Lee Gutkind | November 2020

NOTES

I have written sixteen narrative nonfiction books, immersing myself in various subcultures—from motorcycles to baseball, robotics to organ transplantation, veterinary medicine to mental illness. I’ve researched in the Atacama Desert in Chile where it hadn’t rained for 100 years, bicycled across Tanzania and climbed Kilimanjaro, got trapped in the midst of an armed rebellion in Tibet. I’ve seen people die in pools of blood in the operating arena and witnessed lifesaving incredible surgical heroics as surgeons brought nearly dead people back to life. But in any or all of those instances, I was observing, interviewing and writing other people’s stories. And even though I included myself in these narratives when appropriate, writing a memoir—immersing oneself into oneself—is a very different writing experience. To put it mildly, I struggled for a long time

And being an “expert” in the genre of creative nonfiction doesn’t make it easier; in fact, to the contrary. I know about teaching, editing, reading memoir, but writing one? I was, in many ways, starting from scratch—in fact, in some ways, I was relearning the craft.

First of all, practically speaking, with memoir, you don’t sign a contract with a publisher and set a deadline as with other narrative nonfiction books. I won’t say that this doesn’t happen from time to time, but you usually have to be famous or infamous or have experienced something awful or amazing, and even then you will probably need a good chunk of the book or a fifty-page proposal before you get a publisher to bite.

More importantly, who can a memoirist ask to get honest and helpful feedback? Not family members, about whom in many instances the book has been written. Any memoirist would be foolish to think that parents, friends, or spouses, can be objective and not take what you have said about them personally. Not to readers of my other books, students or former students—not even to my colleagues. It felt embarrassing, self-serving, too close.

Sooner or later, as all writers realize, no matter how many drafts we write and strengthen, even when we think one more draft might even be stronger, we have to call it a day. Finished.

I could have reached out to other successful memoirists, but careful criticism takes the time and energy that those folks need for their own books and essays. I’m grateful that for my book, My Last Eight Thousand Days, An American Male in His Seventies, I received very generous blurbs, from Philip Lopate, Gay Talese, Rick Moody, and Vivian Gornick. But it’s one thing to request a two-sentence endorsement and another thing entirely to expect anyone to read 276 pages and respond with substantial comments.

Truth be told, I didn’t want people who knew me or knew of me to respond; I wasn’t really writing for them, but more for other people my age, writers and readers who might connect and empathize with me and find strength and insight from my stories, confessions, and reflections.

So rather than a personal approach for help and commentary, I chose a very business-like direction: I hired editors I did not know, resulting in a surprising, sometimes difficult, and often delightful professional journey.

The first editor I commissioned thought that I really didn’t have a memoir in the making—but a series of loosely connected essays. I revised. The second editor advised against the essay form; the dreaded E word would turn publishers off. And, in addition, he thought that I ought to modify my voice. I sounded, he said, too angry and aggressive. And I guess, as I thought of it, he was right; I really didn’t like turning seventy. I was frankly damn pissed off that I was getting so old and my personal feelings were overtaking what I wanted to say. It took someone who didn’t know me to spot that and point it out, and because I didn’t take his comments personally, I was able to recognize the validity in what he was saying.

Over the next few drafts and months, I labored to make myself more likeable and less confrontational. And then I went back to the memoir form that I had trashed the year before. No more essays. The next editor loved my voice—amusing, she said, reflective and sincere. But suggested a totally different narrative arc. So, I tried that, and decided, after six months of restructuring, that I had failed miserably with my new approach. It simply wasn’t working. But then, with the help of two more editors, I gradually crafted draft after many drafts, the book I am writing about today.

All of this, editor after editor experience cost money. Luckily, I could afford it, and even though I might have solicited a lot of free advice, you do get what you pay for in the end. Good editors who understand narrative structure, which was really my issue more than anything else, are much harder to find than good writers. And all of this back and forth, building and re-building, refining my arc, modifying and polishing my voice, took—off and on, between teaching, editing and my other writing projects—about ten years. But those ten years were vital. For each time I revisited my work and revised, I found that I could look at the world about which I was writing a little bit differently, and found myself digging more deeply into myself, and often discovering ideas and insights I had not previously considered—or maybe, in fact, dared to consider—in previous drafts.

Sooner or later, as all writers realize, no matter how many drafts we write and strengthen, even when we think one more draft might even be stronger, we have to call it a day. Finished. And in my particular situation, with a book about the loneliness and isolation that comes with aging, living at this point way past seventy, if I had waited much longer, this book might have been published when I was dead! Come to think of it, at least that way no one could complain that I left them out or told my story—and theirs—incorrectly!

Maybe I should have waited a little longer…

Lee Gutkind is the author of My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies (The University of Georgia Press, October, 2020).