Shoes, Eyes, and Other Assorted Metaphorical Body Parts

It never does get easier to write about memoirs.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, both as a writer and as a reader, about the idea of inside-out and outside-in perspectives. The outside-in perspective maintains a modicum of narrative remove. It allows you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions. You might be able to hear a character’s thoughts, in a novel, but you’re not truly seeing the world through her eyes. Motivations, thoughts, symbolism, reasons, are all up to the reader to puzzle out, giving each person a little wiggle room.

But in the inside-out perspective, you’re literally looking out through his eyes. Everything is being interpreted by the character—or the person. If they’re confused about something, trying to figure something out, then it might leave room for the reader to speculate, to supply them with a solution of their own. But motivations, reasoning, all of those fun things, are already done, analyzed, dug through. They might have been interpreted completely incorrectly. But there’s no room for an outsider to do it. You don’t climb into his brain to see through his eyes; he’s inside yours. That’s what’s great about the inside-out. It’s immediately arresting, unflinching, compelling. But it doesn’t lend itself well to analysis. Novels sometimes use each perspective, sometimes waver between the two within the same book. Memoirs, though—all the analysis has to be done for you. It’s someone’s life. You’re not there to make sense of it. You’re there to live it.

Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man details the years of his life that he spent teaching English in New York high schools (and, briefly, a college). He’s the kind of teacher everyone wants to have: mildly clueless (about teaching, not his subject), engaging, caring, fun. He maintains always that he is the one learning, which seems like a cliché but sounds really true here. You can’t help but like him, and the kids he teaches.

Teacher Man was McCourt’s third memoir, and I think I would have had a better understanding of his motives in this one had I been more familiar with his earlier life, which was obviously—isn’t it always?—incredibly formative and affecting. I’m not sure, though, having seen where his life goes, that I’d go back to find out where it was. Who knows? You can’t have a future without a past. You can’t even have a now.

So, as usual with halfway decent memoirs, I did enjoy the book. We’re actually discussing it in the Barnes and Noble book club tonight, and I have no idea what we’re going to talk about. If anyone figures out how to dig into memoirs and analyze them the way I rend novels limb from limb, please let me know.