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I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!"—a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.
234 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1999
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685 people want to read
About the author
Patricia Hampl
43 books116 followersPatricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
December 21, 2014
The first essay let me know I'd found gold. Over and over, I was surprised by the direction of each essay thereafter. When I started the one on Milosz, I initially thought it was too highbrow for me--that I didn't know enough about Milosz work to understand the essay--but suddenly, several paragraphs in, I was captivated. That happened repeatedly, even in the Sylvia Plath essay which is weighty with contemplation. My favorite essays were the "Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War" and "The Need to Say." The last essay in the book, "Other People's Secrets," is a must-read for every memoir writer. Hampl doesn't solve the problem, but she looks at it from every angle possible with surprising and revealing compassion. I thoroughly enjoyed her language and her exploration of remembering as it pertains to memoir. "I Could Tell You Stories" is hands down the best book on writing (and reading) I've read this year.
July 18, 2014
A blend of memoir and thoughts about memoir, united by an inquiry into memory and its capture. A stealth memoir itself, really. Stunning personal writing in parts; in others, deep literary analysis of key historic memoirs. I flagged sometimes in the latter, yet Hampl's historic appreciations are worthy models for any memoirist-reviewer-critic. I will probably re-read this book, but skip the book reports unless I'm trying to emulate hers.
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May 30, 2008What I learned: that I love Patricia Hempl's prose.
That someone else understands the power of story and its complex dance with memory.
That hard truths and great art can be two sides of a single coin.
That someone else understands the power of story and its complex dance with memory.
That hard truths and great art can be two sides of a single coin.
January 28, 2009
One point that Patricia Hampl raises in “I Could Tell You Stories,” which I think is essential to keep in mind when working with autobiographical material, is that memory is not necessarily reliable or true. In the piece “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl recalls a memory of her first piano lesson, down to very specific sensory details, and then admits afterwards that what she had written was a lie. As she puts it: “no memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just, memory” (Hampl, 24). And yet at the same time it seems that there is very much an expectation that autobiographical writing should be factually true. I recently read of a WWII autobiography slated for movie adaptation that was discovered to be ‘not entirely factual,’ which resulted in a scandal and cancellation of the deal. The article suggested that this happens regularly, too regularly for the popularity of this kind of writing. Hampl suggests that “a reader has a right to expect a memoir to be as accurate as the writer’s memory can make it” (Hampl, 29), or at least that’s the assumption. Though why this is the case I’m not sure.
I instead agree that memory is unreliable and leads to invention. If you think about it, it’s not like memory is a faithful recording of past events, the way vinyl or film are. The mind is a malleable medium and works through the ambiguities of meaning. When we remember we can only approach the past from our present vantage point, which necessarily means the memory will be different from when it occurred, both in detail and meaning. Even though the details and importance of Hampl’s interaction with the woman in “Red Sky in the Morning” may have been such when the event first happened, they read now more as a story. The details and meaning may have changed in her mind over the years, becoming more focused on those elements worth retelling. When I read the sentence about this woman “drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance” (Hampl, 20), I was immediately reminded of a favorite line from one of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that I think succinctly captures this contradiction in the function of memory: “We had the experience but missed the meaning,/ And approach to the meaning restores the experience/ In a different form.” I suppose the challenge with memory is that meaning is not something we can ever posit beforehand, it always comes about after the facts. As Hampl puts it, returning to her lie about the importance of the nun in “Memory and Imagination:” “I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know” (Hampl, 27). Working with my own memories I’ve found a similar experience, I write what I thought was true, and then remember that it was different, and yet clearer, richer of detail and meaning. But it takes starting with what you think is true in order to get into that deeper reality of memory.
