Suzanne Farrell Smith | December 2011

NOTES

A man is camping on a beach in Japan. It's a stormy night. The ocean surges closer and closer to his tent but the man, having biked over two hundred miles from Kyoto to Tokyo, is too exhausted to move. He weighs his options-stay on the beach, relatively safe from robbers and the authorities? Or, despite extreme fatigue, hunt for a spot more sheltered from the storm? Before the man can decide, however, the ocean decides for him. Just as the violent waves overtake his campfire, the man grabs his things-tent, backpack, bicycle-and sprints to higher ground. He hurls his belongings over the gate of a walled-in parking lot, climbing up after them. He ties his tent into a shaky lean-to and fights the weather overnight. In the morning, the man-cold, wet, hungry, and worn out-declares, "(A)t last I am ready for Vietnam."1

This man chooses to subject himself to extreme conditions. Indeed, the man portrays this nightlong trial as part of his "training." The question is, what is he training for?

He is Andrew Pham-freelance writer, San Francisco resident, UCLA graduate. Pham was born in Vietnam, survived the fall of Saigon, fled the city with his family, was imprisoned and released, escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat, and was replanted in America, all by the time he was ten years old. Now thirty, Pham leaves his San Francisco life-job, home, and family-behind, and embarks on a relatively unscripted, emotionally charged journey back to Vietnam, with pit stops in Mexico and Japan. He plans to do it all on bicycle. Solo.

Pham is on a memory quest. With weighty questions about his heritage, the war, his family's secretive past, and his sister's suicide, Pham tracks down family, friends, old houses, alleyways, markets, and a prison-landmarks of his childhood. He travels as a Viet Kieu (Vietnamese national who emigrates and returns), fully immersing himself in his homeland, but also struggling as an outsider whose age and experience make him so different from the child he once was. It is this difference that drives Pham's journey, the account of which becomes his immersion memoir, Catfish and Mandala.

I first heard the term "immersion memoir" in the spring of 2009 when Robin Hemley published his book Do-Over. The book catalogs Hemley's immersion into situations he experienced years before. It's a journey akin to traveling backwards through time without becoming younger. Hemley returns to kindergarten, prom, and school plays, among other iconic childhood experiences, as a way to change his relationship with those experiences, to try to succeed where he once failed. "All of these failures were holding me back," Hemley explains.2

In April 2009, just before Do-Over was released, Hemley wrote in his inaugural blog entry about the book: "To me, in 'Immersion Memoir,' a writer creates a kind of framework to actively engage in experience and memory."3 The first part-actively engage in experience-sounded like immersion journalism or even gonzo journalism to me. The second part-actively engage in memory-sounded like memoir. But I'd never seen the terms paired in such a way. I took Hemley's phrase at face value, believing immersion memoirs must be active, even physical, immersions into one's memories.

I rummaged through my creative nonfiction collection; did any books suit Hemley's classification? Some seemed, on the surface, to fit. But the more I read, the less they worked. Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons, for example, was written to solve a personal mystery-the author had always felt like an outsider in her school days and was determined to go back to school to study girls' aggression. It's not quite a memoir, though, because Simmons focuses primarily on her subjects, using her personal stories for color and depth. It's not quite immersion, either, because she returns as a researcher, not as a student. The same can be said for Dinty W. Moore's The Accidental Buddhist, in which, for personal and intellectual reasons, the author investigates Buddhism in America; or Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent's tale of transformation, in which the author "becomes" a man for a year to better understand how gender functions in society. Though born of the authors' vested interests in their topics, these books function as objective investigations with sociological benefits.

I couldn't find much about "immersion memoir" on the Internet, either. Google the term and you get references to Hemley's Do-Over for a page or two before arriving at sites about "immersing as a reader in the genre of memoir." I fared no better with my craft books. "Immersion memoir" is not in the index of Creative Nonfiction by Philip Gerard. Nor is it in Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art by Judith Barrington, or in Philip Gerard and Carolyn Forche's Writing Creative Nonfiction. "Immersion research" shows up in Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola's Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, but it's a description of general immersion: "the technique of actually living an experience-usually briefly-to write about it."4 The examples are, of course, journalistic: working as a circus clown; visiting a women-run nightclub; becoming a football player. I ordered Modern American Memoirs, edited by Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eagerly lapping up excerpts from thirty-five "classic memoirs."5 I found what I've always loved about memoirs: the collection reads like a museum of the moving image, the dynamic portrait of a life experience on each screen. But still, they are memoirs, none of them immersions.

"Immersion memoir" did not seem to exist, aside from in Robin Hemley's head, and now in mine.
After considering every work of nonfiction I've ever read (thanks to a longstanding habit, I keep a list), I found Pham's book and two others that seemed to fit the classification.

