Memoir, Egotism and the Arrogance of “Inspirational”

1

To an outsider, I may not be recognizable as the same human being occupying a photograph taken of me when I was six. But I know that boy better than anyone else.

2

At long last, I’ve completed a childhood memoir, Courage Comes to You, that I hope to get published, even though the concept of “memoir” makes me uneasy. Mine hinges on the before and after of two events that occurred coincidentally when I was thirteen: loss of vision and emigration from England to the United States. But why should anyone who doesn’t know me care? To add to my ambivalence, I’m being encouraged to characterize my memoir as “inspirational,” an idea I find repugnant. Do I really think other people’s stories are less significant than mine?

3

To look back on a life is to observe a long journey with many unpredictable turns on the way to an unforeseen destination.

What a radically different world the 2020s are from the 1950s, when I appeared on the scene, just as the world of the 1950s were unimaginable to one looking out seventy years from the 1880s. Who among those born in the 1950s could have predicted the Beatles, followed by disco, followed by hip-hop; email and the Internet; the flourishing of local ethnic restaurants; routinely checking that a thing called a smartphone is still charged; women heads of state around the world; the release of gays from the closet; America’s election of a black president? Even someone who lived in the same village their whole life witnessed and felt these developments.

At the same time, for each of us personally, there have been many stops on the way, decisions made, regrets accumulated, hopes fulfilled. These waystations and the choices we made inevitably affected us. Yet here I am, my identity seemingly intact.

Even so, because we have all made choices and experienced their consequences, one person’s story can call out to others. When the author depicts their response to tragic events, we might ask ourselves how we handled our own calamities, or else how we would have done so. Fame doesn’t come to most of us, so it can be fascinating to read about how it influenced those for whom it has. Such are the reasons why memoir is an enduring genre.

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The notion that my story is “inspirational” suggests I see myself as an example for others to follow. What arrogance!

Admittedly, I start from a prejudice. The title “inspirational speaker” calls to mind nineteenth century hucksters claiming religious or spiritual insight who traveled around telling their dubious stories in order to peddle their unscientific medicines and superstition-laden charms. Today we’re likely to catch an inspirational speaker on a podcast channel selling their wares like the hucksters of old: Live by my example, buy my products, and you shall be saved.

But my resistance to “inspirational” goes beyond cultish hucksterism. When my charismatic father learned he had only weeks to live, he talked about what a remarkable journey he’d taken, beginning with his modest origins in the far north of England, where, from the age of fourteen into his twenties, he’d attended night school because he had to earn an income during the day. He was lured out of obscurity to an American corporation’s UK headquarters in London and from there to its world HQ in New York, retiring in suburban Connecticut. I marvel at his story and my closeness to it. But was it inspirational for me? His was an example I couldn’t emulate. I started from a different place with a different personality. He influenced my choices only occasionally, and less often the older I got. Had I looked to him for inspiration, beyond his general strength and determination, his example would have distracted me from a journey only I could take.

We will make friends, maybe eventually marry, and then even have children, and undoubtedly compromises will follow, but to realize a fulfilled life, we must make choices that are ours alone.

5

If not to inspire, then why write a memoir? A skeptical friend argues that it is an act of self-involvement. Of course, he’s right. Whether we feel we succeeded in some way or failed, whether this life has been replete with anecdotes or seemingly uneventful, whether we want to unload resentments or spread joy, the commitment to the time required to author a full-length autobiography shows preoccupation with oneself. But it’s possible to have two or more motives for the same act, not all of them tainted by egocentricity.

Writing down each stage of my life helped me come to terms with it and fed my desire to be better understood.

When I was eleven, after having been sent to a boarding school for partially sighted children, I twice ran away, the second time almost reaching home, eighty miles distant, after a day of train hopping. At the end of that term, I was allowed to return to a local school. For years afterwards, I was so ashamed of my conduct that I avoided any reference not only to the school, but even to the city where it was located. Today, I feel proud that I resisted in the few ways a young boy could. Better still, the consequences were far better than I could have anticipated. The local school I then attended participated in England’s first experiment at integrating partially sighted students into a regular school. For the next two years, I proved to myself and the school that my relatively minor disability didn’t preclude me from managing the mainstream. That confidence enabled me to handle the next stage of my life, when I’d lost my vision and, coincidentally, emigrated with my family to America.

High school is a memorably awkward age for many, disabled or otherwise. Once again the exercise of writing helped me gain perspective. With a lot of badgering from a certain teacher and the support of my family, fellow students and the school, I did well academically, but my social life left a lot to be desired. Circumstances placed me in a position of dependency not only because living at my parents’ home restricted my freedom, but also because our suburban town had no public transportation. In addition, there were things I couldn’t talk about with my sighted friends, for whom blindness was an impenetrable world they didn’t want to penetrate in the first place. But talk was one thing, action another. One friend insisted on teaching me to dance (sort of!), and another set me up on a date. The date was a disaster, but it had its funny side, and I started to find the humor even in what made me unhappy.

Although readers of my memoir have urged me to go on to write about my experiences at Amherst College, it is a small institution and relatively protective. The memoir’s direction told me to skip over two years to conclude with the summer I spent at McGill University in Montreal, a city I’d long romanticized—and still do. I deliberately put myself in a difficult predicament, taking a long-distance bus alone to a city where I knew no one. It forced me to navigate new streets on my own, overcome terror of crossing main intersections and the city’s Metro, and initiate friendships in a place where I arrived with none. For many readers, this is the most affecting part of the memoir, although it wouldn’t have the same impact without the episodes that precede it.

As the memoir progresses, readers gain a feel for the rigid discipline dominating post-World War II England, a joyous “swinging London” of the late 1960s, rose-colored suburban New York as the 1960s turned into the early 1970s, and the Montreal of 1974 as it asserted its French heritage.

I’m especially pleased with the portrayals of the many good and interesting people I met along the way. Unlikely as it is to occur, I like to imagine the friends I made in various schools and my Sheffield and London nurses, all long since lost to me, discovering themselves in my memoir. Admittedly, there are some teachers I hope would see the errors of their ways. But most were life-changers for the good.

Society has come a long way in its attitudes concerning disabled people, highlighted in America by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, but disabled and nondisabled people still don’t always communicate well with each other. In my memoir, I write as much about other people as I do myself. I don’t want it to be didactic, never mind preachy. However, through the many conversations I recall, readers may find themselves thinking about how to negotiate such sometimes opposite poles as respect and directness.

6

I used to manage a statewide mediation program for which I relied heavily on part-time students who worked hard at school and somehow found it in them to work just as hard for us over the course of a year and more. The least I felt I could do for them was write strong recommendations when their time came to move on. I’d summon them to my office to grill them about their lives and achievements. Some came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, others from what we call “privilege.” Some were children of immigrants and others immigrants themselves. Some came from New England, the South and other regions of the US to experience New York City. Every one of them had a powerful story. Grad schools and employers clearly agreed.

Everyone’s life is a book that needs only to be opened to be appreciated. Their story often isn’t obvious, and it might not be glamorous. It might even be a disturbingly sad story that gives us a perspective on one who turned to crime.

It’s why I feel that to isolate my story as inspirational does everyone else’s an injustice, just as it reduces mine to a teaching moment.

I like to think my memoir is an unusual story well told. If that is how it’s received, I’ll be content.