I instead agree that memory is unreliable and leads to invention. If you think about it, it’s not like memory is a faithful recording of past events, the way vinyl or film are. The mind is a malleable medium and works through the ambiguities of meaning. When we remember we can only approach the past from our present vantage point, which necessarily means the memory will be different from when it occurred, both in detail and meaning. Even though the details and importance of Hampl’s interaction with the woman in “Red Sky in the Morning” may have been such when the event first happened, they read now more as a story. The details and meaning may have changed in her mind over the years, becoming more focused on those elements worth retelling. When I read the sentence about this woman “drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance” (Hampl, 20), I was immediately reminded of a favorite line from one of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that I think succinctly captures this contradiction in the function of memory: “We had the experience but missed the meaning,/ And approach to the meaning restores the experience/ In a different form.” I suppose the challenge with memory is that meaning is not something we can ever posit beforehand, it always comes about after the facts. As Hampl puts it, returning to her lie about the importance of the nun in “Memory and Imagination:” “I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know” (Hampl, 27). Working with my own memories I’ve found a similar experience, I write what I thought was true, and then remember that it was different, and yet clearer, richer of detail and meaning. But it takes starting with what you think is true in order to get into that deeper reality of memory.
April 3, 2011
I bought this book as a freshman beginning the honors program in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Needless to say, college is busy, especially when one is also in the marching band, and I never got around to reading it for the book discussion...until a break between terms of graduate school. I think waiting that long to read it allowed me to appreciate it more than I would have had a read it when I was 18. This is especially true of Hampl's musings on her hometown of St. Paul. Reading this after living in Pittsburgh and away from the Twin Cities really moved me.
April 5, 2013
What a terrific book about the life of a reader. Hampl discusses a different female author in each chapter and describes why they've been important to her. I, too, am fond of several of the writers she comments on, but she brought me fresh perspectives on all of them.
August 6, 2012
These careful essays probe the ascendence of memoir in contemporary lit, with gratifying results. Hampl mixes autobiographical stories with thoughtful readings of Whitman, Augustine, Plath, Gertrude Stein, Anne Frank, and others (which led me to meet some of these writers anew). She finds that memory engages the future more than the past, that memoir owes more to poetry (in its focus on detail and fragment) than to fiction. I picked this book up to think through the ethics of telling someone else's story in nonfiction (for an essay I'm writing). Hampl has a chapter on this topic, but, alas, it's one of the most troubling in the book.
March 28, 2008
This book of essays begins with an image that is hard to forget. Hempl goes on to make some interesting observations on the life of writing. But what pulled me into the book even more was its setting in my own past time of the Vietnam War. I enjoyed watching Hempl try to make sense out of a confusing era. Though some of her essays would seem to fit better in another book--they don't belong here--the book is a good read.
September 5, 2014
For the first time in a while, I stopped reading this book before I finished it. I was expecting this to be mostly memoir, and it read more like a series of biographies. I found myself getting bored with it, and I have so many books in the queue, I gave it up. I enjoyed Patricia Hampl's memoir, The Florist's Daughter, so I was disappointed.
August 18, 2012
I'd add to other reviews that I appreciated Hampl's chapters "The Need To Say It" and "Other People's Secrets". She engages head on with the ethical issues around memoir writing.
January 4, 2018
This was an intimidating, if rewarding, read. Hampl is seriously too smart for me. With some of her essays, namely the literary criticism ones (especially the one about Sylvia Plath), I frankly couldn’t understand her ideas and sometimes even suspected her (perhaps out of my own inferiority feelings) of over-intellectualising/over-interpreting. But her more personal essays, and essays that engaged with memory directly, without the mediation of criticism, really interested me. I also admire her sensibility, the permanent twinkle in her eye, even when she tries to pontificate politically (I wrote ‘tries’ because she can never take herself too seriously, as much as she attempts, and this is one of the reasons why I love Hampl). I also thought the collection together was put really cleverly. Some one-author essay collections feel like a potluck, or a container to where the writer threw randomly whatever they happened to write that year(s). Maybe that was what Hampl did too, but it doesn’t feel like this. As the book promises, every essay adds something incremental to Hampl’s grappling with the art and meaning of memoir, and its (often fickle) relationship to memory.