In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris immerses herself for two nine-month periods in a monastic community. Her time in the monastery helps Norris answer lifelong questions about faith, ones that, she believes, developed from a near-death experience at six months old. Norris spent her formative years living with her family on a commune, attending Christian church services and celebrating religious holidays. But Norris became doubtful, returning to a spiritual life only later in her adulthood. As an oblate, Norris participates in the daily prayers of liturgy that mark Benedictine time. Her immersion into that liturgy allows her to at least approach an understanding of her faith. Norris writes, "Living in a monastic environment...made me see many things in a new light."6

My Father's Secret War is journalist Lucinda Franks's immersion into her father's world, past and present. Tom Franks is a secretive, angry, aging pack rat. He is unable to feed himself. Weevils infest his kitchen. He leaves lit cigarettes on his lap. An eviction notice sparks his daughter into action-Lucinda Franks becomes his primary caretaker. In the process of cleaning his apartment, she discovers a secret about her father that possesses her to become his primary investigator, too. Among his things are a Nazi cap and insignia. "Discovering them changes everything."7 Using a journalist's skills, Franks launches a quest to uncover the truth about her father's past. The key: she will uncover her own, as well. As Franks grew up, her father left for periods of time, returning a distant and inaccessible man. She writes, "I become caught in a conundrum: my father acts as though he loves me, but if this is so, why is he so far away?"8 Franks remembers her childhood as a constant yearning for an engaged and loving father: "I could never forgive my father for destroying once and for all my childhood dream of family happiness."9 My Father's Secret War is Franks's attempt to unravel the mysteries and, in the end, find peace with her father.

While contemplating the term "immersion memoir," I also came across writer Debra Spark's take on genre fiction in her Writer's Chronicle article "Stranger Things." Spark quotes Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, who clarifies some terminology: "'Category' ...is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. 'Genre' is a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will."10 That got me thinking. Can immersion memoir be considered a genre or subgenre? Genre nonfiction, so to speak? Is there an inner identity to it? A set of guidelines? An ideology? Writing a memoir requires creatively constructing a slice of one's life. Writing an immersion piece requires actually living an experience. How would someone write an immersion memoir? How would one build, in both life and writing, a "framework to actively engage in experience and memory"? In short, how would one dynamically immerse in the past? Do the books by Pham, Norris, and Franks fit the guidelines? In fact, could they help refine those guidelines, even generate the meaning of the term "immersion memoir"?

Intersections with Memoir

Immersion memoir is related to traditional memoir, but, as I've come to believe, the two remain distinct. In traditional memoir, memory is mined in order to tell a life story: a dramatic adventure; a childhood defined by place; an illness. Every memoirist uses methods to reflect on the past and render it in writing. In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser's edited collection of memoirists' tales, Annie Dillard, Frank McCourt, Ian Frazier, and others discuss the methodology by which they remember the past. Whether by reading journals and letters, interviewing family members, visualizing scenes, or meditating, memoirists tap their memories for both general texture and specific details. As Zinsser writes, the memoirists "have gone looking for their past with acts of writing."11

None of the authors talk about placing themselves in present-day quest scenarios-creating opportunities to retrieve memories from the physical spaces in which they were created-to confront the past or to change its impact. That is the work of immersion memoirists. They look for their past, too, but not only with the act of writing; they also look with the act of immersion. The past, with its color and shape, is not just mediated through the writer's memories and methodology of finding them. It is mediated through present-day experience, with its own colors, shapes, unexpected bumps, misfortunes, discoveries, and epiphanies.

Andrew Pham's trek through Vietnam is as crucial to his memoir of childhood as are his actual memories of childhood. The fear he remembers feeling as a child, particularly as war was consuming his country, makes for memoir. But the fear that paralyzes Pham during a biking accident while on his real-time memory quest is of a different texture. It is immediate and gritty. It involves new characters and settings on top of the old ones.

Similarly, eighteen months with a monastic community places Kathleen Norris into the familiar clutches of faith-wrangling that defined her early years, giving her the opportunity to reflect on those struggles while also living through new situations that require processing and reflection. It is as if the past self and the present self are working together in tandem to find answers.

Present tense, therefore, is a hallmark of immersion memoir. It distinguishes now from then, but it also evokes the movement of a quest, the sense of not knowing where this story is going to end, even though the ending of the past story is well known. The present tense, in my usage, is more than just verb form-it's a style of writing that takes readers along for the ride. It starts at the beginning, not of the story, but of the immersion. It does not offer signposts of the outcome. Both narrator and reader do not know what comes next.

Take, for example, Lucinda Franks's My Father's Secret War. Like a rabid biographer, Franks spends over a year doing little else but uncovering her father's past. She retraces every step he took while she was young, hires a housekeeper who doubles as a sort of undercover agent, contacts the military and places ads to solicit information, visits museums and archives, and tracks down old friends and contacts. She frequently leaves her husband and two children to visit and interview her father. All the while, Franks watches her father slowly disintegrate into dementia. She takes on his care, finally moving him from Massachusetts to New York City so she can be with him every day.

Memoirist Ian Frazier conducted similarly intensive research for his memoir about his parents, Family, and explains, "Of course there comes a time when you have to stop the research and start writing."12 Franks's research and writing, however, are intertwined. Much of her discovery process, therefore, is written in present tense, allowing for this forward movement and also allowing for readers to discover along with the writer, as if they too are part of a team devoted to solving the mystery. "I riffle through (letters) as though they were letters informing me whether I'll live or die. I find one dated August 20, 1943,"13 writes Franks, "Letter by letter, I go down deeper into history...They're not only full of brio, they're full of clues. They will give me the atlas I've longed for to chart my father's secret journey as a spy."14 Discovery is a constant. As on a journey, the next page brings something new.

