Interview with Molly Giles about Her Memoir, Life Span

Molly Giles is the award-winning author of five collections of short stories, including Rough Translations, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her first novel, Iron Shoes, was released in 2000, and twenty-three years later, she published the sequel, The Home for Unwed Husbands. This interview is about her engaging and moving memoir, Life Span.

Molly Giles, photo by Ralph Brott

Zack Rogow: As someone with a long and celebrated career as a fiction writer, what motivated you to switch to nonfiction for your memoir Life Span?

Molly Giles: I had jotted down a few childhood memories with the intention of developing them into short stories, but then I got lazy; I thought, why go to all the bother of inventing things? Why not just say what actually happened? So much easier!

 

Q. The structure of this book is not like any other memoir I’ve ever read. How would you describe it?

 

A. Life Span is a memoir composed of flash fictions stitched together year by year, starting in 1945 and ending in 2023. Each short episode happens on, near, or under the Golden Gate Bridge or alludes to the bridge through a memory, allusion, or image of some sort.

 

Q. At what point in your writing process did you decide on that structure?

 

A. Early on. It just seemed right. Assembling the pieces into an actual book did not occur to me for a long time, though—that was a suggestion put forth by a writer friend I trust.

Q. What inspired you to mention the Golden Gate Bridge in each segment of the memoir? Were you at all influenced by Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” or Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”? 

A. Sadly, no—I love Hokusai’s prints. Although I admire Wallace Stevens hugely, I can’t honestly say I understand him. And I’m not sure I was “inspired” by the Golden Gate Bridge. It was always just there. I was born in San Francisco and have lived in the Bay Area all my life. (Although I taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas for fourteen years, I returned to my home in West Marin every summer and Christmas holiday during those years.) The bridge has been my steady beacon, companion, and friend throughout my life; I simply love it.

Q. The sense of humor in this book is winning, but at the same time, it has a dark tinge. Often, terrible things end up being funny. For example, when the author’s second child Rachel is born, the older daughter Gretchen is jealous and absolutely refuses to say her baby sister’s name when her mother prompts her:  

“Can you say Rachel?”

Gretchen plugs her thumb into her mouth and closes her eyes. No. She cannot say Rachel. Will not. Should not be asked to.

Why do you think some of the episodes about the most difficult interactions end up being humorous?

 

A. I’ll probably misquote him, but Bukowski once pointed out that nothing is funnier than the truth.

 

Q. Many of the stories or entries in this book are only a page and a half, but they are extremely moving, such as the one about the wife having a dream where she tells a stranger to kill her husband. How does a writer create deep emotion with few words?

 

A. By cutting. You have to pare and pare to get to the heart. Then you have to be careful not to stab the heart. You have to know when to stop. One of the most frustrating things about trying to teach creative writing, as I did try for 35 years, is that some things, like this, cannot be taught. They have to be learned.

 

Q. There’s a lot of tragedy and betrayal in this book, and yet the tone is mostly light rather than grim. How did you manage that?

 

A. Being a memoir, the book is about me, and my life. And though I don’t take myself too seriously, I do love my life.

 

Q. In the end, what were the gains and losses for you in using such a particular and unusual structure? Did the shortness of each vignette challenge you, or restrict you, or both?

 

A. Neither. I never felt challenged or restricted by the brevity of the pieces—I felt freed. It helped me zero in on what I wanted to say. I like to overwrite and then cut back. I was constricted by my decision to only include incidents relating to the Golden Gate Bridge, however—I had to leave out the entire East Bay!

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Poetry vs. Memoir: "Forcing a Genre"

By “forcing a genre,” I mean insisting on writing a piece in a certain form, even if that form is not right for that specific work. I see this on a regular basis as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. A writer will submit a poem that is divided into lines, the way a poem usually is, but the line breaks feel artificial. The language has the warp and woof of prose. It doesn’t have any of the compression or music that marks strong poetry.

Often when I see this happen, the author is writing very autobiographically. The story might be extremely compelling. So compelling, the writer feels such urgency to tell the story that he or she doesn't have the time to enrich the language with metaphor, imagery, and the sounds of words. It may not seem to that writer as if he or she has the luxury of using all those literary tools, since the message is so immediate. 

So why not write that piece as prose memoir? Memoir and poetry can be extremely close. Some writing that may feel thin when written as poetry can make wonderful memoir. 

Poets often recount particularly intense moments from their lives, as do memoirists. But for writing to be poetry, it requires a different approach, an approach where the writer is determined to wrestle the experience into art, rather than simply to recount part of a life. Poetry also often focuses on a small moment of large significance, whereas memoir usually tells a story over a longer period of time.

A book that's useful to look at in this context is Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary, a collection of poetry that is deeply rooted in the poet’s family history.

Linda McCarriston

Eva-Mary is partly focused on the abuse that McCarriston and other family members experienced when the author was growing up. There is nothing prosy about the writing in this book. The experiences that McCarriston recounts are memoir, in the sense that she is testifying that she witnessed them, but they are also poetry in every sense of the word. The music of the language and McCarriston’s deft use of metaphor all contribute to make this book pure poetry:

                               her heart

the bursting heart of someone

snagged among rocks deep

in a sharkpool

(from “To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons”)

McCarriston's book also tells the story of a family, but focused on particular, highly charged moments.

I don’t think that all autobiographical writing should be poetry, or that it should all be memoir. But it’s important to recognize when a piece of your writing wants to be a different genre from the one you are forcing it into. Often this happens when a poem should really be memoir.

This can also happen in reverse. A piece of prose can be so dense, so tangled with metaphor and imagery that it demands the breathing room of line breaks to be assimilated and appreciated. Or a memoir that is fixed on particular moments in time could work better as a series of poems.

One caution about switching a work to another genre. Once you switch, there are alterations you have to make. The demands of prose are different from the demands of poetry. A prose version of exactly the same story may require more elaboration, more development of certain details or characters. Some poetic diction may have to be purged in the interest of maintaining authenticity. 

Conversely, a verse version of a story may require focusing more on a particular moment. Poetry also requires more figurative language and more focus on the rhythms and sounds of the words, so even the most poetic prose will need heightening to make it sing when it is broken into lines.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer