A Memoir Is Not a Loose Heap of Personal Anecdotes

An assortment of thoughts and the paradox of suspense

Memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies are imperfect reflections of reality. 

But they can capture something of human life in a way that other forms of writing or inquiry cannot. Alongside events that I easily recalled, I was surprised at how the fleeting and various wisps and fragments that also encompass my memories made their way into my book.

Throughout the process of writing Troubled, I learned that a memoir is not a mere recital of events. The author has to clothe the dry bones of personal stories in the flesh of living reality. To portray human beings and their social context in such a way as to give you, the reader, a sense of actually being there. A sense of the kind of society or kind of person you could imagine that you could have met or interacted with. 

When a decent storyteller or memoirist communicates effectively, you can then figure out for yourself why this person did this or that without having every detail fully explained. This is because—if the story is any good and the characters in it are sufficiently drawn—the social abilities you use in your everyday life have been activated. While reading, you recognize real people and notice their patterns, and you feel the thrill of surprise when they deviate from them. 

You then understand that you have not been given a loose heap of personal anecdotes, but full immersion into another world.

Describing flawed people in real terms, giving a memoir the feeling of life, of something recognizably human, even at the risk of saying more than we can know with absolute certainty (can I prove beyond doubt that I, as a thirteen-year-old boy, I behaved in this way or that because of the reasons I describe?) brings into play those ways of understanding the social world which are intrinsic to our everyday experiences as human beings.

You definitely wouldn’t find this type of writing in a social science paper. Empirical research and theoretical frameworks can illuminate patterns. But truly understanding human beings means acknowledging that they have unpredictable qualities that are, as the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written, “too various and fugitive to be neatly captured and stuffed into a neat model of behavior.”

When writing Troubled, it became apparent to me that, however much the social sciences bring under their sway, or however detailed the accounts of historians and ethnographers, so much is left out at the individual personal level. I’m speaking here about the views, feelings, reactions, impulses, and beliefs of flesh-and-blood human beings, as well as their distinctive characters and life patterns. I'm also referring to a mood, a culture, a social class, a period of recent history.

Accurately conveying the outlook of a social milieu or an individual person requires a more direct experience of life, along with sympathy, interest, and imagination, than the abstract and regimented methods that academic scholars and scientists allow.

Each way of understanding the world—the abstract and the personal—has its place.

Still, much of this book indirectly reflects my suspicion of attempts to simplify, or reduce to artificial abstractions, what Isaiah Berlin described as the “dark mass of factors” that make up human existence. Not all of the complexities of human life can be flattened into neat categories.

Writing this book was a strange experience, rummaging through the semi-conscious swirls of memory to untangle and relive some of these stories. 

Throughout my book, you read about childhood instability, violence, addiction, social class, elites, and more. Not through experts telling you what to think, but through me recounting my experiences. Readers can see for themselves how my worldview arose from the events of my life. Composing the "common-sense" picture of the world from the perspectives of my younger self and my companions, proved more challenging than I anticipated. I was relieved to discover that I managed to capture something of the human experience; early readers tell me they’ve felt a physical sensation upon reading the immediately recognizable experiences I describe.

The aim is for Troubled to help readers capture, through some imaginative effort, the interior lives of kids in severely unstable surroundings. I try to bring to life more first-hand experiences in order to illustrate my more global observations that come later when I reach adulthood. Rather than a mere sequence of events, these chapters are structured to highlight different aspects of family instability.

I spent two years with my agent and editors discussing how to organize this book. Should it be a personal story with some studies and stats interspersed throughout, or should it be a pop science sociological/psychological text, with some personal stories from my life included?

I didn’t want to write much of a personal narrative. Writing about research and ideas comes much more easily to me than the kind of personal and creative writing that memoir demands. My PhD thesis was far less difficult for me to write than Troubled. It wasn’t even close.

When thinking of how to write this book, I didn’t want to step outside of my comfort zone. I also didn’t know what feelings and memories would arise if I tried to tell my story from top to bottom.

I seldom read fiction. But I’ve always been drawn to biographies and memoirs. People who have lived unusual lives offer unique insights into the human condition, and can share universal lessons that apply to all of us.

Ultimately, I knew this had to be a memoir first and a discussion of the relevant data and research second.

My editors and I compromised by bracketing Troubled with studies and data, with the story sandwiched in the middle. The preface and final three chapters contain plenty of citations to studies and survey data and theoretical frameworks. The bulk of the book, though (chapters 1-10), is primarily a firsthand account of my life. So there’s something for everyone. If you like survey data and social science, that’s there. If you want to read a unique personal story, you’ll find that, too.