After a chapter about his harrowing biking leg through Japan, Andrew Pham announces, "...at last I am ready for Vietnam."15 The new chapter begins, "On the highway downwind, the Saigon bus driver, at the first whiff of fish, announced, 'Phan Thiet, the Fishsauce Capital-two more klics.'"16 We might believe we are in Pham's present Vietnam, but he quickly adds, "I was nine, traveling with Uncle Long back to the town of my birth."17 We understand the past tense will continue to signal Pham's memories of then. He goes on to describe his family's escape from Vietnam, and then he shifts back to present tense: "Rain mists the glass pane as the airplane sinks through the clouds and banks into the midnight sky..."18 Pham is traveling back to Vietnam as an adult. Throughout Catfish and Mandala, Pham pivots back and forth through time. He is like a hologram: slide one way, we see Pham the adult on the bike; slide the other way and we see Pham the child.

Writer Sue William Silverman describes two distinct voices in memoir-the Song of Innocence and the Song of Experience. The Song of Innocence, the voice of the past self, "reveals the surface story-specific actions and episodes that encompass the experience."19 The Song of Experience "is able to reflect back on this story, this past, to interpret the facts, and to guide the reader through the emotional maze..."20 In immersion memoir, it might be said the Song of Experience has gone through a kind of rebirth. It is a voice that is experienced enough to have set forth on this journey, and it is called upon to reflect on the past as it emerges. But the voice is untried as of yet on the present journey's twists and turns.

An important part of any memoir is the writer's lens. A traditional memoirist crafts the lens that she uses to look through time to her past. She chooses a point of view from which to "film." Annie Dillard and Cort Conley describe memoir as having "a powerfully fixed point of view."21 It is "a picket in the past," from which the narrator can "range intimately or intellectually across a wide circle of characters and events."22 From her "picket," a memoirist looks all around, tweaking, focusing, broadening, and zooming, in order to capture what she sees. Readers do not necessarily see the picket or the lens. Rather, readers see what the memoirist sees from that point of view. The lens disappears.

In immersion memoir, however, the lens is as crucial to the story as what is being "filmed." The lens captures forward-moving action because the lens is forward-moving action. While the memoirist is like a film director, setting scenes and compiling footage from different camera angles and different takes, the immersion memoirist is like a documentary filmmaker who moves into a scene with a handheld camera, uncertain of what will be captured.

In memoir, the author is challenged to call up senses-the smells and sights and feelings of childhood or some earlier stage in the life story-in order to paint a believable scene. This is common to all writers, of course, not just memoirists, but the memoirist faces the particular challenge of trying to recreate dialogue and scene from memory. As Jocelyn Bartkevicius explains in her essay "'The Person to Whom Things Happened': Meditations on the Tradition of Memoir," "Memoir is writing for and from memory."23

In immersion memoir, writers describe senses as they are being experienced in real time, sometimes in place of remembered senses. Becoming drunk on the liquor of Vietnam is not something Andrew Pham did as a child, for example. Neither is his trip-long struggle with the food in Vietnam. It's not a memory episode, then, when he has a bad dinner. It's not a remembered scene when he writes about it. But the sensations while experiencing the food and liquor of Vietnam send him into vivid memory trips nonetheless. In this way, Pham writes for memory, but not from memory-the present experience helps him get in touch with his past. He has returned home, but the trip is grueling on his body and mind. His senses are not dulled or immune in the familiar environment; rather they are on constant high alert. "Touring solo on a bicycle, I discover, is an act of stupidity or an act of divine belief."24

Ultimately, like all memoirists, immersion memoirists need to make choices. What stays and what goes? What is relevant? The memoirist looks at the entirety of an experience and chooses the threads to tease out. He compresses time, recreates dialogue, highlights characters, and follows themes. The immersion memoirist might be seen as having either fewer or more choices. On the one hand, he is less apt to look at the wide scope of a past experience when that past experience is being called up patchwork-style via immersion. On the other hand, the present immersion is likely as vast and complex as the past experience. Immersion memoirists, therefore, have two rich experiences from which to draw as they write.

Intersections with Immersion Journalism

Immersion memoir relates to immersion journalism, as it relates to memoir, but it retains a separate identity. Immersion journalists undertake life-changing experiences in order to write about them. Earlier I mentioned journalist Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man. Vincent turns herself into a man (by appearance and manner) in order to confront firsthand how men and women are treated differently in society. The immersion gives her "the chance to survey some of the unexplored territory."25 The key word here is survey: the research, though inspired by very personal curiosity, remains reportage with the air of sociological ethnography. Similarly, journalist Jon Krakauer participates in a climbing tour up Mount Everest to write about crowding on the mountain's slopes and unwittingly finds himself part of a deadly disaster. His resulting article and book, Into Thin Air, are, of course, very personal, and indeed related to his own passion for climbing, yet his aim is to report "in complete detail" and with "a raw, ruthless sort of honesty" on what happened during the ill-fated climb.26 There are countless other examples: Philip Gerard's trip on the ship Brilliant, which he writes about in Brilliant Passage: A Schooning Memoir; Susan Orlean's investigation of black-market orchid traders in The Orchid Thief; D.K. McCutchen's sail through the South Pacific to track whales, a journey logged in The Whale Road.

