LifeStory Briefs

To see how this works, study the excerpt on the right, from a book about a woman who forsakes her activist city life to live on an island off the coast of Maine, in a cabin with no plumbing, electricity, or phone. Shulman’s family and friends all think she’s gone crazy. Shulman (recently returned from her island retreat) is having lunch with a friend, who spends most of the time complaining about her mother.

Katherine and her mother are not important characters in Shulman’s book and neither appears again. Why does Shulman report the conversation in such detail? Because the conflict in this dialogue (the opposing concerns of the narrator and Katherine) tell us something important about the narrator’s commitment to her own need for privacy and seclusion. Katherine’s complaints about her mother’s behavior resemble the complaints the narrator imagines her own children making, and force the narrator to defend the reclusive mother against an interfering daughter. "Anyway, what’s the matter with being reclusive? What’s wrong with it?"

In fact, this conversation is central to the main themes of Shulman’s book: her need to make her own personal choices about privacy even when her use of her private time seems irrational to others; her need to continually redefine herself, even when this means changing family traditions ("This year she told them she wants them to do Christmas."); her need to resist others’ moral judgements about what she’s doing ("It’s just wrong...something is terribly wrong."

To put it a different way, in this scene Shulman dramatizes her own family’s opposing objections through dialogue with Katherine and reveals, quite cleverly, how psychologically and morally inadequate those opposing judgements are. We can schematize it this way:
Katherine: my mother wants to be alone
Alix: but that’s her choice
K: her need for privacy is irrational and unhealthy
A: but it makes her happy
K: we feel left out of her life, so she should get therapy
A: but privacy is what she prefers
K: what she prefers is wrong

You can also notice, in this scene, the use of "dialogue summary." The first paragraph sums up and condenses several moments of conversation, as well as setting the stage for the conflict that follows. Dialogue summary is also a useful tool when you don’t want to repeat something that your reader already knows.

Another useful dialogue technique is something we might call "between the lines" speech--which sometimes isn‘t speech at all. At one point in this scene, the narrator laughs. She’s really saying something like Can’t you see how foolish it is to impose your expectations on her? When Katherine doesn’t get it, the narrator spells it out: "Maybe she prefers her own company." Between the lines, the narrator is affirming her own choices: I prefer my own company. I refuse to do Christmas this year.

If you’re going to use dialogue in your memoir, be sure you make it sound natural. This means using contractions: What’s wrong instead of What is wrong. It may also mean using sentence fragments (No exercise), one-word sentences (Nothing.) and other non-grammatical constructions. In fact, the best way to achieve writing that sounds like speech is to read it aloud after you’ve written it, trying out different ways of making it seem more natural. As one of my writer friends says, "Hey! This is the fun part of the work!"--Susan Albert