# Separate the Selves of Memoir

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 40 · Part 4: Character, narrator, and point of view

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> In memoir, distinguish the experiencing self, the remembering self, and the narrating self.

Memoirs go wrong when the selves collapse into one: the narrator who remembers everything and understood it all at the time, or the child who speaks in an adult’s vocabulary and irony, or the retrospective wisdom that flattens the person who lived through the event into a victim or a fool.

Augustine keeps all three in view. In the sixteenth year of his life he and some friends shook a pear tree late at night and carried off loads of fruit, not to eat but to throw to the hogs. The man who tells it in the *Confessions*, written between 397 and 400, cannot find an ordinary reason. In E. B. Pusey’s translation: “Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.” The boy shook the tree and, so far as the text shows, did not ask why. The man remembering, who in the previous chapter hedges what he recalls of his parents (“recalling, as well as I may”), interrogates his memory and finds that the pears were not the point. And the writer has chosen to place this episode in Book Two, to address it to God, and to make it the occasion for an inquiry into motive. The phrase “I loved to perish” belongs to the writer.

The three terms are our working labels, not a theory with a single source, and Daniel Kahneman uses the first two in a different, psychologist’s sense. The *experiencing self* is the person inside the event, knowing only what she knew then and wanting what she wanted. The *remembering self* retrieves, with gaps, reconstructions, versions told by others, and revisions by time. The *narrating self* is the one now shaping the text, with knowledge the others lacked, a purpose, and an audience. They are not separate people, and Augustine’s inquiry merges them, but the writer does need to know, for each sentence, whose knowledge it is using.

Frederick Douglass shows the narrating self deciding what the others could not. In chapter 11 of his *Narrative* (1845), about his escape, he announces his “intention not to state all the facts,” because telling them might involve others in difficulty and close “the slightest avenue” by which another slave might get free. The experiencing self lived those facts and the remembering self holds them; the narrating self, writing with consequences in view, withholds them and says why.

The narrating self knows how it ended. We think that letting that knowledge leak into the experiencing self’s scene removes suspense and plausibility, while letting the experiencing self’s confusion leak into the narrator’s framing removes authority. Kept apart, the selves let the reader see the gap between them, and much of a memoir’s meaning can sit there, including the places where present understanding is still unsure. Disclosing the remembering self’s limits keeps faith with the reader about the kind of testimony on offer (71). Some memoirs suppress the narrating self on purpose, in present tense and without commentary, so that the reader stands where the child stood. Others think aloud as an essay does. Both are legitimate if the writer knows which selves are speaking and why.

**Practice.** Choose one memory and write it three times, in forty-five minutes. *Experiencing*: present tense, only what the person then could see, hear and want, in the vocabulary of that age; no sentence may know what happened next. *Remembering*: what you recall and how, with the gaps marked, meaning what you are unsure of, what others tell you, what a photograph or letter says against your memory. *Narrating*: from now, what you know that you did not, why you are telling this, and what you are leaving out and why. Reread the first for any sentence that knows the ending, and the third for any claim that treats memory as certain. Then decide which version, or mixture, the piece wants. If real people appear, check what you have said about them against 79.

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