What I'm Pointing At: Memoir and the Authority of Experience

from Black Warrior Review Vol. 29 issue 2

What I’m Pointing At: Memoir and the Authority of Experience

an interview with Connie Sumterville by Tom Bligh

Connie Sumterville is the author of a best-selling memoir, Turning 24 (2000) and a novel, Family Friction (2002). Born in Wildwood, New Jersey, she graduated from the University of Michigan in 1996. She is a student in the graduate creative writing program at Nebraska State University. Turning 28 will be published in April. A book of poems, True/False/True, will follow in September. Her work is included in 30 and Under: America’s Best Young Memoirists and she’s been chosen to edit the Best American Memoir Writing 2003.

BWR: You’ve been called “the hottest young writer that no one has heard of” yet your book was a bestseller.

CS: I think I flew in under the radar. The literary community didn’t recognize the book but people bought it--not just 24 year olds, either.

BWR: When do you write?

CS: I’m always writing.

BWR: Always?

CS: Always. Even now. When I’m eating, when I’m kissing someone, during a conversation with a friend or with a student, I’m thinking, “How can I use this?” I compose, I reflect. I write when I’m sleeping. I wake with a feeling of accomplishment, with many words behind me. When it looks like I’m not writing, I’m probably writing even more.

BWR: How does teaching fuel your writing?

CS: Students buy my books, of course. Not just my students but other people’s students as well. One of the things we’re doing, in the enterprise of teaching creative writing, is teaching people to buy my books. As an MFA student I buy my professors’ books. That’s how it works; it’s a cycle. I’m a teaching assistant at NSU and even when I don’t assign my books as required texts, a few of my students purchase them. Sometimes it’s for extra credit but there’s genuine interest as well. That kind of encouragement prompts me to keep writing. Some of those students will in turn teach others to buy my books. The best place for an author to be is a university. It’s like putting your books in the checkout lane at the supermarket, next to the gum and the tabloids and the repair kits for eyeglasses. A better question would be “How do you negotiate between teaching and writing? How do you achieve balance?”

BWR: That is a good question. Are you asking me? I teach writing at FSU.

CS: No, I ask it of myself here in this interview, but I ask it of myself daily, sometimes hourly. The answer is I can’t. I find it so difficult to shift from writer to student to teacher. It’s frustrating to have so many student papers to grade. I write steadily throughout the semester, waking before dawn to get something down on the page. It’s hard to build up the experience that memoirs require. Being a student means I have a lot of obligations that don’t help my writing, such as writing critiques for my peers in workshop, reading submissions to our school’s literary journal, or going to readings on campus. These distract from my true purpose. Some days when my work isn’t progressing to my satisfaction I walk into the classroom and see 25 freshmen and think, “It’s your fault.” Teaching is a huge commitment and you have to reserve time and space for your own work. You’ve got to trick yourself, in a way, into writing. And when I say you, I mean me.

BWR: For a moment I thought you might mean me, because I’m a writer too.

CS: Of course you are.

BWR: Has your approach to writing changed since the publication of 24?

CS: No. I feel fortunate to have some recognition, but I go entire days without thinking about it. Writing is still a daily struggle and I’m moving forward on new projects. Occasionally I’ll be in line at the gas station and I get impatient and I think, “Don’t these people know who I am?” But that’s about it.

BWR: What’s it like to have so much success while you are still a student?

