Tragedy + Time = Comedy: the essential Stephanie Klein

Stephanie Klein

How had I lived so long and gone to so many writing conferences without running into blogger/memoirist/TV script writer Stephanie Klein, the petite New Yorker with a head of wild copper-colored curls who was the keynote speaker at the 2017 DFW WritersConference in Dallas. 

The popularity of her original blog, Greek Tragedy, focused on life after her divorce. Its popularity gained her the title “Internet Queen of Manhattan,” and led to the publication of her first book, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir, about moving on after divorce. It was followed by a second book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. A third memoir, about her too improbable to be fake stint as a Girl Scout leader in Texas, is in the works.

In this post, and especially for the benefit of those who already heard her conference speech, I’ll also include quotes from the conference’s “Book to Film” class whose speaker, Dallas film executive Will Evans, invited her to join him, as well as from her role as a panelist on “What Makes a Publishable Memoir.” (No, I have not been stalking Klein. How could you even think that? These were purely serendipitous occurrences!)

So, how does a magna cum laude graduate of Barnard College, who married the “mensch-nest door” move on after her perfect marriage came to a bitter end? Wildly. And detailed in detail on her blog.

(The popular post about the guy who was into Pam cooking spray – “and not because he wanted to cook me an egg” – had to be taken off before her first book came out. Who, her publisher asked, would pay money to read about it if they could see it for free on the internet? When asked, she first told the questioner in the audience “there’s a book in the lobby, it’s in chapter one.” In response to later questioning, she would only admit that it involved one person going north while the other was intent on going south. With cooking spray. Hopefully, no gorgeous auburn locks were injured in the process.)

That’s the kind of bone-deep honesty that she recommends for memoirists. Well, that and what she called “the observational stuff. . . what the artist notices that makes the good story. Not the expected, not the cliché.

“Don’t ask permission to tell the stories you need to tell. People will connect with you because you’re authentic and real. And not because of how promiscuous you are. The minute you fear what other people will say is the minute you become inauthentic.”

(She then confessed that even she thinks it’s a little weird that she dedicated the first book to her father. In answer to his hope that she “took a little poetic license” in her telling, she can only say, “OK, Dad, whatever let’s you sleep at night.”)

Her second book, Moose (“and not just Moose, but Moooose” as she heard in her school hallways), is the source of her equation: tragedy + time = comedy. (She confessed to recently taking a course in writing comedy, “which left me constipated,” but insisted she doesn’t try to sound funny, and it’s not her fault that people find her writing hilarious.)

Still, she’s happy to take the cash, including payment for writing the pilot for a TV series based on Straight Up and Dirty. She did, however, turn down a request to do a reality show of her life, which includes a new husband and twin children. A camera in the house? “Sounds like a recipe for a second divorce!”

See Klein’s site for more, including book excerpts, and musings on relationships, food, beauty, and parenting, where “Mother,” she says, is a verb.

(Tomorrow: author J.C. Davis’s tips on crafting fabulous first sentences for our own books, and a contest for those who dare to craft the truly awful.)

Wordcraft – So you think you want to write a memoir?

As is appropriate for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), posts at this site have explored several writing genres. And although memoirs are hardly considered novels, the artful memoirist will shape her narrative with the same care a novelist devotes to a story. So it was only appropriate that the recent meeting of the Writers Guild of Texas focused on prize-winning local writer Drema Hall Berkheimer and her debut memoir, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood.

Drema Hall Berkheimer

“I am the child of a coal miner father who was killed in the mines, of a Rosie the Riveter mother. I’m a child of Appalachia,” Berkheimer told her audience at the Richardson, Texas, library.

Appalachia (pronounced by natives, ap-uh-LATCH-ah) isn’t a place that that gets much respect. It’s full of the blue-collar workers and out of work coal miners that establishment types overlooked in this year’s presidential election. “When people find out you’re from Appalachia,” Berkheimer said, “they subtract 100 points from your IQ. I don’t think that’s true – it’s probably just 75 points.”

Stretching from the mountainous, coal-rich regions from mid-Atlantic states to the upper South, Appalachia is a land of contrasts – “bone-deep poverty as well as places of haunting beauty,” a place Berkheimer thought she had left the region behind when her family moved in her adult years. Wanting her children and grandchildren to see its beauty, she enshrined it in words, but didn’t forget its rigors. The “red dog” of her memoir’s title isn’t a friendly pet – it’s the slag produced by the burning of waste coal and the shale scraped from the mines. In Berkheimer’s childhood in the 1940’s, “red dog” was used to top roads. Falls on the hard, sharp surface were so painful parents admonished their children not to run on it. Of course, they did.

“I keep a piece of red dog on my desk,” Berkheimer said. “It is my touchstone.”

