{"id":2185,"date":"2021-09-08T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/09\/08\/from-sept-11-to-covid-using-the-personal-to-write-the-global\/"},"modified":"2024-03-05T16:49:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:49:53","slug":"from-sept-11-to-covid-using-the-personal-to-write-the-global","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/09\/08\/from-sept-11-to-covid-using-the-personal-to-write-the-global\/","title":{"rendered":"From Sept. 11 to COVID: Using the personal to write the global"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n H<\/span>ow do you write about a shared event that changes the world, but that we each experience personally? And how do you then share that personal experience back to the world in a meaningful way?

I\u2019ve been pondering those questions as a memoir writer who, like everyone, is living through a stubborn global pandemic. I find myself wondering about the many, many retrospective stories COVID-19 will inspire in coming years, and what will make those stories work. That led me to some lessons I\u2019ve learned in my own journey as a journalist and writer. And that<\/em> led me to remembering what I learned writing about another shared but very personal event \u2014 9\/11 \u2014 and how that might help write about COVID.

First, the memory:

When I emigrated to America from India in the late 1980s, I was always struck when people said that they remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. More than 20 years had passed, and they still remembered as if it were last week.

Then, a few years later, a similar thing happened to me.

At 8:45 AM on September 11, 2001, I arrived at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, pregnant and expecting a tour of the maternity ward. But the nurses behind the reception desk paid me no attention. They were all staring at the tiny television screen above the reception desk.

“Excuse me,” I said in that plaintive voice used by pregnant women everywhere.\u00a0“I’m here for the maternity tour.”

“No tours today,” said a nurse without turning around.\u00a0 “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

Moments later, sirens wailed and the intercom in the hospital began calling doctors and nurses needed to the entrance \u2014 STAT<\/em>.\u00a0I had no idea what was happening. The nurse\u2019s blunt comment was surreal. There was no instant Twitter, Facebook or other social media at the time.\u00a0Dazed and tired, I sat down in the hospital reception area thinking that there was some medical emergency and, when it was over, I could get my tour.

Then another nurse paused briefly as she rushed by.\u00a0\u201cLook, kid,\u201d she said.\u00a0 \u201cGo home. Something terrible has happened.\u00a0A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.\u00a0It is a terrorist attack.\u201d

Her last two words chilled me. My husband worked for Morgan Stanley then, and they had offices in the twin towers. I raced out of the hospital. Smoke was rising in Lower Manhattan. Desperate, I tried to call, but he didn\u2019t pick up.

Even then, I didn\u2019t realize the enormity of what would ensue in the next few hours, days and years. Yet to this day, I remember the face of the nurse who took a moment to explain what was happening.\u00a0I remember the purple coat I was wearing that morning.\u00a0I remember people running through the streets as I came out of the hospital, and the rising bile that caused me to vomit into a waste basket on the side of the road. And I remember somehow flagging a cab to take me across Central Park to our home on the Upper West Side.

Minutes later, my husband called.\u00a0He was at the Midtown office of his firm \u2014 not Downtown.\u00a0He was safe.\u00a0When I tried to call, he was already on the phone to our parents \u2014 his and mine \u2014 in India to assure them that we were both safe. Twenty minutes later, all international lines went down.

Over the next few days, streams of our friends would walk up to our apartment \u2014 the bridges and tunnels were closed \u2014 and stay for hours or even days.

Building from intimate details<\/strong><\/h3>
As storytellers of any genre, most of us know in our guts when we are in the midst of a newsworthy event. But what we do with that intuition, or the information we discover about it, is up to us.

In the hours and days after 9\/11, my writer friends and colleagues filed reports to editors in other parts of the country and the world; anyone with an international connection worked their contacts and fed them stories. Some kept journals in the moment that they later mined for magazine pieces or even books. They practiced what is necessary for anyone covering a major event: They remembered things big and small, asked questions, and kept notes.

The stories we tell are often infused with and influenced by our lived memories.\u00a0There are no end of stories from 9\/11. But those that get told, and how they are told, depends on who is telling them.

For example, as a feminist and native of India, I found myself particularly interested in the tales of Muslim women. I remember how Muslim identity shifted, not just among my friends in New York City or in America, but around the world as some Muslims began choosing their religious identity over their secular or national identity. As police in New York began rounding up Muslims on the blanket suspicion that they were somehow connected to terrorism, my British friend Ameena came to the East Side school our daughters attended wearing \u2014 for the first time \u2014 a hijab. This was the beginning of a global trend as Muslim women whose mothers had shed the hijab and the burqa re-embraced it to show solidarity to their persecuted Muslim brethren. Donning the hijab, Ameena told me, gave her an opening to explain her faith to unknowing friends.