CS: It’s odd having a high profile--I wouldn’t say I’m well-known yet--I can browse at the A.W.P. bookfair without being mobbed. But I have some name recognition. One of my professors--he’s actually on my thesis committee--asked me to blurb his book. I mean, I need this guy’s approval to earn my MFA and here I am writing compliments for his book jacket. It’s hard to do a book tour as a full-time student. I can’t read at the KGB Bar and then zip back to teach freshman comp and go to workshop--it’s too much. Next semester I’ll sign up for thesis hours and go out to promote the new book. My success has created a bit of an uncomfortable gap in workshop, though. There’s this sentiment that I should move on but I’m not finished the program. I came here to study writing and I’m doing that. It’s not my fault that I’ve been short-listed for the National Book Award. Meanwhile another student in class turns in drivel with a pathetic “Dear Workshop . . .” note attached. The workshop will give that student love pats but attack my work. I have to meet a higher standard now that my talent is no longer hidden. Last spring I took my first poetry workshop. It was an uninspired group with basically three kinds of students: the ones trying to please the professor, the ones writing standard confessional stuff about boyfriends and being sad, and some language poets crossing out lines from their poems as if they’d been censored. It was fun for them, but it seemed as if they were covering up their lack of talent with black ink. None of this interested me. I created two types of poems, true poems and fictive poems. My true poems are the verse equivalent of creative nonfictional prose. My subject matter is current events, observations I make on my walks to campus, and incidents from my life. I have a poem called “Iraq.” The other kind of poem I write is the fictional confessional. These purport to be about my experiences when in fact they’re made up. Everyone assumes poems are autobiographical but these aren’t. Yet they benefit from that consideration. Next fall the poems will be published as True/False/True and you’ll see what I mean.

BWR: I’ve read most of Family Friction. (It’s at the FSU library.) It received mixed reviews and sold less well than Turning 24, which I read in its entirety. A number of critics praised Family Friction while suggesting you are too young to be writing memoirs. What’s your response?

CS: When critics like something I do, fine. I’m happy to reach someone. If critics don’t like something, they can just sit and spin. More troubling to me is when critics suggest a book should not have been written at all. Why shouldn’t I write a memoir? I have a life and I remember things about it. What’s the right age for a memoirist? Fifty-five? Sixty-five? Nonsense.

BWR: That seems like a stock answer. You said that in Poets & Writers last year. Or maybe it was Writer’s Chronicle. Or both. Can you say something new for the readers of the Black Warrior Review?

CS: How about this: I don’t think a person needs to have been an astronaut or lion tamer or teenaged prostitute in order to write a memoir. I write about everyday things: family, relationships, school, jobs. They’re important because they happened to me, even if they don’t appear “memoir worthy” at first glance. You’re a young man but you could write a memoir.

BWR: Do you really think so?

CS: If you’ve shed one tear in your life you have material for a memoir.

BWR: At 27, you returned to the memoir form to write your forthcoming book, Turning 28. How did you know what turning 28 would be like?

CS: I forecasted the next phase of life. Just closed my eyes and imagined myself into 28. I knew 24 and 25 and 26 and 27 and I had every good reason to expect similar things of 28.

BWR: Why didn’t you just write Turning 27 while you were 27?

CS: Answering that question would imply that I choose my subjects. I don’t; they come to me. And turning 28 was such an anticipatory event. The world changed and I changed and I wanted to write about it. The book’s about me thinking about turning 28 long before I ever did, and it delves into the sensation of 28 in a palpable way, though I had to feel my way through it blind, not knowing what was ahead. It shows me at 28 before I was 28. I was excited yet terrified and ultimately I felt I had to do justice to the material.

BWR: But the material did not yet exist as you were writing it. Do you think the traditional category of “memoir” breaks down if it is widened to include future events?

CS: No.

BWR: Aren’t you writing fiction if you’re inventing things that may happen, even if they’re going to happen to you?

CS: I don’t think so. Your saying so doesn’t make it so.

BWR: Some might say it’s a marketing decision. Your publisher must have been anxious for a follow-up to 24.

CS: Not just the publisher, but readers, my agent, my editor, friends. I had to put them off to write other things, but also in order to live my life without jotting it all down right away. I wasn’t going to live 28 just so I could write 28--I wanted to live 28 for its own sake. So I wrote Family Friction, a novel.

BWR: And yet, Family Friction is clearly autobiographical. Cassie Sandfordsen, the protagonist, shares your family background, your passion for writing, and even your birthday. How did you decide to make this work a novel and not a memoir?

CS: Family Friction is a different creature all together. My process was different, a very deliberate act of story making, creating an entire world rather than summoning one. I put on Cassie’s shoes and walked around in them, whereas in Turning 24 I recalled what wearing my own shoes was like.

BWR: Why not just publish Turning 24 as fiction? Enough of it is invented to justify doing that.

CS: I want to present it as fact. Ultimately the root of my memoir is true and it is my story. The main facts are just as I’ve written them.

