Your Future Self's Future Story (Jen Intro) (07/11/2020)

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Jen Maidenberg.

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Last month, I received a highly anticipated link to a Google Drive folder. Inside was a collection of old hi8 tapes and VHS home movies converted to digital files. Fun, right?

The emotional response to watching the videos, though, has necessitated a kind of mindful restraint. I can only watch so much footage of my now 17-year-old son as a two-year-old giggling and stumbling over three-syllable words. There is also only so much lovestruck naïveté I can tolerate, such as when the wedding my 26-year-old self is planning in one video will only lead to a marriage I now know ends in divorce.

For the most part, watching the videos has provided me with a profound sense of joy, and an unexpected recognition of the person I had forgotten I was, and more important, I now like. 

As a writer of personal essays, I’ve spent a lot of time the last two decades dipping into old journals, re-reading letters, and browsing photo albums often in pursuit of clues that would fill in a gap in a story I was writing. When doing so, I noticed my reaction would typically lean more toward self-loathing than self-love; I hated how immature I sounded, for instance, no matter how old I got. 

But the young woman in these videos? She’s someone I now appreciate with a kind of endearment I wasn’t able to generate for myself when I would read old journals. 

Have I simply matured? Am I subsequently more forgiving, more generous with my compassion toward my younger self? Perhaps. But I think there’s something else at play, something connected to storytelling, to the writer’s choice of the narrator’s point of view.

Point of view determines a narrator’s speech and tone. It supports the writer in her attempt to create a narrator we sympathize with, or don’t, and serves the reader as it determines the amount of information available with which to make judgments or conclusions as the story unfolds. 

There’s a case to be made that “me now” watching “younger me in old home movies” is as close to omniscient third-person narrator as I will ever get in the telling of my own story, a story I tell to myself these days with running commentary in front of Quicktime on my laptop, and in the reflections that follow.

“Wow, that was before he had his peanut allergy.”  

“Look at that: my pre-C-section belly!” 

“God, we knew nothing back then.” 

On screen, I see Younger Me’s sense of personal style, body language, facial expressions, and movement in relationship to the world around her. There is dialogue, not running monologue as there is in a journal. There is evidence of both best self and worst self. She’s a much more well-developed character in a home movie than she is in a journal. And, with the knowledge I have now, she is much more relatable. 

As writers, we are tasked with taking narrative voice very seriously, and for good reason.  A really good memoir writer must master the skill of reflection, must offer new insights into past experiences in such a way that both the narrator and the reader come away changed. (In this way, older writers may, in fact, be at an advantage over younger ones.)

I’ll be honest: I don’t know exactly how yet, but I feel like this latest dip into the past will close a gap in a future story I haven’t yet written. I’ll leave that one to my Future Self to figure out.

Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here.

Jen Maidenberg

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THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS REVIEW

FICTIONCOYOTE STORYby Kelly Gray"He beckoned me towards the bed. I took a step forward, repeating, 'I want my journal.'"READ ON

POETRYMY FATHER KISSES ME ON THE LIPSby Shannon Castleton"It has always been the way of his family,the aproned women, the work-booted men; you do notturn your head, you tilt it toward the lipspursed before you."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONA MAP OF SHELTERED DARKNESSby Ashley Inguanta"The time I rested my head on her shoulder, in the shadow of her hair, a place all its own..."READ ON

MIXED MEDIAFERROVORESby Ian Gibbins"Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds ('rust') rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same..."READ ON

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