The Eye watching the ‘I’ 

Among her other skills, US teacher Kaylie Jones runs memoir-writing workshops.  At the first one I attended, she explained that the good memoirist uses the omniscient Eye to watch over the more personal ‘I’ of the narrator. In seconds flat, she was at the whiteboard drawing an eye in the sky observing and informing the stick figure ‘I’ she’d sketched below; the stick figure being the more personal – even sentimental or naive – ‘I’ of the subject.

What Kaylie meant was that the memoirist must keep a watchful eye on the narrator in order to achieve a certain distance. This is a helpful way of objectifying, but not lessening, the heartfelt memories and feelings we may wish to convey. I breathed a sigh of relief at this lesson, knowing that I could detach from my smaller, more vulnerable self, being the ‘I’ who is the protagonist.

The paradox, as she explained, is that while you must remember what it was like to be that child or teenager – and immerse the reader in the experience – conversely you strengthen your story by taking the more meta view. I might, for example, remember the worry I felt when my father attempted to teach me at six to swim by the ‘sink or swim’ method. ‘Is that how you taught the soldiers in the Middle East? I wanted to ask him as I flailed about in a sea of fear before sinking to the sandy bottom. With a new level of adult detachment, I can remember how the six-year-old felt, while keeping a watchful eye on that same vulnerable child.

Employing such a method can be liberating as we learn to see ourselves as characters in our own stories. It can enable the kind of freedom that writing fiction might afford, only in this case, our stories are all true.