Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Sue William Silverman/@SueSilverman
” I am large. I contained multitudes.” Walt Whitman
I am honored to feature Memoir Author, Professional Speaker and Teacher Sue William Silverman in this WOW! Woman on Writing Book Tour for her latest memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. I have been a fan of Sue’s work since I started getting serious about writing my own memoir five years ago. Her memoir writing resource book, Fearless Confessions as well as her award-winning memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction have guided many of us who are searching for voice and story in our own journey to memoir.
My reviews of The Pat Boone Fan Club can be found on Amazon , Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing
Welcome, Sue!
Confessions of a Memoirist: My Serial Personalities
As a woman, I live one life. As a writer of memoir, however, I live several. With each book, I observe myself as if through a different lens of a camera, each revealing its own story. In my new memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, I’m a Pat Boone groupie. But before Pat Boone….
Personality #1
After I wrote my first book, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, I thought, that’s it. I’ve written the story of my life: the loss, fear, and confusion I felt growing up with a scary father. I believed this was my entire story. One memoir per person.
Except, after the book was published, I thought: What about the sexual addiction with which I struggled for years, a result of the child abuse?
Personality #2
Only by writing Love Sick did I discover the meaning of my addict life – the double life I lived. In public, I appeared a “normal” married woman; no one knew that, in secret, I had one affair after another.
After these two memoirs I thought – finally – I had revealed all my secrets, written everything possible about myself.
But wait: There’s more to me than being an incest survivor/sex addict, thank goodness!
Personalities #3, 4, 5, etc.
As a middle-aged baby boomer I came to realize there are many different strands to my life. This realization formed during the writing of the new book, which began – fortuitously, ironically – when I just happened to see a photograph of Pat Boone in my local newspaper. He was scheduled to perform a concert near my home in West Michigan. This encounter, which, I feel, was fated to happen, began the long journey of writing this book.
First, for background: Pat Boone was a 1960s pop-music idol. As a teenager living in New Jersey, I had a crush on him and once attended “The Pat Boone Chevy Show,” broadcast from Manhattan.
Now, as an adult, I planned to barge backstage after the concert in Michigan in order to tell Pat Boone what he’s meant to me all these years.
In The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, I depict how my childhood crush went far beyond just liking his music. Three separate encounters with Pat Boone frame my quest to belong to the dominant culture. With his wholesome, squeaky-clean image, he represented everything my Jewish father was not. I wanted the overtly Christian Pat Boone to adopt me, to be my father.
Beyond my father, I also wanted to flee my Russian Jewish heritage and fit into the WASPy suburb in which I lived. I wanted to look like one of Pat Boone’s four daughters – resemble all my Christian high-school friends. This, then, is another aspect of myself, another personality: one seeking a sense of belonging.
I portray this search for identity in various other ways throughout the book. For example, I also write about an obsession with a homeless tramp in the West Indies – someone who, like Pat Boone, might likewise be a savior. In another chapter, I’m a teenage Jersey girl, attending a predominantly Christian high school, in love with a boy who resembles Pat Boone. In yet another section, set in Israel, I’m a kibbutznik enamored with a paratrooper and his cute red paratrooper’s cap. Another “me” vacations in Yugoslavia with an anti-Semitic boyfriend. Elsewhere I play the role of wife – albeit one having an existential crisis when I move, with a husband who doesn’t really love me, to Galveston, Texas.
As I wrote each of these sections, and others, I was, in fact, exploring various aspects of myself, all held together by this life-long crisis of spirituality, of belonging. In that quest, I kept trying on different identities, seeking one that fit.
What Next?
Now that the Pat Boone book is published, I’ve begun yet another memoir. I don’t have a title yet, but in it I meditate upon that part of me that’s a quasi-hypochondriac fueled by an irrational (is it?) fear of dying. We’ll see where it goes!
And after that I’ll write…. Who knows?