McCutchen commends immersion journalists for writing "some of the genre's most creative experimental forays in America."27 Such are the true-life accounts resting on the keen observations and adventurous shoulders of authors willing to risk life and limb, and willing to interrupt their regular routines, in order to get the story.

The immersion journalist and the immersion memoirist often go on similar journeys but with different intentions and into different territories. Where the immersion journalist wants to answer a question, satisfy a curiosity, or report on a topic, the immersion memoirist must do these things. Where the immersion journalist might take on an identity, culture, or task, for a fixed amount of time, in order to report on it from a particular point of view, the immersion memoirist struggles with his or her actual identity. The investigative task is the most personal one possible, that of facing oneself.

If the distinction between immersion memoir and immersion journalism lies in the intentions behind immersive experiences, we can look at the moment an immersive experience is born to find the heart of an immersion memoir. This moment is often an epiphany that propels the writer into another world. The goal of the resulting experience is to chase down answers. In immersion memoir, the immersive experience is not necessarily designed with writing in mind. Immersion memoirs are not book ideas first; rather, they are natural progressions of one's life. The book might or might not come after the immersion; it is the immersion that counts. Take this moment in Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk:

(W)hen I became a Benedictine oblate, I knew two things: I didn't feel ready to do it, but I had to act, to take the plunge...standing before the altar in a monastery chapel was a remarkable place for me to be, and making an oblation was a remarkable, if not incomprehensible, thing for me to be doing.28

Though Norris might always have intended to write about her experience-indeed, it would be surprising to learn of a writer who immerses without some notion of using it as material-the nature of Norris's immersion is not of premeditated book writing, but more of premeditated life altering, with the book coming afterwards.

Andrew Pham's epiphany comes in response to the words of his grandmother. While sitting in the room where his sister hanged herself at thirty-two, Pham faces a question from his grandmother that propels him into another life. After explaining that his sister had been destined to die, that it had been foreseen, Pham's grandmother asks him if he'd like to read the birth fortune written for him by a monk when he was born. "I looked at this relic from a distant world, dreading its power," writes Pham.29 "I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert."30 From that moment, though he does not know it yet, Pham is on his memory quest. For Pham, the immersion comes first, the memoir after. In an interview given to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, Pham says of his book, "I certainly did not set out to write about my family. One day, I just had this emotional breakthrough where I realized that I just had to just write it and get it out of my system and burn it if necessary..."31

Premeditation can certainly be part of an immersion memoir. But the premeditation needs to be about searching for, and coming to terms with, one's memories. It's what makes these immersive experiences read like necessary next steps in the progression of the lives of the memoirists. Pham casts his net wide to find anything to help him know his past better. One element of that past is the runaway sister who committed suicide. On his journey, Pham finds a link to her he did not predict: "I find it here in Japan where I least expect it: the black-hollow desperation of a runaway."32

From an epiphany of memory to an immersive experience to the writing of that experience in memoir, the process of an immersion memoir is similar to a baptismal one. The immersion memoirist embarks on a journey-akin to the hero's quest as described by Joseph Campbell-to discover something, and returns with new and transformative information. The immersion itself is much like a rebirth. And how fitting-the writer is reborn in his or her own past, discovering anew a childhood or series of memories that can now be incorporated into adult life.

It's not that immersion journalism can't be personal. Some pieces are more personal than others, responding to a critical circumstance or satisfying a deep-seeded obsession nurtured over a lifetime. It's hard to imagine immersing oneself simply for the sake of a gig; one likely has a vested interest in the topic being studied. If immersion journalism is a subgenre of journalism, perhaps there is a subgenre of the subgenre-a group of books that might be called "pop-immersion," the kind of works that are personal, and, funnily enough, easily made into film. Because of its recent success as a big-screen adaptation, I'm thinking of Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, in which a thirty-year-old woman, facing her milestone birthday's perceived pressures, decides to learn to cook like Julia Child. For all intents and purposes, Powell interrupts her regular life so that cooking is almost all she does for a year. Similarly, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love tracks the author's year traveling in Italy, India, and Indonesia, both as a travelogue and an attempt to recover from a marital breakup and depression.

While promoting Do-Over, Robin Hemley named A.J. Jacobs's book The Year of Living Biblically and Danny Wallace's Yes Man as other immersion memoirs. After reading the books and considering the topic, I tend to disagree. In Yes Man, Wallace writes about an experience with a stranger on a bus who tells him to "say yes more," thus propelling him into his unusual experiment: "And that was when I had my revelatory moment."33 Wallace's tale is unique to his life, but not a natural progression of that life. There was no prior inkling in his life that this immersion would be necessary. Wallace's book certainly does not traffic in memories either. Rather, it serves, somewhat therapeutically, to alter his present life and help him become a different person, while giving him something meaningful about which to write.

