Readings

141

The Ninth Letter of The Alphabet: First-Person Strategies in Nonfiction

Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is writer in residence at Emerson College and the author of Half the House:
A Memoir (2005), Interference & Other Stories (2009), and the poetry collections Without
Paradise (2002), Gold Star Road (2007), and Emblem (2011).
© Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.

Even setting aside the naïve reader who believes that the process of writing a memoir
is 1. having an interesting life, and 2. writing it down (that’s what they always say to me
after a reading or a panel: “One day I’m going to write it down”), there are many other-
wise sophisticated readers who choose to believe that the memoir is a species of journal-
ism, albeit gussied up with some techniques borrowed from fiction writers. It seem to
me more accurate to see the memoir, as it has evolved, as a subgenre of the novel, a kind
of first-person historical novel, a dramatic work that agrees to be bound by fact. What is
being explored is not only what happened, but how one has remembered what happened,
including the gaps in the story and one’s lapses of memory. The contract with the reader
one makes, by calling a work a memoir, i.e. nonfiction, is that you honor what actually
took place and write about it, and about the process of remembering it, with honesty.
Although readers want the same pleasures (what Aristotle called delight and instruc-
tion) from a memoir as from a work of fiction, they approach the two very differently.
I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief in order to be entranced by a work of
fiction, but I approach a memoir, because it claims to be nonfiction, with a certain skepti-
cism. A novel need only be consistent with its own imagined world. A memoir needs to
be consistent with the world of facts and events that we share.
One more thing remains to be said before we begin a consideration of who or what is
represented by the ninth letter of the alphabet. Here I want to issue a disclaimer, caution-
ing you to hold what I say here in a kind of suspension. The terms I’ll be using, terms like,
“the engaged I,” “the reconstructed I,” “the reminiscent I,” are provisional terms of my
own. There may be better names and, more to the point, other kinds of “I”s. We’re not
trying to create a filing system for ourselves as readers; rather we’re trying, as readers,
to look at the full potential of this most important and basic component of first-person
narrative. It’s better to think of these terms as refractions through a prism; besides, these
various “I”s shade off into one another as we move from one part of a text to another. In
most authors you’ll find a tendency to shift through these different first-person strate-
gies like moving through so many gears as the story’s changing terrain makes different
demands. Many authors primarily toggle back and forth between a couple of the pos-
sibilities while others use the full array. Let’s have a look.

Not For Sale

Richard Hoffman, “The Ninth Letter of the Alphabet: First-person strategies in nonfiction.” Reprinted by
permission of the author.

11140_05_ch05_p123-160.indd 141 09/08/12 5:20 PM

 142
Not For Sale
chapter 5  Memoirs

The engaged I: I want to start with a use of the first-person pronoun I call the “engaged
I” because so many memoirists also start with it, and not because it is a primary kind of
narration. It does have certain virtues, as we’ll see in a moment, that are especially suit-
able for beginnings.
The “engaged I” makes overt editorial or political statements on behalf of a worldview,
belief system, or social/political agenda. We see what the author is engaging in the work:
injustice, ignorance, heresy, misunderstanding, life-threatening illness. It is often a bold

© Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
statement of the reason for the work. Here, for example, is Maxim Gorky expressing his
moral indignation and engagement with the issue of childhood poverty and cruelty:
Sometimes when I recall the abominations of that barbarous Russian life I ask myself
whether it is worthwhile to speak of them. And, with renewed conviction, I answer—
yes, it is; for they are the vicious, tenacious truth, which has not been exterminated to
this very day. They represent the truth which must be exposed to its roots and torn out
of our grim and shameful life—torn out of the very soul and memory of man.
Maxim Gorky, Childhood

Another kind of engagement is that of the writer with his material, with the labor to
translate the vision to the page:
Not long after our arrival, we went to a bookshop; she asked for an English-
German grammar, bought the first book they showed her, took me home immediately,
and began instruction. How can I depict that instruction believably? I know how it
went—how could I forget?—but still I can’t believe it myself.

Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free

What’s more, because every memoir, on one level, is also about the act of remember-
ing, this “engaged I” sometimes struggles with memory itself:
I am sorry to be so vague, especially because I am proud of my good memory, and
many have remarked upon it, but all I can remember is sitting on my one suitcase
(I travel light) and waiting for hours to get going. Anywhere.
Neither can I remember how I got to the pier, although obviously it was on the
boat from Paris.

