slapped together randomly, but that the intentionality of the book proceeded the writing of the contents. That’s certainly true in my case and I’d wager, in the cases of most such books. Still, it’s important for such a book to have the cohesion of a book that was intended from the start as something large and of a piece.

Why is that important? I’m not saying such cohesion is important to me when I read some random collection of essays or random collection of stories. In fact, I love hodge-podge collections that show an author’s stylistic and thematic range and roving interests. But editors and perhaps most other readers want something that builds, that leads somewhere.

When I first started publishing, this was not the case. My first collection of stories, All You Can Eat, was published during the Raymond Carver era and the late 80s short story boom. My second collection, The Big Ear, was also a hodge podge. The terms, “novel-in-stories” and the “memoir-in-essays” were not widely used, if at all. Both suggest a tolerance for some fragmentation, with the eventual emotional payoff that a conventional novel or memoir might have. An exemplar of the novel-in-stories form is Abigail De Witt’s, News of Our Loved Ones, which beautifully follows one French family’s rough journey from the Normandy invasion to post war North Carolina and France. The stories in the book are from various points of view inter-generationally, but the fictional universe is the same from story to story. Characters, whether alive or dead from one story to the next are at the very least carried forward in memory by the others. In this way, the book indeed has the emotional payoff of a novel (The word “NOVEL” is written right there plain as day on the cover, but yeah, it’s a novel-in-stories, a slightly different animal from a conventional novel).

You could say (or at least I hope you would say) that How to Change History operates similarly. There’s my mother, father, and older sister traipsing across the pages as they have sometimes done in other works of mine. My mother and father even get their own “chapters” (Nola had her own book, years ago, my memoir, Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness, so she shouldn’t complain), while Nola is lightly referenced throughout. But the book’s borders are larger than my immediate family’s.

If I tell you the range of subjects in the book, you’ll be forgiven (well, maybe not. I’m sensitive) for clapping back, “Well, that’s just a hodge podge after all, with a fancy title slapped on it.” My subject matter includes photography, travelogues, TV shows, real estate come-ons, washed up rock stars, incontinent dachshunds, stalkers, war memorials, skeletons in the closet, scrapbooks, pre-cancerous moles, murder, the Philippine-American War, Sherwood Anderson, James Agee, curses, divorce and skinny dipping.

I’d argue that all these subjects are as one, first because they all sprang from my mind, but also because they reflect my obsession with memory and erasure. I am at once attractted and repelled by gestures of memorializing. I want not only to be remembered but to remember others, and I know that this is a losing battle. And so, I write about a memorial plaque to a former colleague who died of a heart attack during my time at UNC-Charlotte. The English Department made a little memorial plaque for him and hung it on the spot where he used to hang out in the hallway, smoking (in the days when people smoked indoors) and chatting with anyone he could collar. Jim’s Corner, it was called. But not long after, the department moved to a new building and Jim’s Corner was no more, the plaque likely thrown away or lost in the move. I had since moved across the country so I did not know of its removal until a couple of years later. Another essay features a scrapbook I bought at an estate sale in Virginia, of a woman who had meticulously collected the ephemera of her life over a four-year period during WWII. The scrapbook was amazing to me, and I bought it despite a hefty $75 price tag. Among its treasures were the pair of nylon stockings she wore throughout the war, theater tickets, a performance review (rather mixed) of her job as a volunteer on the psych ward of Walter Reid Memorial Hospital, a menu from Antoine’s in New Orleans, her birth certificate (we share the same birthday, though many years apart), dental x-rays, you name it. This was her own memorial to herself, but a memorial with little context. How to piece it together into a life, a remembrance from scraps? Ironically, I was recently honored with my own plaque at the Digital Storytelling Lab in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing House. I take some solace in the fact that the lab and the building in which it sits are both new, so maybe it will last a little longer than Jim’s Corner. Still, I don’t expect that any student will give the name on the lab a second thought, not even to wonder who I was. They’re too busy with their own lives.

If you read the book, and I hope you will, far from a hodgepodge, I’m confident that you will see that these are indeed linked essays. This is a memoir-in-essays. But it took me years – 25 years to be exact – to see what now seems obvious. For years, I wanted to collect my essays into a book, and I tried various configurations and titles. It took me so many years because it took me that long to finally see what held these essays together. I don’t remember all the titles I tried out, thankfully, but one that stays with me is A Handbook for Haunting. Not a bad title, actually. But not the right title for my book. And I can’t stress enough how important a title is to a book’s success. A good title will help you find the right way to order your book. A good title will not confuse the reader. A good title will deliver a promise. A good title will sell your book. I learned that with my first book of stories. The original title was Dropping the Baby. No one wanted to publish it. Then I changed the title to All You Can Eat and it sold within two weeks to a major publisher. Once I understood that the best title for my forthcoming book was How to Change History, I understood everything about my book that previously had been obscured. That’s the only way I can frame it – it was like all my essays were poured into a funnel and out the other end came that title. Suddenly, I knew which essay would anchor the book and which one would end it, and that has never changed. The final essay, about a mysterious photograph I found one day on my basement floor, acts itself as a funnel for all the previous essays. The mysteries of time and remembrance all bear down on that one photo as I finally realize what it depicts.

I’ll leave it there with the hope that I’ve been helpful to anyone wishing to embark on such a project and the hope that those of you who have read this far might be interested in the book as a whole. How to Change History is available for pre-order (the pub date is March 1^st), and if you purchase it on the University of Nebraska website, you can use this code which will give you a whopping 40% discount. 6AS25 https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496240323/how-to-change-history/

Thank you.

“Reading How to Change History is akin to sitting with an intimate friend, going through old photos and scrapbooks, conversing deep into the night about what connects us to the past and what might endure into the future. ‘Everything is about letting go,’ Robin Hemley writes, ‘but still we let go reluctantly.’ With his characteristic wit and keen acumen, Hemley inspects places near and far, even the most mundane sites—such as waiting rooms and flooded basements—for the wisdom they might offer us as we move through this temporary world.”—Brenda Miller, author of A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form