Session Three · Unit One — The Threshold
Memory’s Floor Plan — Memoir and Scene
The Genre: Memoir
Main Points of the Lesson
- Memoir is a slice, not a life. Autobiography tells a life; memoir chooses one strand of it — a season, a relationship, a question — and follows that strand faithfully.
- The double voice. Every memoir has two narrators: the younger self who experienced the events and the older self who understands them. The music of memoir is the conversation between them.
- Scene and summary. Scene slows time and puts the reader in the room; summary moves us across years. Memoir needs both, and the writer must decide which moments earn a scene.
- Memory is a floor plan. Drawing the rooms of a remembered house unlocks sensory detail that direct recall cannot reach. Place holds memory.
- Franklin’s arrival. Franklin walks up Market Street in 1723 with three puffy rolls, one under each arm, eating the third, while his future wife watches from a doorway. It is Philadelphia’s most famous arrival scene — and a lesson in self-portraiture with irony.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — opening through the arrival in Philadelphia — read on Project Gutenberg
Read from the beginning through Franklin’s first morning in Philadelphia. Watch the older Franklin smiling at the younger one. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory”; Chapter 2, “Writing the Family” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — composition and influence (Wikipedia) — How an unfinished private memoir became a founding American text.
- Memoir — the form and its history (Wikipedia) — Distinctions among memoir, autobiography, and personal essay.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Draw the floor plan of a home you lived in before the age of fifteen. Label every room. Mark with an X the place where something happened that you have never forgotten. Now write that scene in the present tense for ten minutes — what you see, hear, smell — as if it is happening now. In the last three minutes, switch to the past tense and the voice of the person you are today.
The floor plan stays in your notebook. The switch of tense and voice is the exercise; notice what the older voice knows that the younger one did not.
What happens with this: nothing is collected. It is yours, written on paper, in your notebook. No one is asked to read aloud who does not wish to.
Discussion Questions
- Where do you hear the older Franklin commenting on the younger one? What is the tone of that commentary?
- Franklin calls his mistakes “errata,” a printer’s word. What does that metaphor reveal about how he sees a life?
- What does Franklin choose to dramatize as scene, and what does he summarize? Why?
- Is a memoirist obligated to tell the whole truth, or only nothing but the truth?
Homework
- Read Tell It Slant, Chapter 9, “Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction.”
- Write a memoir scene of 750–1,000 words from your floor plan, using both voices: the one who lived it and the one who remembers.
- Read for Session 4: Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” and the Brevity craft essay “Consider the Platypus.”
For the 2601 Anthology
Consider a companion scene: your first night at 2601. What did the apartment sound like before it was yours?
Before Next Time — Session 4
The Elevator — Flash Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay. Thirteen floors, thirteen fragments. We learn compression, white space, and the lyric essay’s logic of image and association.