December 12, 2013
Here we have a memoir of memoir writing, a kind of voyage through several writers’ experience in addressing life story in their own way. Hampl focuses on memoir by referring to her Czech Grandmother’s inability to write, enlisting Hampl’s skill to write letters for her to a sister in Los Angeles, then going from there. She details the writing genesis of such literary greats as Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and refers to iconic literature from far ranging authors like Saint Augustine and Anne Frank. A central theme of the work is the sanctity, no other word for it, of autobiographical writing. Hampl states that this writing must be done, preserved and cherished otherwise history can be and will be lost. She decries the very real efforts of certain angry, misguided or simply evil people who attempt to discredit certain historical events such as the Holocaust and the story told by Anne Frank. Those efforts to rewrite history, Hampl claims, will be successful if memoir is discouraged.
The book weaves back and forth between Hampl’s own experience writing about her family—which exercise gets her in hot water with her mother, but also allows the author to explain the writer’s responsibility to put it all down, regardless of what ‘all’ means.
This reader would like to have had much more of Patricia Hampl in this book. The author concentrates so much on other writers she seems to leave herself out in some ways. Be that as it may, the book offers stunning insights to the art and craft of memoir writing, and its place in the valued collection of literary work. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewer wrote, Hampl
"weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" I agree with that, so no wonder I wanted more of it.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me: A Memoir of Flying & Life
The book weaves back and forth between Hampl’s own experience writing about her family—which exercise gets her in hot water with her mother, but also allows the author to explain the writer’s responsibility to put it all down, regardless of what ‘all’ means.
This reader would like to have had much more of Patricia Hampl in this book. The author concentrates so much on other writers she seems to leave herself out in some ways. Be that as it may, the book offers stunning insights to the art and craft of memoir writing, and its place in the valued collection of literary work. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewer wrote, Hampl
"weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" I agree with that, so no wonder I wanted more of it.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me: A Memoir of Flying & Life
March 10, 2012
This is a really amazing book, collection of essays, exploration of the ways and means of non-fiction and memoir, through ten or so different lens. Honestly, I'm not sure how this book ended up on my list, but it's probably the best overview of memoir-writing I've seen, in terms of laying out the biggest questions you might have about memoir writing and then diving in to wrestle with them. I think I'd accept a criticism that said this book limits itself to marquee concerns and stays away from small fish, which are probably pretty interesting, too. But as a broad look at the field of writing, it's pretty compelling.
Near as I can tell, these are individually written essays that are then collected together for this book-- so you get a range of kinds of writing, from the opening memoir-reflective essay about paino lessons to essays that feel more like extended book reviews-- like those on Anne Frank and others. Maybe there are more of that second, less personally rooted kind than the others, which maybe would be a problem for some readers, but as an academic, I found it fascinating-- whatever her technique or focus, Hampl tells interesting stories very well.
This is a great book, highly recommended.
Near as I can tell, these are individually written essays that are then collected together for this book-- so you get a range of kinds of writing, from the opening memoir-reflective essay about paino lessons to essays that feel more like extended book reviews-- like those on Anne Frank and others. Maybe there are more of that second, less personally rooted kind than the others, which maybe would be a problem for some readers, but as an academic, I found it fascinating-- whatever her technique or focus, Hampl tells interesting stories very well.
This is a great book, highly recommended.
February 20, 2011
This is an amazing book that may be hard for some people to grasp. When I first picked it up I thought that it would merely be some essays on memories and memoir, but it turned out to be so much more that that. Hampl uses delicate prose to not only talk about her own experiences with memory, but the experiences of many others, including Milosz, Plath, Whitman, St. Augustus and Anne Frank. Not only does Hampl explore memory, but she explores the differences in what the "self" is seen as depending on which country you are from, and how different people write from the perspective of "self" as in their own selves contained, or "self" as in their past, their country, their experiences and the world at large. She applies all of her ruminations to herself, and some of the essays are very deeply philosophical.
