George Mason has spent a career drawing other writers' stories to the surface. In his Memorygram memoir, he turns the same patient attention on his own life, and the math comes out beautifully simple.
George Mason is a writer who has, for years, made his living listening to other writers.
Through his project The Authors Road, he has crossed the country with a camera and a notebook, coaxing stories from novelists and poets, asking the patient questions, sitting with the long pauses. It's the kind of work that requires you to disappear a little. To get out of your own way so someone else's voice can come through.
In his Memorygram memoir, OK, I Made It Here, Now What?, he's finally let himself take the chair on the other side of the camera.
The book is gentle, observational, a little funny, the way good memoir is when a person stops performing themselves long enough to actually look. And one chapter in, you realize the man who has spent decades drawing out other people's stories has a remarkable one of his own.
A Writer's Eye
Here is what a writer's memoir looks like, and what a non-writer's often misses: the small moment, preserved.
When his daughter Cassidy was little, she kept having the same nightmare. A tiger was chasing her. She would climb a tree to escape, but the tiger would wait at the base of the trunk, patient, certain she would eventually fall.
Most parents would say, it isn't real, go back to sleep. George said something else.
"I asked her if she had tried to talk to him in a calm voice and made him her friend. The next night she did that and reported how her dream tiger became her friend, her personal protector. She said his name was Shere Khan… Over the years Shere Khan often would visit in her dreams. It was her own magical icon, and when we traveled to India high on our list was to spend time in one of the tiger preserves…"
— George Mason, from his Memorygram memoir
That's the writer in him. To recognize, at the time, that the moment was a moment. To remember it, decades later, with the calm voice still intact. To know that the right detail isn't the tiger but the trip to India that followed it, the way a child's invention became a family pilgrimage.
His chapters are full of moments like this. Quiet ones. The kind that don't end up in most memoirs because most people don't think to write them down.
The Math of Love
Late in the book, George stops to consider the question of love directly. He has been married a long time. He is the father of three daughters. He is, by his own admission, a man who has felt many things.
And here, again, the writer's instinct takes over, to find the precise sentence, the one that says the true thing without overstating it.
"I've loved many times but truly loved but once. Or three times when I count our remarkable daughters."
— George Mason
It's a sentence that does what George does best, which is to hold two ideas at once without bending either of them. One love, and three. A wife, and the daughters who came from that. A writer who has spent a lifetime helping other people find the right words finally finding his own, and using them, of course, on the people he loves most.
Every family has a story worth keeping. Memorygram helps you write yours.
George's memoir began with a single prompt and a writer's eye. Yours can begin too.