No memoir can trace very many of the consequences of a life — but even if we had all the space in the world, no memoirist would have the patience to follow the effects of every ripple that resulted from every pebble we have thrown into the ponds of our existence. Still, there are times when our choices and actions extend our influence so obviously beyond its normally limited sphere that we feel obliged to call attention to them.
For somebody who has been reading my memoir from the beginning, Chapter 8 may feel like somebody else’s life. This is perfectly understandable because the story has reached a point when I began to feel that I had moved into somebody else’s life as well.
The prospects that had seemed so bright were far away; the future once so promising became unpredictable. The good little boy who had tried to be more religious than his parents and who had stretched their academic ideals far beyond anything in his or their experience, then had moved into a respected position of responsibility, now found himself back at what amounted to square one, forced to learn the most basic facts of life again in a new environment.
Transitions are never easy. First you have to survive them. Then you have to try to understand what happened. If you are willing to stare at the past, this is even more complicated than living the events in the first place. Months or years after the fact, the memoirist goes a step further and tries to make others understand as well. This means going far beyond tossing off a simple description of the experience or a facile explanation of what it seemed to mean at the time.
I knew that it was going to be a challenge to make readers grasp the sense of moving to the farm. To some people it would never make “sense.” But as a writer offering a continuous story, I have presented the situation from a number of perspectives. Within a page, talking about how Carol and I transported our family, transformed our lives, transfigured our whole orientation, I show the reader that the shift in our lives meant different things to our Crysler family, to the large Detroit family, even to the shattered Thunder Bay connections.
I begin by recalling the obligations to the university that I could not escape even on the farm. I show my metamorphosis from professional teacher to amateur farmer, and hint at my family’s bewildered response to the direction (or apparent indirection) of my life. I talk about the books I gave away and the university files that became fuel for a wood cookstove, leaving no doubt that I was slamming the door on what had been my life’s work.
Readers coming to one of the major transitional periods of my life might feel as if they are looking at these events through a crystal polygon, not through a pane of clear glass. Such an object makes events infinitely multi-faceted, and nothing looks the same if you move even just a micron to the left or the right. Add to that complex filter the personal filters that readers bring to the story, and the result is a germ of the chaos promised by the title of my book. Some readers will be peeved by the story of an educated adult who threw away a career; others will admire the innovative way I found to make the best of a bad hand.
A memoir may be about you, but it need not be solipsistic. You do not hold the only key to your past. You know only part of your story, and you admit or are willing to tell only some of that. The reader knows something else, and makes that a part of the perceived narrative.
While I can no more control how readers respond to my story than I could when I lived it, I must concede that my life has had consequences. One of the neighbor boys down the road sized up the educational path that had led me to the farm and was inspired never to go back to school. And, by personifying my books as betrayed, abandoned friends, I acknowledge that moving from Thunder Bay to Crysler may have affected far more than the people than I am aware of, and far more than just people.