Why so many memoirs? At its essence, I believe a memoir can contain only one major theme. For example, there was no way I could have squeezed incest and sex addiction into one book, let alone Pat Boone!
Among these three books, I move from a confused, lost girl, to an edgy sex addict, to a much more ironic Jewish liberal Democrat with a crush on a man, Pat Boone, who’s a member of the conservative Tea Party. Each book has a different theme, a different energy, different metaphors, different voices, different tones, different words.
Sure, I myself am one person; yet, as a memoir writer, I tease various strands of myself apart in order to examine each as fully and consciously as possible.
After all, whether we explore them through writing or not, don’t we all have many different selves?
What are some of yours?
***
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2014
Paperback: 248 pages
Synopsis:
Gentile reader, and you, Jews, come too. Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us—or should. Pat Boone is our first stop. Now a Tea Party darling, Boone once shone as a squeaky-clean pop music icon of normality, an antidote for Silverman’s own confusing and dangerous home, where being a Jew in a Christian school wasn’t easy, and being the daughter of the Anti-Boone was unspeakable. And yet somehow Silverman found her way, a “gefilte fish swimming upstream,” and found her voice, which in this searching, bracing, hilarious, and moving book tries to make sense of that most troubling American condition: belonging, but to what?
Picking apricots on a kibbutz, tramping cross-country in a loathed Volkswagen camper, appearing in a made-for-television version of her own life: Silverman is a bobby-soxer, a baby boomer, a hippy, a lefty, and a rebel with something to say to those of us—most of us—still wondering what to make of ourselves.
***
Sue William Silverman, author bio:
Sue William Silverman’s new memoir is The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. Her two other memoirs are Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which is also a Lifetime TV movie, and Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. As a professional speaker, Sue has appeared on The View, Anderson Cooper 360, and more. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Website: Sue William Silverman
Twitter @SueSilverman
Amazon link to The Pat Boone Fan Club
How about you? How would you answer Sue’s question about your “different selves”?
All commenters names will be entered into a drawing and the lucky winner whose name will be selected randomly will receive a copy of Sue’s memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club.
We’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~
This Week:
Wednesday, 4/30/14
I will be a guest on Author and Creativity Coach Nina Amir‘s blog. Write NonFiction Now:
“10 Lessons Learned by a Memoir Writer”
Thursday, 5,01/14 12:00- 12:30 pm ET
Google+ Hangout Interview with Memoir Author and Marketing Coach Sonia Marsh:
Sonia will interview me about ” What You Really Need to Know About Writing and Marketing a Book in 2014″
Next week:
Monday, 5/05/14
“Introducing Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Pubslush Memoir Campaign”
Thursday, 5/08/14
“Why Fear is the Key to Unlock Your Best Writing: A Guest Post by Joe Bunting”
Thank you so much, Kathy! I’m delighted you’re hosting my blog on memoir writing!
My pleasure, Sue! I am honored to have you as my guest this week and look forward to a lively conversation about your latest memoir.
Hi Sue,
It’s wonderful to watch your career and learn about writing from you (via Facebook). I remember when my brother, Chris Noel, handed me your first book before it was even published. It blew me away; I never forgot it. Now I’m struggling to finish a memoir (on its third incarnation) and I find this blog post very helpful. It also reminds me of the writing workshop I am running, in which we focus in on separate parts of ourselves to learn the parts’ stories. I love the synchronicity!
Best of luck with the new book!
~ Jennie Noel
Welcome, Jennie! I’m happy Sue’s post resonated with you. Thanks for stopping by and best wishes on your own memory writer’s journey.
Hi, Jennie — you know, I remember this, too, when Chris gave you a copy of that book — years ago! Thank you so very much for continuing to follow my writing, all these years later. That really means a lot to me.
I’m *delighted* that you’re both writing and teaching memoir. Well, if it makes you feel any better (?!), I went through about ten drafts of the Pat Boone book before, finally, it was finished. It IS such a long process to carry a manuscript through so many revisions. But the important thing, of course, is to stay with it! Your voice is important and I look forward to reading your memoir one day. All best wishes to you with it…and with the teaching.