Now, as we live through and then look back on the COVID-19 years, what are the moments you will remember? This is a useful mental model if you want to write memoir or narratives that are not time-bound: How do you tell a <\/em>story, the<\/em> story and your<\/em> story, all anchored by a central event?

Writing through the trajectory of time and memory<\/strong><\/h3>
Kennedy was assassinated in an instant. The planes hit the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania in the 9\/11 attacks in about 75 minutes.

But the COVID pandemic has been with us for most of two years, and shows little sign of abating. In that sense, this pandemic is more like the world wars in which central events, not just their aftermath, carried on for years. How do you write about a world-changing event that is diffused through time?

If you are a personal essayist or a memoir writer, you have to begin with the self.

As the late William Zinsser said in his essay, \u201cHow to write a memoir,\u201d<\/a> published in The American Scholar, \u201cRemember that you are the protagonist in your own memoir, the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control.\u201d

There are two key terms here: \u201cnarrative trajectory\u201d and \u201ccontrol.\u201d\u00a0The narrative trajectory is a specific arc that your story will follow; it will be unlike anyone else\u2019s story, even about the same event, because it will be imbued with personal details.\u00a0A degree of control is something that all writers wield over their material.\u00a0But in a memoir, control becomes even more urgent.\u00a0Unlike news pieces where it is customary to retain some detachment and neutrality, and to explore multiple points of view, a memoir must be fiercely intimate.

So memoir-based stories, told about the time of COVID, must have both a specific and personal point of view. Easier said than written. An obvious narrative arc in these times, for example, is \u201cI got COVID. I nearly died. I survived. Here\u2019s how it changed me.\u201d But that alone is not enough. What if you didn\u2019t get COVID? Does that make your experience less meaningful than that of someone who did?

Essential truth and questions<\/strong><\/h3>
Memoir comes from the French word for memory. Modern-day masters of the form like Mary Karr<\/a> and Tobias Wolff<\/a> mine their memories to find gems.\u00a0These gems are not always pretty.\u00a0In fact, the most valuable are often the opposite: They are raw and reveal deep hurt.\u00a0But here is one thing memoirists, no matter how personal their perspectives, do not do: They don\u2019t invent events.<\/em> In \u201cThe Art of Memoir,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Karr alludes to this difference by quoting a fellow writer. \u201c\u2019I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.\u2019\u201d

Meaning is a word with weight and gravitas. It imbues today\u2019s journalism in myriad ways, ranging from peurile lists \u2014 \u201cTen things I learned from being quarantined\u201d \u2014 to essays about mental health issues that are emerging from COVID isolation. One way to search for your own meaning in the pandemic madness, or any non-singular experience, is to probe your past to recover traumas that you have forgotten, then link it to the present situation.

This is what Amy Tan<\/a> does in her fiction and in her memoir, \u201cWhere the Past Begins: A Writer\u2019s Memoir.\u201d As she said in a recent interview for Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/a>, “Everything that had happened between my mother and me, despite how terrible it was at times \u2014 this is what made me a writer.” No wonder Tan\u2019s novels involve mother-daughter relationships.\u00a0Were she to write about COVID, it is highly likely that she would link it to parental trauma.

Most memoirs compress timelines in the interest of pacing and drama.\u00a0While COVID seems unending, it lends itself naturally to this because it has come in waves.

Ruth Reichl<\/a>, the master of the food memoir (and former editor of Gourmet, which I wrote for), has talked about this.\u00a0As she says in the author\u2019s note of her first book, \u201cTender at the Bone:\u201d<\/a> \u201cEverything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual. In some cases, I have compressed events; in others I have made two people into one. I have occasionally embroidered.\u201d

One way to use all this wisdom advice if you\u2019re writing memoir about COVID is to ask yourself: How will you remember this pandemic, say five years from now? Will you remember the dull malaise of being stuck at home? Will you reminisce about the shocking lack of community that each of us felt? Will the unhealed trauma of this age include suspicion and rift between the vaxxers and the anti-vaxxers? If you are a doctor or frontline worker, will your memory of this time be one of rage and frustration? Or is your attention held by the daily indignities that those of us who have lost jobs, livelihoods and loved ones feel?

For me, personal memoir from a shared event boils down to three fundamental questions:

    \t
  1. What is a<\/em> story that you can tell about the pandemic?<\/li>
    \t
  2. What is the<\/em> story of this time?<\/li>
    \t
  3. What is your<\/em> story?<\/li>
    <\/ol>
    ***

    Shoba Narayan<\/strong><\/a> is an author of four books, journalist, columnist and content creator.\u00a0 Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler, the Financial Times, The Atlantic and other publications.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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