BWR: Was 24 pivotal year? The book doesn’t really say, and unlike many memoirs in which the author struggles against domestic turmoil or deals with personal problems like bulimia, your early twenties seem refreshingly angst-free. How did you find a publisher for a book about a relatively untroubled life?

CS: When I started the MFA program I was 23, almost 24, and full of uncertainties, those nail-biting, insomniac worries. It was a funny year where some of my friends from college were getting married or going to law school though they didn’t want to become lawyers. Others had taken compromise jobs at frozen food companies and rental car agencies. I’d been a nanny, a house painter, a hostess at a chain Italian restaurant--anybody’s story, really--and I decided to bag it. I was writing all the time and the pages were piling up so I applied to grad school. I thought to myself, “at any given moment I could drop dead.” It became a question of what I wanted to be doing when I dropped dead--writing, publishing, reading from my work, or seating a party of four and handing out menus? Finding a publisher wasn’t difficult. It’s the kind of story that resonates with people immediately. I still have people come up to me and say, “Your book helped me get through 24.” I had readers such as those in mind when I began work on Turning 28. For those people in the intervening years, I’m sorry.

BWR: How would you answer those who assert Turning 28 is more fiction than memoir?

CS: I can’t worry about critics. You know the dumbest people in your workshop?

BWR: Yes.

CS: That’s what critics are like--their opinions don’t matter. The new book may startle or confuse or infuriate because it doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. So it’s a little belles-lettres and some creative nonfiction with a dash of autobiography. For me, it’s not a terribly interesting debate. It reminds me of the old controversies about science fiction. What’s real science fiction? Is it robots or poetic fantasy like Ray Bradbury? What is gained or lost when you take a book out of that category? Nothing. The work remains the same. Damon Knight said “Science fiction is what I’m pointing at when I point and say ‘science fiction.’” Well, memoir is what I’m pointing at when I point and say “memoir.”

BWR: I see what you’re getting at. What if I say “memoir” when I point at Family Friction?

CS: I wish you wouldn’t do that.

BWR: I’m pointing at my coffee mug and saying “memoir.”

CS: You’re not getting it. It doesn’t work on ceramics. Readers may choose to read 28 as a novel. What’s the difference to people who don’t know me? I might as well be Jane Eyre. Connie Sumterville is the “I” of both of my memoirs and she’s me, but I don’t expect that to matter much to my readers. If readers see the author as a character, that’s fine with me. And the memoir is a story, after all, and like all stories it has an arc and a cast of characters and a rhythm.

BWR: I think labeling a work of fiction a memoir denigrates the form. Memoirs have a certain cachet because the author is expected to remain faithful to the truth. The thrills and spills in a memoir mean that much more because the reader knows they are true. Fiction is manipulative; memoir should not be.

CS: Those are not meaningful distinctions for me. The book I’m working on now (it’s on my laptop even as we speak) combines fiction and memoir. It’s creative nonfiction. Before I go forward to write of my life beyond 28 I’ll go back--way back. Turning 6 is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to write. And the most rewarding. It’s a true book about the fantasies of my childhood--the things I imagined then, daydreams, nightmares, hallucinations I experienced when I had a fever. The main characters, apart from me and my parents, are the pretend friends I created in my dreams. I might subtitle the book Where I Was Going to Go.

BWR: The mix of recollection and invention would appear to contain mostly invention. Again you’re valuing creation over experience, fancy over fact.

CS: Not at all. Especially not in this case, in which the fancy, as you say, is fact. Facts have a place--don’t get me wrong. But I don’t need to, let’s say, go to Thailand to write about Thailand. I can read about it, conduct research, and then write with authority, confident that I’m getting the place and the people just right.

BWR: You’ve visited Thailand, however, and written about the experience.

CS: Yes, of course I have. I was just using Thailand as an example. I could have easily said Austria. Or Chile. Liechtenstein. I’m presently revising a manuscript about Copenhagen I wrote over the semester break while I was waiting for the proofs of Turning 28. I really fell in love with the people, the culture.

BWR: You haven’t actually gone?

CS: Not yet. Copenhagen is a place where I imagined myself and the writing followed. After the tour for 28 winds down, after I graduate, I do hope to go.

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Tom Bligh lives in Tallahassee, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University. He is at work on a novel about memoirists.