I’m delighted you found this blog helpful.
Warm wishes,
Sue
Sue’s story (stories?) is more than 3-dimensional. What popped into my mind was the image of a crystal with multiple facets. The juxtaposition of all of your “lives” is stunning. Sue, I admire your willingness early in your writing career to show vulnerability, a must, it seems, if a memoir is to touch the heart of the reader.
Yes, we all have different selves: plain Mennonite girl, traveling artist’s wife, mother, English prof, writer are some of mine. I suspect readers are drawn to the idea of multiple personalities simply because we detect those tendencies in our own selves. What a way to turn a pathological label into gold! (The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins also comes to mind.)
Kathy, thank you for hosting such a fascinating author this week.
Hi Marian, my pleasure and thank you for your wonderful comments. You bring up so many valuable points–vulnerability as a way to connect, the “image of a crystal with multiple facets.” And thanks for sharing your own different selves. Very thought-provoking.
HI, Marian, thank you so much for reading the blog, and I’m delighted it resonated with you. I’m fascinated by the various aspects that you see in yourself: the plain Mennonite girl, wife, mother, writer, etc. A memoir could be written about each of these “selves.” And I love your image about the facets of a crystal! Exactly! We’re all — all of us — way too complicated to “force” into one memoir. A memoir is a slice of a life, not a whole life. And by differentiating these personas, and writing a memoir about each, we have the space and room to fully explore each! All my best to you! Sue
What an encouraging read. I hadn’t thought of looking at my very different selves like that. Now instead of wondering what I could possibly write about in a memoir, I see I have many stories to tell. Thank you, Sue.
HI, Jayne, I’m delighted you found this blog useful! Yes, that’s true: you have many stories to tell! And isn’t that good news?! It means, as writers, we have many books inside of us, all waiting to be written. I wish you all the best with your writing! Sue
Sue, I so admire your clarity and courage as a writer. I still see you in the chair at the Bear River Writer’s retreat, listening and offering helpful counsel to each person in the room. Thank you for being one of my many mentors in memoir.
And congratulations on making new memoir out of different facets of your personality at different stages of growth.
I love the cover of your new book and hope to read it soon. Perhaps while I am on my own book tour with Blush, the book you helped me write.
I’m also keenly interested in your reflections on health and death. The next phase I am drawn to is living into my mission statement selected in 2004: “to prepare for the hour of my death, one good day at a time. And to help others do the same.”
Hi, Shirley! I LOVED that Bear River conference as well. You were such an important and authentic part of our workshop. It means a great, great deal to me that this workshop — and I — contributed to the writing of your memoir! I’m just so pleased. And I’m delighted you like the cover of the Pat Boone book! I have to say I kind of love it, too. It’s really perfect. Have a wonderful time on your book tour, and thanks so much for stopping by here! Terrific to “see” you, even virtually! Sue
I’m reading Pat Boone right now and I love the willingness Sue has to write so honestly. Also her prose is beautiful.
Gay, I’m truly delighted that you’re reading the book — and right now! I’m deeply appreciative of your comments. They mean so much Thank you!! Sue
Sue, all of your memoirs sound fascinating and you are so courageous to share so much of yourself. I found your perspective on writing different memoirs to address different themes intriguing, but what really resonates with me is this line “With each book, I observe myself as if through a different lens of a camera, each revealing its own story.” Maybe their are more stories left in me?
Pat, thanks so much for reading the blog…and for your wonderful support. That means a lot to me! I’m also thrilled that the blog resonated with you. And, yes, I’m thoroughly convinced that all of us memoir writers have many different stories to tell…so definitely there are more stories in you. I’m working on my fourth now, and who knows what will happen after that. We go through so many different stages and events in our lives, and each is its own story. I wish you all the very best with your writing. And, again, thank you!