Details for Essay and Memoir
Vivid. Compelling. And completely unsuitable for use in your novel. What can you do with a memory or detail that’s too resonant to part with? Adam Gopnik’s essay introducing The Best American Essays 2008 is still on my mind, and it gave me the answer: Deploy it in an essay.
holiday towels from the baking aisle
Some of my most vivid memories are triggered by a familiar scent, a favorite song, a glimpse of something from childhood. I had one of those moments in the grocery store just after Thanksgiving. I was minding my own business in the baking supply aisle when I saw them–holiday towels. I love Christmas, adore putting beloved ornaments on the tree, enjoy having my family come on Christmas Eve. But I’m not much for decking the halls. I decorate the tree, put up a nativity, light a few candles and that’s it.
But I love finding old Christmas tablecloths at garage sales because they remind me of my grandma’s modern-designed ones from the 1950s and ’60s. And the holiday towels in the baking aisle directly across from the chocolate chips took me back to my grandparents’ kitchen, where every Christmas day I snitched spritz cookies from the tray, carefully covered with a be-ribboned plastic doily edged in, for lack of the correct technical term, dingle-balls.
one of my garage-sale finds
The tablecloths I find at garage sales bring me back, too. I’m willing to overlook small stains or thin spots for the pleasure of the memories they evoke.
If I were writing an essay, I might now introduce some facts with which to create from my details and memories an argument, as Gopnik calls it, with an obvious “I.”
The facts I’d choose would tie the memories and details I’ve shared to information about Charley Harper, an illustrator whose work reminds me of so many things in my grandparents’ home. Like many in their generation, my grandparents retained no fondness for the dark, ornamented furnishings of their childhoods. They adored flat planes of blonde wood, glass and metal. Their davenport had no curves or skirting. The only piece of furniture they owned with a spindle on it was a grandfather clock they purchased in a momentary lapse into the colonial during the Bicentennial.
The first time I learned Harper’s name, I was fixing breakfast on a Sunday morning and had CBS’s fabulous “Sunday Morning” on TV for company. When they showed some of Harper’s silk-screened images of birds, I was immediately in my grandparents’ kitchen again.
a thoroughly modern reindeer
The second place I’ve run into Harper’s work is at dooce.com. Last week, Heather posted information on some Charley Harper products that are now available. For me, it was too late for holiday shopping, but my nieces will be getting some of them, beginning with a birthday in January.
A book I left off my Christmas list, because it feels like such an indulgence, is Charley Harper: And Illustrated Life, by Todd Oldham. It contains more than 700 of Harper’s works, and I’d love to page through it again and again. With luck, perhaps I’ll someday find it on the remainder table.