“ Autoschlange, I called it, and my friend understood what it meant, because his father was German too.” “Mostly we’d play with cars,” he recalls, “arranging them in a long line and driving them slowly down the hallway toward the bedroom, moving each one forward an inch at a time.” Müller remembers how playtime mirrored the halting way he adapted to the U.S. In Müller’s memoir, all the important details, the who-and-what and beginning-middle-end, come from the author’s memory. The memoirist “relies almost solely on memory,” writes Sue William Silverman in “The Meandering River.” He mines his mind, perhaps consults artifacts from his past. My boys love the game Minecraft, gathering materials to build underwater palaces and schools in the sky. With her husband, she travels around Lake Superior, and along the way gains insight from novelists, fellow travelers, parents of children who’ve died in mass tragedies, and the lake itself. Linda Anne Silver announces the universal with her title, “The Capacity of a Human.” In the wake of her daughter’s death, Silver searches for a new normal that incorporates profound grief.
Where, in culture, place, and time, does her story fit in? Which of her questions do others ask? Accordingly, we talk about personal essay’s “universal theme.” The writer paints herself against the backdrop of humanity. The personal essayist focuses on the self, too, but seeks to relate. We are inside his child mind, being pushed, gently, along with him, step by step. While Müller’s descriptions of David and others are important to the story, we really only know Müller. Müller’s friend, David, coaxes him out of the house and into the world. In the memoir essay “Fits and Starts,” Matthew Zanoni Müller tells a short, significant story about an afternoon in childhood as a relatively new immigrant to the United States. Readers may identify- I went through something similar or I changed in the same way-but the memoirist’s driving force is self-exploration. The memoirist focuses on the self and what has changed over time. By my measure, memoir and personal essay differ along four lines: focus, mining, voice, and sense. So where do they differ? To answer, I draw from several resources on writing creative nonfiction and illustrate with two Hippocampus pieces.
We love true stories and we love to be entertained.
And both are crafted with literary devices: scene, dialogue, sensory detail… That’s what makes creative nonfiction compelling. Both tell true stories from the author’s life with intimacy and honesty. We know memoir and personal essay overlap. It’s the most common question my creative nonfiction students ask.
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