A Letter to Patricia Hampl about Inventive Approach of Composing Literary Memoirs

Mr. Jon Doe
Address
Date
Ms. Patricia Hampl
Course
Address
Dear Ms. Hampl,
A few years ago, I read your article, “Memory and Imagination,” for the first time. A few years later, I had to rely on the same work to prepare a presentation for a workshop. Now, I got the opportunity to write to about this marvelous personal essay and reflect on my own memoir. Having been originally published almost the same time literary memoir was beginning to garner more attention, I believe the critical essay was a defining stage for this art. And as you said earlier, a memoir is not for reminiscence but for exploration.
While reading this article, I found myself struck by your inventive approach of composing literary memoirs. This makes me want to read the essay again and again. At the beginning of the “Memory and Imagination,” you are discussing an early draft, a memoir that was not working for you. In a detailed manner, you try to describe a scene from this draft about your first piano lesson.
As the scene approaches its final stage, you describe it as “a moment” and you wonder why you remembered that piano lesson incident in particular and not the other possibly more vivid and dramatic stories. Your response that “whenever you reread what you had written immediately after you have finished it, you realized that you had spoken several lies,” made more curious and I decided to find where your essay was heading.
As your reflection at the end suggests, you seem to question why you invented the piano lesson’s details although you say that you did not have a recollection of this incident. Next, you tell your audience that until you had written details of the same “moment,” you believed a memoir was actually a faithful, accurate, transcription, rendition of an incident/period from your past. In reality, I admit having believed the same thing sometime back when started writing a memoir.
For the time I have been working on memoirs, especially in workshops, I found most of the autobiographical artworks to be straightforward, chronological writings. However, I believe that if a memoir does not dig deep and go beyond narrating about events and situations in a story, it is not good enough and will not make the cut when it meets a serious editor no matter how well-written, compelling, chronological, and/or fact-based it is. Therefore, I have adopted the same spirit in my memoirs where I try to write narratives that aim at reproducing literal events and the facts of stories, including my latest work, The Fourth Man.
While thinking about things in the next pages of your essay, your questions stopped me. An example of this is where you start interrogating your reasons for writing about ‘that’ lesson. “I must admit,” and you continue “that I invented that scene.” Then you ask yourself “But why?&rdqu...