Jacobs, too, has such a moment, a discovery not about memory but about writing. While telling a friend about his uncle, the "spiritual omnivore," Jacobs "(has his) epiphany" which inspires him to follow Biblical rules for a year.34 One of Jacobs's most compelling reasons to immerse is to answer the question "what could I do next?" as a writer.35

These books, "pop" or not, might be categorized as memoirs of immersion. Immersion memoirs are, quite simply, much more urgent.

Urgency

A central characteristic of immersion memoir that bears attention is the sense of urgency. Immersion memoirists leave their life structure to immerse themselves elsewhere, sometimes at great personal risk. The stakes have to be high. Without book deals or magazine assignments, what makes a writer immerse himself? What makes him leave so much behind?

Consider again Andrew Pham's story of immersion. After the moment with his grandmother, Pham quits his job and escapes to Mexico. He happens upon a United States veteran of the Vietnam War. The veteran, learning Pham is originally from Vietnam, says, "When you go to Vietnam...tell them about me...Tell them I'm sorry."36 Pham assumes the responsibility of delivering the message. He might have always known he would return, but this stranger has clarified his quest. Pham remarks inwardly, "I know I have embarked on something greater than myself."37

Pham returns to San Francisco and moves in with his parents. "I have to accumulate funds and settle my affairs," Pham writes.38 "I tie up loose ends, freelance all sorts of work for the extra cash, do it all in silence."39 Pham's secrecy is important:

No one, not my brothers or my best friends, knows about my plan to bicycle to Vietnam. They say, Andrew is finding himself... When I finally tell them, I lie. Going up the coast, I say... It'll do me good. I don't tell them I might not be coming back.40

Here, the stakes are sky high. Pham risks his life on his journey. Even if he survives, he puts everything he has built for himself in the U.S. at risk. He arrives in Vietnam:

I am tired, nearly broke, and scared. Surprise. So I toss back yet another lowball, this one a toast to my twenty-year anniversary since I had forsaken this city. Here's to you, Saigon. I've come for my memories. Give me reconciliation.41

Pham, already exhausted, now enters the darkest part of his journey, confronting the relationship between himself and his home country that makes the rest of his trip both harrowing and heartfelt. And, of course, urgent.

Perhaps urgency (personal stake) is the most important element in an immersion memoir. Catfish and Mandala succeeds because the reader understands that Pham needs so badly to make this trip that he is willing to give up his stable life and all his savings to head off to Vietnam into danger. There is a balance between risk and reward-high risk translates into vital rewards.

Robin Hemley talks about his urgency in writing Do-Over. In considering his childhood, and how it relates to his current life as a husband and father, Hemley feels empty, stuck, lost. He confronts his past head-on, by inserting himself in situations that coincide with his past. The immersion gives him a way to frame his memories, and the therapeutic element, the response to an urgent need, is what leads Hemley to call it an immersion memoir.

Lucinda Franks, throughout her quest, expresses a similar urgency. She is more than just frustrated with her father, a secretive ex-soldier now deteriorating with age and neglect. She feels outright rejected by him, as if he, over time, has iced their once-loving relationship. The moment Franks decides to immerse herself entirely is the moment she finds the Nazi insignia in his house. "(I)t's the cross and cap that ignite a fuse, a sense of urgency about my dad that I've never felt before."42 It is as if Franks, fearing her father's failing health, has no choice but to enter the immersive experience. Soon, her father's secrets will be locked in his brain forever, and she needs to find out who he was, as a soldier, as a spy, and as a father, before it's too late.

The immersion comes with great risk. Tom Franks cuts friends out of his life after they agree to speak with his daughter. Father and daughter argue violently. Lucinda Franks often leaves her husband and young children in order to pursue her quest and take care of her father. She "abducts" him when he refuses to leave his apartment. She questions him relentlessly, sometimes brutally, and feels ashamed afterwards. The extreme risk Franks's investigation poses to her relationship with her father, and to both their mental states, becomes clear: "Tom Franks's decision...had bought him a sentence of eternal suffering. In my ignorance and rush to judgment, I'd doubled his sentence."43

Kathleen Norris, while living in the monastery, comes to terms with her memories, too. Norris nearly died at six months old, and she believes that, though the doctor called her a fighter, she had actually wanted to enter the "blue light" at the edge of death.44 But she lived. The experience, one Norris believes she remembers despite her young age, set her on a path that led eventually to her immersion in the monastery. "For me, for years afterward, there were nightmares, and screaming fits induced by motor noises and lights that triggered memories of my hospital stay."45 Ultimately, the terror and the memory are translated into an existential question that Norris is now determined to answer. "Before I had language, I'd had the most intense engagement of my life, a frustration I contend with by writing. Had I been rejected from heaven?"46 Considering the range of answers an immersive experience could provide to that question, the stakes in such an immersion are as high as they get. About a passage by the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, Norris writes:

Listening to that dazzling convergence of the prophet's call with his pain and his hope, I realized suddenly that the prophet Jeremiah had become part of a remarkable convergence in my own life, a synchronicity of blessings and curses that had shattered certain boundaries that had long held me secure... But at the same time...I was also experiencing bitter failure in my attempts to fit in.47

Norris's immersion, like Pham's and like Franks's, comes at great personal risk and often physical and/or emotional discomfort. Norris discusses her limited chances to "escape" the monastery, particularly as she falls ill during her time there. Yet the immersion reaps high rewards-she finds guidance in the liturgy.

