Acting and Memoir Writing

This week, and long overdue, I am reading Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. And yet again the link between acting and writing is at the forefront of the text - although I'm not sure how much Karr herself realises this (maybe it will become clear in due course). I had read to page 32 when I had to stop and turn my attention, briefly, to this post. So here goes...

Karr makes clear that one of the most challenging and dangerous parts of memoir writing is the event/memory that elicits the most fear in the writer. A moment from the past that encapsulates the individual's whole being in conflict with something that threatened that existence. Of course, the prospective writer may or may not be able to explain why returning to the moment feels like it will be stressful, but Karr is clear: if you are thinking of writing a memoir and want to know if you are ready to do so, return to the moment at the emotional heart of your tale, the moment you fear revisiting, and revisit it. So far so good. But how does Karr suggest you go about revisiting that moment and evoking your memories in a visceral, intense form? By using the acting technique made popular - too popular - by Konstantin Stanisvlavski: affective memory.

I use the words 'affective memory' here when, if you know a little of Stanislavski's system, you might expect me to use the words 'emotion memory'. Emotion Memory has become generally known as the core of the Method school's approach to acting but the truth of the terminology is a little different. Emotion memory is outcome: the actor recalls emotions. But the way in which those emotions are recalled - the trigger for them - is the actor's sense memory or 'affective' memory... the memory that affects the way we think and feel in this current moment. So what is 'affective' memory?

Affective memory is memory which affects us today and it is most deeply embedded in our recollection of sensory experiences: sight, smell, taste, touch and sound. These sensory memories can be enhanced, and create even stronger emotional memories, with recollection of what we were doing at the time. So, for example, when you enter a bakery and smell fresh bread the supermarket is exploiting what, for many people, is the affective memory of fresh bread from a happy, safe, enjoyable, younger time, when the smell of bread was enticing and delicious. The supermarket, by triggering this affective memory through the sensation of smell, hopes to trigger the subsequent emotional memory of happiness that leads you, as a a consumer, to desire bread now, in the current moment, to sustain that happy feeling. Whether you buy it or not is testament to the success of their strategy but I have wide and deep experience of the success of this strategy from the field of drama and acting which is significant.

Method actors - from Marlon Brando to Daniel Day Lewis to Christian Bale - are famed for going out into the world and living as their characters from day to day in what might be termed intensive, immersive research. This might involve leaving their swanky Hollywood mansion and booking into a room in a seedy motel, living there with no money, surrounded by drug taking and prostitution, with no change of sheets for a month, in order to live like a character they are about to play who is down and out on their luck. But why do this? The cameras are not in the seedy motel: this research precedes filming. The reason is simple: the actor wishes to build a store of memories, sensuous and visceral, that will inform the emotional truth of his or her role when filming finally commences, in a studio or wherever. On set, during filming, he or she will be able to use their affective memory to trigger the right kind of emotions for their role. They will literally 'remember what it felt like, when...'.

Now those who know me know that I reject this notion of acting for anything other than films where the method actor is the leading player, or one of them. For the simple reason that an actor in a minor role will not be given the time or space, usually, to indulge in affective memory in this way. Similarly, this technique does not work on a stage, because there is not normally time 'between takes' to dig back into the past in preparation for the next sequence. But the fact is that affective memory techniques can and do work in certain conditions if the circumstances are right. In the course of several hundred workshops with A-level drama students in the 1990s, for example, I determined that approximately 1 in 20 students would find that the circumstances were right for them to experience emotional memories that could drive them to physical action (i.e. that helped them to 'act'), in the course of executing an affective memory exercise. The odds are not great when a performance usually involves several actors who all need to be emotionally convincing, but Stanislavski loved the idea... until he didn't... and many actors still use it - or attempt to - to this day.

But what's this stuff about Acting got to do with Mary Karr and the art of Memoir Writing? Well, on page 31 of her book, Mary Karr invites the memoir writer to engage in an affective memory exercise in order to trigger the emotional memory, in detail, of the event that causes them fear: 'What can you see, hear, touch, taste? What do you have on? Is the cloth rough or smooth? .... what taste is in your mouth?' she asks. In these questions, and others which follow, Karr is inviting the memoir writer to do what an actor does in order to re-engage with the past in a memory which will affect their current emotional state. Karr's reason is to test whether the writer is ready to revisit their past in the requisite detail and without a damaging and limiting excess of fear: 'Can you be in that place without falling apart?' she demands. For Karr, sensibly, if the writer experiences the feeling and can let it fill them and affect them without being devastated by the memory, then the writer is ready to write about that moment in a memoir.

So there it is again: the direct link between acting and, in this case, memoir writing. Of course this exercise can help the writer at any stage of their memoir, by helping to place them back at that moment in time in a sensorily affective manner, swiftly and, so far as possible, to order. It is an exercise I will reintroduce in a writing workshop at some point, when there are memoir writers in the room who request it. And from this starting point we will be able to move on to consider the equally interesting question of how far affective memory can trigger responses in a reader, rather than in a rememberer, of the sensory past....

[Special thanks for this particular post must go to Garry, producer of the current national and international tours of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, who attended a recent tutored retreat to develop his own play concept, and afterwards sent me a copy of Mary Karr's book for our writers' shelves in the library. Without that kind donation I would still be waiting for my own long overdue copy of the book from an online retailer to arrive!]

Till next time,

Nic