My book can be read in a variety of ways. A glimpse into what it’s like to grow up in foster homes, squalor, and poverty. An exploration of social class in America. A journey of upward social mobility. A decoder ring for understanding how elites think and operate. Or just a unique and (hopefully) compelling story. Going through it again, I notice I inadvertently wrote the early chapters as a love letter of sorts to the era of my childhood and youth. That not too distant past spanning the nineties to the early 2000s. Re-reading it, I also noticed some subtext and indirect allusions and buried symbolism. This was unintentional, unconsciously expressed through the process of writing. Most of the story, though, exists above the water line, with fragments submerged beneath.

Much of Troubled explores that abandonment, the many foster homes, the broken adoptive homes, and, later, my search for understanding the roots of all the dysfunction and deprivation that I and so many other children were mired in. 

I wrote this book to illuminate the challenges children face when they live in impoverished and unstable environments. I used my experiences growing up as a foster kid as a way to shed light on the lingering effects of dysfunction and deprivation. We spend a lot of time focusing on the effects of poverty and low income for children, but I also wanted to underscore the detrimental effects of instability. And highlight how we focus too much on the wrong end of the problem. We think the main issue is that not enough kids from marginalized backgrounds are going to college, not enough of them achieve upward mobility. And that is an issue we should focus on. But in addition, we should also be trying to ensure that fewer kids live through such harrowing experiences in the first place. Even if every kid goes on to attend a great college and earn a high income, that doesn’t magically heal or compensate for the wounds or scars of their early life experiences. In addition to trying to help children from unstable backgrounds, we should try to ensure that fewer kids have those detrimental early life experiences in the first place. Alongside promoting educational attainment and earnings, we could also prioritize nurturing and attentive care for emotionally deprived young children.

The implicit question throughout the early chapters is why so many kids find themselves having to navigate such treacherous terrain. Something that occurred to me only after I wrote this book is that the destructive consequences of the 1960s cultural revolution harmed people in order of their marginalization, predilections, and vulnerability. Poor black families got hit first. Then poor Hispanics and poor whites. By the time I was growing up in the 1990s, ordinary working and lower-middle-class areas of California (mostly white and Hispanic) were being plagued by the erosion of what were formerly common sense conventional social norms and cultural guardrails. Marriage, neighborliness, thriftiness, hard work, punctuality, striving, respectfulness, integrity, decency, and so on.

Interestingly, I think if I’d been adopted maybe 20 years earlier—in the 1970s, say, instead of the late 1990s—my life would have been more stable. There was a bit of a lag before the cultural rot oozed into working/lower-middle-class families across the U.S.

Talented storytellers know something bad storytellers don't: storytelling is the art of strategically withholding information. Before you begin your story, you decide which details to withhold until the end—to maximize suspense along the way. Brian Cox, who played Logan Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” has said that in drama, “The beginning is inevitable, the end is inevitable, but the middle is not so inevitable, and television is about the middle.” I knew that by the time Troubled was released, many readers would have some inkling about my early life, and know how it all concludes. The book is about the middle, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Each section, beginning, middle, and end, had its challenges. The middle was difficult because I had to communicate to you, the reader, how it was that the kid you read about at the beginning of the book became the adult you will come to know at the end. This involves what the philosopher Noël Carroll and others refer to as “the paradox of suspense.” The paradox is straightforward: How is it possible for you to know the conclusion yet still experience suspense during the course of a story? The reason seems to be that knowing that something will happen is very different from knowing how it occurs. The suspense isn’t just in trying to figure out how something will end, but also in trying to figure out how that ending comes about. We remain curious about the sequential steps that transpired that lead to the foreseeable conclusion. 

How does this unfocused troublemaker (Troubled maker?) find his way into the U.S. Air Force, how does he get into Yale, how does he get a PhD, what does he learn along the way?

In “From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature,” Melanie A. Kimball writes: "What the orphans seek, is a place to belong and a right to be there…The difference between the ending of the orphan story and other folktales is the orphan is not leaving the parents’ home to become independent but finding a home after coming from nothing…It is because the orphan so deeply represents the feelings and pain of us all that the character continues to exist in children’s literature. And until the day when none of us feels the pain of isolation, orphans will continue to symbolize it for us.”

Readers have asked me about how I approached the ending of Troubled. Writing a conclusion in a memoir is weird because you, the author, are still alive. Your life hasn’t ended. But you have to find a satisfying way to conclude the story. That final interaction in Troubled, as soon as it transpired in my real life, I realized it might make a pretty good ending. As many writers will attest, though, usually when you think you have a good idea, you write it down and realize it’s stupid. So I thought, “Okay, let’s write it all out and see how it looks on the page.” It was perfect. I knew it was the conclusion. Arriving at that conclusion in such an apparently effortless way felt like a reward after all of the difficulty and doubts throughout the entire book writing process. Finally, something struck me. A gift from the muse. The gods. The unconscious. Delivered to me without having to suffer in order to receive it.