Traditional memoir certainly contains urgency. In his essay "Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obliged to Tell the Real Truth?" memoirist Michael Steinberg writes, "The impulse behind the piece about my baseball coach, for example, came from a nagging mid-life urge to go back in time and examine that tumultuous relationship."48 Fergus M. Bordewich's memoir My Mother's Ghost is an urgent journey as well. After living with an idealized memory of his long-dead mother, the author decides to reopen her life, so to speak, and learn who the woman really was.

And it's not that a writer can't set out to write an immersion memoir without the urgency. Perhaps, though, because the setting of an immersion is so intense, so charged, and so life altering, the motivation behind it must be equally intense. Urgency gives the piece its identity as immersion memoir. Without that drive, the reason behind the immersion and the immersion itself are mismatched: high adventure on low stakes.

Criticism and Challenges

Shortly after using the term "immersion memoir" on his blog, Robin Hemley responds to criticism as if anticipating it. Hemley writes of Do-Over, Yes Man, and The Year of Thinking Biblically:

I suppose someone could conceivably consider my book and these others as "gimmicky," but I would say that they're simply structured around a theme and that they are no less "Authentic" than any work in which the writer imposes a structure-which would pretty much include all novels and all memoirs. There's certainly artifice in all art and as writers know, writing is not simply a matter of recording life but shaping it in a kind of "return the favor" way. Life shapes us and we, in turn, shape life.49

Is this reaction a defense of memoir in general? A defense against an onslaught of criticism in the days of James Frey and Margaret Jones? Or is there something about immersion memoir that makes it particularly vulnerable to attack?

For one, as Hemley notes, there's a gimmicky quality to immersion memoirs. A forty-eight-year-old man attending kindergarten; a UCLA graduate secretly leaving his home to bicycle, nearly penniless, through Vietnam; a middle-aged ex-Protestant becoming a Catholic oblate. All of these stories are incredible (astonishing) to the point of being incredible (implausible). For some readers, the question might be, why do it? If the answer appears to be, "to write a book," such immersions do seem like gimmicks. Stunts for a book deal. L.A. Times writer Scott Timberg calls them "gimmick books" and describes them as "memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings..."50

Furthermore, a writer could, hypothetically, fake the stakes in an immersion memoir. James Frey faked part of his story, even though the essence of his story, and the need to tell it, was real. But what if the story is 100% true-a detailed account of an adventure-but the purpose is faked? What if you get the sense while reading that the author just didn't really need to do this? Then it seems like a gimmick, a ploy to get onto bookshelves and onto talk shows.

In a successful immersion memoir, immersion is not just a tool. It is the writer's only option. It is necessity, not gimmick. And there are hints of its necessity in the author's life, during the years leading up to the moment of immersion. The stakes for Andrew Pham, Kathleen Norris, and Lucinda Franks are as real as their stories. Urgency makes these works part of the human drama, not just stunts performed for entertainment.

Another criticism of immersion memoir noted by Hemley is targeted at its artificiality. D.K. McCutchen, in "The Art of Lying-Or Risking the Wrath of Oprah," mentions the subjectivity of memory, as does nearly everyone who's ever written about memoir. McCutchen describes the "necessary artifice involved when translating amorphous thoughts into literal writing."51 All memoirs, we know, are constructions, because all memories are constructions.

Immersion memoir takes construction as its starting point. Immersion memoirists construct artificial circumstances (leaving "real" life to enter an immersion) in order to find memories, mine them, and write about them. They build environments in which to participate, and then they build narratives to describe both their observations and their experiences as participants.

So where is the "truth"? If I want to write about tigers, for example, I could observe tigers in the wild. Or I could construct a zoo, watch the tigers behave, and write about them. Where is the truth in studying tigers outside of their natural environment? Immersion memoirists are themselves the tigers-real, breathing, responsive, behavioral, adaptable, interesting, curious, unique creatures-self-installed in situations outside the normal environment, in order to construct memories through words. Some might say that's too much artificiality to be considered authentic.

Whenever I think of memoir, I think of reflection. A writer reflects on the past, painting what she sees in the mirror, which might be skewed or reversed, with bright spots and shadows. Reflection in an immersion memoir, however, is like a fun house mirror. The truth is bent one way (through immersion), and bent another way (into memoir). The result might be extraordinarily bent out of shape. Or, bent one way and then another, it might look like its normal self again. The doubly reflected memories in an immersion memoir might actually stand straight and true. Perhaps the artificiality of creating an immersion memoir makes it the most truthful form of all.