Mary Cantwell, Speaking with Strangers

So, what I’m calling “the engaged I” appears most often early in the story, in the first
chapter or even the prologue to a memoir, and then gives up its place to “the reminiscent
I,” “the reconstructed I,” and others we’ll talk about in a moment. Because “the engaged
I” is often didactic, a little of its use goes a long way. Too much or too often and you’re
haranguing your reader who, even if he or she agrees with your view, is no longer in the
thrall of your storytelling.

The reminiscent I invites us to accompany the narrator in her remembering. The simplest
form of this is a sentence that begins, “I remember . . . ,” or, “I recall . . . .” Here the narrator
views the past at least mostly from the vantage of the present. In any case, this “reminiscent I”

11140_05_ch05_p123-160.indd 142 09/08/12 5:20 PM

 Readings 143

straddles two time frames—one foot in the present, one in the past. It is the most usual,
probably because it is the most natural, form of the first-person that memoirists use.
When I first sat down in that great sea of tedium I thought somebody at the Times
was trying to make me feel humble about working for the paper that printed all
the news that was fit to print. Everything seemed aimed at making me feel like the
smallest fish in the biggest pond on earth.

Russell Baker, The Good Times

© Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.

The reconstructed I is often introduced by “the reminiscent I,” as a way of establish-

ing the time, place, and particulars needed in order to enter into the reconstructed con-
sciousness of the narrator in an earlier time.
Almost all of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is written from the reconstructed van-
tage of a young boy. Nothing young Frankie could not know is recorded, whether because
he couldn’t have seen it or because he couldn’t have understood it; though, as we’ll see,
much that the boy could not know is nonetheless communicated. When we narrate in
the reconstructed voice and consciousness of a child, accepting those bounds, we rely
on the reader to interpret and or interpolate things in a way the child cannot. This gap
between what the child experiences but cannot understand, or misunderstands, and what
the reader, once a child himself, now understands can be, in skillful hands, an irresistible
invitation to empathy, whether with joy or suffering.
Even when “the reconstructed I” is not the remembered/imagined voice of a child, but
the representation of the self in an earlier period, it gives the writer the opportunity to play a
scene from the past against some knowledge of what has happened since then, thus involv-
ing the reader by engaging her own historical experience. Take, for example, the holocaust
memoir of Primo Levi, which derives at least some of its power from the fact that both “the
reminiscent I” and the reader know full well the horrors to come that “the reconstructed
I,” the younger first-person narrator, speaking from within an earlier time-frame, cannot.
Now another German comes and tells us to put the shoes in a certain corner, and
we put them there, because now it is all over and we feel outside the world and the
only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom and sweeps away all the shoes,
outside the door in a heap. He is crazy, he is mixing them all together, ninety-six pairs,
they will all be unmatchable.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
The self-regarding I is the I interrogating and exploring itself within a specific time-
frame. A memoir that doesn’t catch the first-person narrator, at whatever age, being self-
conscious, hesitant, unsure, is not being honest about the complexity of the self. In other
words, if I am to trust the narrator in the present, I need to see him being honest about his
or her motives and mistakes and confusions and shortcoming, perhaps even at some cost
to our estimation of him.

Not For Sale

I hate to say it, but hearing Frank’s stories, I became grateful my father died when
I was still young before my own hopes got in his way. I say it in part because I’m glad

11140_05_ch05_p123-160.indd 143 09/08/12 5:20 PM

 144
Not For Sale
chapter 5  Memoirs

I never had to fight with him, never got stepped on in the way my brothers did. I also
say it because I know the range of my own anger and determination, and my own
awful, unswerving stubbornness.
Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart

The imagining I is fairly straightforward in announcing itself; usually it’s heralded by

the simple phrase, “I imagine,” or “I imagined,” although sometimes, for effect, the writer
may prefer to let this realization sneak up on the reader.

© Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
This is a simple and useful tool for filling in gaps in the story. You either remember what
you imagined to be the case when you were a certain age, or you announce “I imagine . . .
now,” meaning that you acknowledge the limits of your knowledge as a writer, and that
you’re going to give us the following scene courtesy of your imagination.
In the hospital room as my father told it all to me I could see the journey through
his eyes: Mrs. Macek moving before him, her shoulders resolute, and before her the
tall figure of Dr. Macek and more distantly, the moving shadow of Pisa. The forest
floor and the mountain fields were a combination of snow, puddles and mud, and
it was cold and raw. Sometimes at the edge of the snowy meadows, they could see
footprints where the border patrol had just been.
Joseph Hurka, Fields of Light

The documentary I is an EYE, really, and not much else. This may be the eye, view,
or vantage of a “reconstructed I” but it is different in the intensity of its connection to
what is going on. This is a narrator who is at one remove from the scene, watching,
and not filtering what’s seen through any feelings or interpretations. It is as if the cam-
era is on the shoulder of the narrator, merely recording what is visible as she walks on
the street, stands in a room, watches and listens. What the reader gets is the place, the
events, the other people. The “documentary I” gets its power from the complete lack of
commentary, and from a tight focus and careful selection of what’s being shown to us.
Afghan rugs. In the 1980s, Afghan rugs, which had drawn their designs from age-
old tradition, developed new patterns: helicopters and tanks.

Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty

The men are drinking stout from bottles again and the women are sipping sherry
from jam jars. Uncle Pat Sheehan tells everyone, This is my stout, this is my stout, and
Grandma says, ’Tis all right, Pat. No one will take your stout. Then he says he wants
to sing “The Road to Rasheen” till Pa Keating says, No, Pat, you can’t sing on the day
of the funeral. You can sing the night before. But Uncle Pat keeps saying. This is my
stout and I want to sing “The Road to Rasheen,” and everyone knows he talks like
that because he was dropped on his head. He starts to sing his song but stops when
Grandma takes the lid off the coffin and Mam sobs, Oh Jesus, oh, Jesus, will it ever
stop? Will I be left with one child?
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

Any first-person narrative, but particularly memoir with its insistence on at least the
subjective veracity (i.e. honesty) of the tale it tells must engage the reader on several levels

11140_05_ch05_p123-160.indd 144 09/08/12 5:20 PM

 multimodal composition 145

to be successful. The memoirist, like the novelist, must take pains to create a multifac-
eted, emotionally three-dimensional character whose name is I. He or she must be con-
tinually aware of the gap between what the narrator knows, what the reader knows, and
what the character—I—knows, and how to make use of those understandings to create
trust and empathy in the reader. Making use of a number of first-person strategies gives a
story complexity, texture, and authenticity, and results in a dramatic work that will satisfy
even the most sophisticated reader.
© Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.

Analysis: First-Person Strategies

Richard Hoffman’s catalog of first-person strategies in memoir writing offers insight into
the variety of ways memoirists present their own experience through acts of remember-
ing. These are not simply tricks of the trade but figure more consequentially, as Hoffman
notes, in determining the relationship between the memoirist and readers, in eliciting
empathy, trust, and identification. In this sense, Hoffman’s “provisional” categories ena-
ble us to see how the “contract with the reader one makes” takes shape in memoirs.

FOR CRITICAL INQUIRY

1. Consider the memoirs that appear in this chapter in terms of the first-person strategies
employed. You may not find examples of all the categories Hoffman presents, but see
whether you can identify a number of them. What functions do they perform in the
context of specific memoirs?
2. Hoffman makes the point that memoirs depend, at least in part, on gaining the trust of
readers. Pick one or two memoirs in this chapter and explain how the memoirist seeks
to gain the reader’s trust and the extent to which you think he or she is successful.
3. Consider Hoffman’s idea that there are actually three kinds of knowledge in memoirs—
“what the narrator knows, what the reader knows, and what the character—I—knows.”
Pick one of the memoirs that illustrates the three types of knowledge and explain why
and how there is a gap between them.

MULTIMODAL COMPOSITION
Audio Memoirs: StoryCorps
StoryCorps is a nonprofit public service project to record the stories of ordinary people.
Since it began in 2003, over ten thousand people have recorded interviews of family
and friends through StoryCorps. Those interviewed get a free CD, and their stories also
appear regularly on National Public Radio and are archived at the Library of Congress,
creating what has become a vast oral history of everyday Americans recalling impor-
tant moments in their lives. In this sense, StoryCorps is a kind of audio memoir project,
to encourage people to record their memories as part of a collective portrait. Visit the
StoryCorps Web site www.storycorps.org to listen to some of the stories. Consider to
what extent they resemble written memoirs in terms of looking at the past from the

Not For Sale

perspective of the present. Is there a sense that those interviewed invent a first-person
narrator, as memoirists typically do? Is there a moment of revelation?

11140_05_ch05_p123-160.indd 145 09/08/12 5:20 PM