By David Armand
Let
me start off by saying this: I never planned
to write a memoir. For the past five years, since I published my first novel, I
considered myself first and foremost a novelist, a writer of fiction. But I was
in need of a break. You see, I had just received a contract from Southeast
Missouri State University Press for my third novel, The Gorge, and although I had a new book in mind, I wasn’t ready to
start writing it yet. Instead, I worked on some old short stories, wrote a
couple of poems, but none of the work was truly satisfying—nothing like the
complete immersion of self that is required to make a novel. So I sat down one
afternoon with the intent to write a longish essay about my mother who has
schizophrenia and what it was like growing up under the shadow of her illness.
The
words came easily enough, but I found out rather quickly that I had a lot more
to say about my life than what I had originally thought. So I decided to keep going,
to see where this thing would take me. Thus my “essay” grew and grew, and I
started to recall instances from my life that I had completely forgotten about.
Within two weeks, I was staring at a twenty-thousand-word long document—and it
wasn’t nearly finished.
From
the beginning, I knew that I didn’t want the writing of this book to be a
therapeutic exercise. That’s not what good art is. The great short story writer
and poet Raymond Carver said that “art is not self-expression, it is
communication,” and I’ve always agreed with that statement. In other words, I
didn’t want to write this book solely for myself, as a sort of catharsis, but instead I wanted to turn
my life story into a piece of art—if I could. I wanted to achieve what Keats
called “Negative Capability.”
Then
I started reading memoirs. I read Mary
Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Tobias
Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Harry
Crews’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Larry Brown’s On Fire, and
a whole slew of others. I discovered that all of these books had one thing in
common: they were all riveting, fascinating, and compelling portraits of these
wonderful artists’ lives. They were also beautifully-rendered stories that captured
the dream-like quality of good fiction, yet they were all real. I was fascinated by this new genre, this new mode of
communication. And so I kept writing.
In
exactly six weeks, I had a completed draft of my memoir. Six weeks after that,
I received a contract for publication from Texas Review Press. Never has
something happened so quickly for me, and at the same time, never has something
felt so right. As always, I am
humbled and grateful to be able to share my story with others. I just hope I can
communicate something meaningful and lasting and hopeful to all who might read it.
______________________________________________________________________
David Armand was born and raised in Louisiana. He has worked
as a drywall hanger, a draftsman, and as a press operator in a flag printing
factory. He now teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also
serves as associate editor for Louisiana Literature Press. In 2010, he won the
George Garrett Fiction Prize for his first novel, The
Pugilist's Wife, which was published by Texas
Review Press. His second novel, Harlow,
is also published by Texas Review Press, released, September 4, 2014.
David lives with his wife and two children and is at work on his third novel.
His website can be found at www.davidarmandauthor.com
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