A third criticism of immersion memoir might extend from the general criticism of memoir. A memoirist relies on memory. But, as we have written about time and time again, all memory is subject to questioning. So how can a memoirist be believed?

An immersion memoirist doubly relies on memory. She mines the memory of the experience she's trying to recall and the memory of the present experience that is used for the recall. Can an immersion memoirist, then, be considered trustworthy?

Again, all memory, and therefore all memoir, is subjective. As psychologist Donald Spence writes, "Any psychological event that belongs to the domain of the unconscious is, by definition, not available to the patient's immediate observation."52 Andrew Pham, however, like other immersion memoirists, places himself into a situation that is readily available for immediate observation. A writer like Pham might even increase his odds over a traditional memoirist of finding memories. By placing himself in an observable sensory experience, Pham creates a powerful opportunity for key associations to be made. And by immersing, he could also be shedding the possibility of false associations-i.e., by reducing distractions, he pares his environment down to only those stimuli that are related to his past, to the memories he is seeking, or seeking to interpret. Immersion memoir, in effect, reduces the white noise of memory.

Consider what Philip Gerard says of memory in his essay "The Fact Behind the Facts":

Memory can be warped, it lies, it tells us what we want to hear... Memory will rarely match that evidence very neatly, but this is a good thing. Discrepancy between memory and other evidence is not a problem-it's the point. The reckoning, the true story, lives in the space of the contradictions.53

An immersion memoirist like Pham takes the reckoning as far as it will go, by physically moving into the "space of the contradictions." By immersing himself on a journey to his homeland, Pham must confront, every minute, the difference between his memory of Vietnam and his current experience, his lost culture and his current existence as something of an outcast, a Viet Kieu. Things he remembers no longer exist, and new things have taken their places, but people who remember him are there, and an old mattress where he used to sleep, on which his father beat his sister, is still in its corner. To live the immersed life allows Pham to breathe contradiction constantly.

A challenge faced by the immersion memoirist is the climax, the moment (or moments) of revelation that makes the immersion worth it. The stakes are high to discover something big during an immersion. After all, the immersion must come to an end. In a traditional memoir, that ah-ha moment might be what sparks a writer to embark on writing in the first place. An immersion memoirist, however, is looking for that moment on his journey. What to do if it never happens?

Robin Hemley discusses this challenge in a question-and-answer session on the University of Iowa's website. In response to a request for advice for others embarking on an immersion memoir, Hemley has this to say:

Still, such a book is frightening to contemplate in that so much depends on setting out to do something and hoping that interesting things happen as a result. I think some editors are wary of backing such a project if the results seem too difficult to predict. What helped with this project is that it didn't depend on things always working out. If I failed a do over (sic) (and I'd say I only failed one), that in itself was inherently as dramatic and potentially as funny as succeeding in one. So my advice would be to make sure as much as possible that whatever you immerse yourself in is something that you can make a story from whether your endeavor is successful or not.54

Here, Hemley identifies a central characteristic of immersion memoir. Meaning does not depend on revelation; it lies in the immersive experience itself.

Still, there are poignant moments of climax in all three immersion memoirs I've discussed. Lucinda Franks's revelatory moment could not have been planned, but it is as dramatic as if crafted in fiction. After her relentless digging, she cracks her father's case. Lucinda Franks has "finally extracted the gruesome past he'd buried so deeply. Finally discovered the Big Secret, but at what cost?"55 She writes:

I had wanted to hurt my father as much as he had hurt me. I'd nagged him, manipulated him into confessions, then shamelessly condemned him. Little by little, I'd forced him to give up every shred of camouflage, until he was utterly exposed. Now, sitting in the wheelchair, staring up at me with his whole heart, he was finally mine. The price for this gift had been clear. Just as he had unquestioningly done his duty, it was time for me to do mine, to care for him, to love him, to abide with him for the balance of his days.56

Toward the end of her journey, Franks finds the forgiveness for her father that she had hoped for.

The true ah-ha moments can also be subtle ones. In considering the feast of Saint Augustine, Kathleen Norris discovers a truth about her childhood that justifies her immersion in the monastery:

Church meant two things to me when I was little: dressing up and singing... I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God.57

Through her present immersion, Norris develops a way to recast her entire history of faith. Every day in the monastery introduces her to a new set of writings and teachings that helps her mold her new outlook. For example, she writes:

And this is why St. Augustine is so precious to me. He helps me see, in the lengthy story of his own conversion-with its fits and starts, its meanderings and deep desires for faith-that mine has been a traditional Christian journey.58

Naturally, such revelatory moments might not have been possible without the eighteen months of exposure to Augustine and others, without the time in which to focus exclusively on how such teachings might affect one's understanding of the past.

Andrew Pham, who has long grieved for his sister, finally finds solace toward the end of his trip:

I look out on the water and let the memories roll over me. I swim in the ocean of morning gray and wade in the surf of evening gold. The blue here is so vast, no war could ever measurably sap it, not even the one in me. My faults, all my shortcomings, my wrongs against Chi-Minh, pale away, disintegrating, in this desert-ocean-peace. I remember the joy of our being near each other. I know my love for her now, refelt my love for her then and all the love I felt for her in the between years.59

Here, Pham creates solace for himself. He crafts a moment of revelation, both during the immersion, and in the process of writing about it.