Her childhood, she insists, was idyllic, so “why then was writing about it so soul-searing? It was the best thing I’ve ever done. It is also the hardest. So don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Berkheimer cautioned.

Of all literary genres, memoir is the one that most demands deep emotional truth. It’s also one of the hardest to sell, tending to get swamped in a morass of memoirs about the horrifying and grotesque. What can a writer do to make an ordinary life – although Berheimer believes no life is really ordinary – stand out?

One necessity is that emotional honesty she writes about, easier to say than to experience. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” she said, quoting poet Robert Frost’s dictum as she proclaimed writing memoir as “a form of self-torture.” It’s a journey of discovery that should surprise the writer as much as the reader. “I don’t think I really knew how I felt about (the people in my family) until I wrote about them. I write to know what I feel.”

That kind of emotional honesty demands the reader’s total immersion in the story, with details, please, and more details. But only those that really count. And where do the details come from?

Some writers (David Sedaris has noted that he is one) keep daily, detailed journals. But for those of use, like Berkheimer, who haven’t kept extensive diaries, how much detail is it possible to remember years, even decades after the events we write about? Fortunately, our minds are able to store information, even of scenes we didn’t consciously realize we remembered.

“I was surprised again and again as I dredged 70-year-old details up,” Berkheimer said, “sometimes of things I didn’t even know I remembered.”

Which brings up the age-old dilemma for memoirists – how much of what we write is “truth” in the most factual sense? Is it possible to accurately remember entire conversations years later?

“People have asked me – is that the truth or did you just make it up,” Berkheimer said. Her answer: both. “Every story happened, but the memories are . . . seen and remembered through my eyes as a child.”

She and her brother and sister went numerous times to the carnival that toured their town every year. Was the year her sister got sick on the Ferris wheel the same year Berkheimer had a shocking revelation on the midway? Both happened, but whether simultaneously or not is not the kind of truth she seeks to uncover.

Similar problems arose as she tried to reconstruct conversations. Were those the actual words Grandmother spoke on that occasion, or have they become fused with words spoken so often that their exact date has faded in memory? Berkheimer’s solution: “I didn’t (always) know what they said, but I knew what they likely would have said.” Although when she reports her Pentecostal grandmother saying, of a neighboring snake-handling sect, “The Bible says if you have enough faith, you can pick up serpents and not be harmed, but I don’t think God’s going to be offended if I don’t take him up on it,” the words ring true no matter what date they were uttered.

One thing Berkheimer modestly omitted mentioning as a necessity for memoir writing: the quality of the writing itself is essential. This doesn’t mean flowery or self-consciously poetic language. Berkheimer’s tends to be as spare as the people and places she writes about, writing honed by hard work.

  

For more about Berkheimer, her life and work, see her site. For my review of Running on Red Dog Road, see “A hardscrabble life, beautifully remembered” at this site, May 10, 2016.

Wordcraft -- An editor's take on memoir

“Memoir, to me, when it comes to historical fiction, is one of the best sources of material,” Steven Anderson Law, editor of Missouri-based Goldminds Publishing, told his audience at last weekend’s Houston Writers’ Guild conference.

That doesn’t mean memoir is always sellable. “Memoirs are tough business,” he warned. “Publishers are going to want to know who you are.”

However, not being a nationally-known name doesn’t make memoirs unpublishable. For instance, Missouri author Ellen Gray Massey had “just turned ninety when she said she wanted to publish her memoirs.”

When he considered that Ms. Massey had a significant following in the Missouri Ozarks for her Foxfire-type folklore writing, he told her to send them in. The result: Footprints in the Ozarks: A Memoir, now available on Kindle.

The technique for writing a compelling memoir, he said, is to “make it strong and powerful with a message in there for somebody else. We read memoirs for an uplifting message.” And above all, especially for memoirs from unknown or little-known authors, the quality of the writing is crucial to interesting a publisher.

A writer can have good ideas, “but I’m not going to truly know until I see your writing.”

What about length, audience members asked.

“If you’re a new writer and (publishers) are going to take a chance on you, the more pages, the more it costs.” Although cost is not as great a problem for electronic publishing, the writer must still keep in mind the strong competition between media for the attention of potential readers.

“To me, smaller is better. If you write more than 100,000 words as a first-time writer, you’re going to intimidate publishers.” (If fact, for first-time authors, he recommends keeping the word count between 75,000 to 80,000.)

But what if the names are changed? Or if the story is partly fiction and partly memoir? Or it’s about a person who doesn’t know he or she is a character in your memoir?

“Writers need to do a lot of soul searching,” Law said. “Why are you writing the book? I can tell from the tone, if somebody’s angry. . . You’re not trying to get back at someone, just trying to explain how it impacts somebody’s life.”

For more information about Goldminds, see www.goldmindspub.com/ or the July 27, 2011, post at this site’s archives, “Texas tales at A Real Bookstore.”