The writing memory that I chose for my writing memoir this semester was a research paper that I wrote when I was a senior in high school. In AP Literature that year, my teacher assigned a research project that required us to choose a person who influenced a particular decade (or decades) and research what it was that this person particularly influenced and how.
I had just come back from New York over Spring Break where I had seen a made-for-TV biopic on Audrey Hepburn. The movie, though terribly acted, was interesting enough for me to want to find out more about Audrey Hepburn, so I chose her as my person to research. After reading a biography about her, I decided to write about her influence on fashion and body image in the 1950s and 1960s.
Over the course of writing that paper, I discovered quite a few things about myself. The most direct discovery was the personal connection (though slight) I felt with Audrey Hepburn. When she came on the scene in the 1950s, she presented a completely different body type and style to what had previously been popular (aka Marilyn Monroe and other blonde bombshells). Though I certainly realize that popular culture has taken the slender body type to an extreme, and that Audrey Hepburn herself suffered from anorexia (more out nerves than a conscious decision to not eat and be thin), I still appreciated the change in what was considered “beautiful” as a not-very-curvaceous teenager.
Something else that came out of my research was that I learned about an entire period of American culture that I had previously known nothing about, and discovered that I really liked it. Furthermore, it really suited my personality—the fashion, the films, the music—all of it. In high school, I didn’t really consider myself as very different from my peers because I more or less liked the same things in mainstream popular culture that my friends did. While I did genuinely like all the things my friends did, I still felt like there was more out there that I wanted to experience and know more about. As I read about the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, I felt like I had found the kind of “stuff” I was looking for.
The most important discovery that came out of my research paper actually had nothing to do with the paper at all. Somewhat coincidentally, around that same time period I had really gotten into Frank Sinatra and his music. I didn’t know enough about him to have selected him as my research person (though if I was to redo the assignment, I would pick Sinatra hands down), but enough to know that he was at the height of his popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the reading I did for my paper, Sinatra’s name came up quite a bit, which cemented my interest. The impact my love of Frank Sinatra and his music has had on me is too profound to explain in this commentary, but suffice it to say, that it all came back to that paper I wrote about Audrey Hepburn.
From what I’ve said about the paper so far, it doesn’t really sound like I learned anything about actually writing at all. That’s not true. I did learn, of course, all the technical aspects of writing a research paper, such as how to conduct research, citing my sources, properly quoting information, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, etc. However, the real value I got out of writing that paper, and what made the “technical stuff” fun to do, was what I learned about myself through the process and the influence of what I learned on the rest of my life. To me, writing that paper on Audrey Hepburn was an exercise in writing-as-discovery. It maybe wasn’t the traditional writing-as-discovery task in the sense that I wasn’t discovering what I thought about my topic as I wrote about it. I did do that, but in a larger sense, the paper provided me an opportunity to discover what I thought about myself by writing about someone else. That was an invaluable lesson for me and why I chose that paper to write about for my memoir.
In writing this memoir, I tried to make the memoir reflect the far-reaching effects that writing the Audrey Hepburn paper had for me and how my personality and tastes have developed. I thought the best way to do that would be to write a series of vignettes that could reveal all of the different parts that came together for me in the writing of the Audrey Hepburn paper. I’m not sure it works. Though I wrote the vignettes in chronologically order, there is quite a bit of jumping in time that may still be confusing for the reader.
Another aspect that may be confusing is that I framed the vignettes with a conversation I had with my sister about how I liked “old stuff”. Coincidentally, because I was so engrossed in that time period, and she wanted to spend time with me, I eventually got my sister to like the “old stuff”, too. I wanted to use that frame to show that the effects of my writing that paper haven’t stopped with just me, that the influence has been felt by my sister, as well as my whole family.
I also struggled with the fact that the majority of my paper wasn’t actually about writing, or about the writing of the Audrey Hepburn paper. However, I realized that by including all the vignettes, I was mirroring what had happened when I wrote the Audrey Hepburn paper: I was discovering more about myself. I had forgotten many of the incidents I included in the paper, but when I sat down and actually thought about what I would need to include to make sure my reader was able to follow along, that led to a backward cause/effect chain that led me to remember several important moments for my story.
One of the things I love most about writing is the unexpected places it takes me. When I started this memoir, I expected to gain some insight into myself as a writer. I didn’t have any idea that it would take me on a journey through how one aspect of my personality emerged. However, I don’t think that those two things are exclusive. They are just the opposite, which I knew, but through writing this memoir, I remembered.