John D'Agata, in The Lost Origins of the Essay, recovers the original form of the memoir by discussing its more subtle, and often overlooked, root, that of "mer-mer" or "to vividly wonder."60 D'Agata sees the original memoir as structured through instinctual, "impulsive exploration."61 His example: Matsuo Basho's 17th-century text, "Narrow Road to the Interior," which recounts the writer's five-year journey, on foot, through his native Japan. To me, this could perhaps be the original immersion memoir. Basho embeds in his essay the original notes, little poems, from his journal. It seems fitting to me, if antithetical to the character of immersion memoir, to end where we began, on a beach in Japan. From Basho's piece:

Still exhausted and weakened from my long journey, on the sixth day of the darkest month, I felt moved to visit Ise Shrine, where a twenty-one-year Rededication Ceremony was about to get under way. At the beach, in the boat, I wrote:

Clam ripped from its shell
I move on to Futami Bay:
passing autumn62

sense of openness to whatever comes, unscripted and unfiltered, sets immersion memoir apart. Andrew Pham, on his journey, encounters a group of Americans. "The road is a wondrous place," one says to him. "Go with an open heart."63

AWP

Suzanne Farrell Smith is a teaching artist in New York City public schools and teaches in the Graduate School of Education at Manhattanville College. Her essays have been published in many literary reviews and magazines. She recently completed her first book, a memoir about excavating lost memory.

1. Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 50.

2. Robin Hemley, Do-Over (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), p. x.
3. Robin Hemley, "Immersion Memoir and Do-Over," RobinHemley.com, April 2, 2009, 20 July 2009 http://www.robinhemley.com/blog/2009/04/immersion-memoir-and-do-over.html.
4. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), p. 121.
5. Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, "Introduction," Modern American Memoirs eds. Annie Dillard and Cort Conley (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), p. xi.
6. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), p. 83.
7. Lucinda Franks, My Father's Secret War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), p. 15.
8. Ibid., p. 8.
9. Ibid., p. 53.
10. Debra Spark, "Stranger Things," The Writer's Chronicle 42:1 (2009): 22-28.
11. William Zinsser, "Introduction," Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), p. 14.
12. Ian Frazier, "Looking for my Family," Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), p. 171.
13. Franks, p. 231.
14. Ibid., pp. 235–236.
15. Pham, p. 50.
16. Ibid., p. 51.
17. Ibid., p. 51.
18. Ibid., p. 62.
19. Sue William Silverman, "From Innocence to Experience: Multiple Voices in Memoir," Fourth Genre 6:2 (2004): 121-123.
20. Ibid., p. 122.
21. Dillard and Conley, p. ix.
22. Ibid., p. ix.
23. Jocelyn Bartkevicius, "'The Person to Whom Things Happened': Meditations on the Tradition of Memoir," Fourth Genre: (1999): 133–140.
24. Pham, p. 33.
25. Norah Vincent, Self-Made Man (New York: Viking, 2006), pp. 4–5.
26. Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), pp. xvi-xvii.
27. McCutchen, p. 147.
28. Norris, p. xviii.
29. Pham, p. 3.
30. Ibid., p. 3.
31. Bob Graham, "On the Ride of His Life," San Francisco Chronicle October 20, 1999, 20 July 2009 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/10/20/DD47357.DTL.
32. Pham, p. 50.
33. Danny Wallace, Yes Man (UK: Ebury Press, 2008), p. 10.
34. A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 6.
35. Ibid., p. 6.
36. Pham, p. 9.
37. Ibid., p. 9.
38. Ibid., p. 23.
39. Ibid., 23.
40. Ibid., p. 23.
41. Ibid., p. 62.
42. Franks, p. 16.
43. Ibid., p. 202.
44. Norris, p. 88.
45. Ibid., p. 88.
46. Ibid., p. 88.
47. Ibid., p. 35.
48. Michael Steinberg, "Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obligated to Tell the Real Truth?" Fourth Genre: (1999): pp. 142–147.
49. Hemley, "Immersion Memoir and Do-Over."
50. Scott Timberg, "Meet the Gimmick Books," Los Angeles Times September 5, 2009, 8 September 2009 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-gimmick-books5-2009sep05,0,4104835.story.
51. McCutchen, p. 149.
52. Donald Spence, Narrative and Historical Truth (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), p. 162.
53. Philip Gerard, "The Fact Behind the Facts," Brevity 27 (May 2008).
54. The University of Iowa's Writing University "Live Discussions" series, June 11, 2009, 20 July 2009 http://writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/entry/robin_hemley_ live_discussion.
55. Franks, p. 201.
56. Ibid., p. 299.
57. Norris, p. 90.
58. Ibid., p. 347.
59. Pham, p. 338.
60. John D'Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009), p. 219.
61. Ibid., p. 219.
62. Matsuo Basho, "Narrow Road to the Interior," in The Lost Origins of the Essay ed. John D'Agata (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009), p. 246.
63. Pham, p. 40.