I think this book is a must-read for anyone working int he genre of creative nonfiction, and for anyone who writes essays.Some of her essays are much denser than others, but all of them are very worthwhile.
I think this book is a must-read for anyone working int he genre of creative nonfiction, and for anyone who writes essays.Some of her essays are much denser than others, but all of them are very worthwhile.
May 19, 2011
Hampl has much to say -- about identity, imagination, history, the self, the struggle to remember and the desire to forget, and about memory, privacy and memoir. “The privacy of individual experience is not a right... it is an inevitability that returns no matter what invasion seems to overtake it.” It “is bred of memory’s intimacy with the idiosyncrasy of the imagination.” (223) She questions the right and the reasonableness of writing about the intimacies of others. The recounting of experiences, particularly those of others, can be “transparently self-serving or self-dramatizing,” she writes. But, she continues, it can also be “the necessary literature of witness. Historic truth rests on such testimony.” (223) Hampl’s insights and truths rise to the surface in this book worthy of experiencing again and again. There is a lot here a writer would do well to remember.
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August 20, 2007This book has some excellent essays on how great writers and thinkers think and write about memory and imagination and how they intersect. Hampl is a true essayist, especially when she is dealing with others' ideas like St. Augustine, Czeslaw Milosz, Whitman, Edith Stein, Anne Frank, and Sylvia Plath. Her style can get very academic-- dense and complicated ideas in a very matter-of-fact tone. And I appreciate these more serious moments, but often I find myself more drawn to her more personal moments that show her intellectual prowess through more personal subjects like Mrs. Beranek, who she took Czech lessons from and almost learned her secrets of WWII, but of course ended up learning more about herself than anything else.
April 6, 2013
As a writer who explores the memoir form a lot, I was very interested in this essay collection's constant theme of memory. The essays range in topic from Czeslaw Milosz to Edith Stein to Hampl's childhood, and while I certainly have favorites, the collection as a whole expresses really important ideas about the practice, scope, and ethics of memoir. While Hampl's prose occasionally feels heavy and sentimental, her work's articulate voice and high-caliber thinking make this book worthwhile for anyone interested in the mysteries of memory. I plan to read her other works, including _A Romantic Education_ and _Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life_.
October 26, 2014
Hampl's book, about memoir and memory, contained excellent personal and literary essays. "To create one's life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and it also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political anaylysis can." Her writing on Whitman, Milosz, Anne Frank, Edith Stein, and especially on the Confessions are all beautiful and insightful meditations on very different methods of self-formation than what are common in the modern West. They are not about experience first of all, but of memory, the reconstruction and reflection on that experience. Just wonderful.
December 11, 2016
Part memoir, part academic essay, Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories is an important book that dutifully covers the memoir genre. Its title hints at the overarching theme of the book-- stories that go untold and the desire to tell stories. Hampl's strongest writing comes when she writes about the self, but her essays ranging from Anne Frank to Czeslaw Milosz are also enlightening and made interesting, particularly by Hampl's beautiful, poetic prose. It's also clever in its telling, bringing together the objective and the subjective-- writing academic essays while remaining autobiographical.
April 26, 2015
It took me a while to get through this book but only because its not a book to read fast. Patricia Hampl's range is vast. How many people can write with such authority about history, philosophy, poetry, religion and culture all through the lens of "writing about memory?" I was riveted by her essays on Sylvia Plath, Edith Stein and Anne Frank and paid close attention to the wisdom she passes on about writing autobiographically. As I leaf through the book now, I realize that I'll have to keep it handy... Seldom do the books I've read have so many passages marked, starred, underlined and with comments written in the margins. Its not an easy read but so worth it
February 25, 2013
Well written and engaging - I felt like I learned a great deal from Hampl, while never feeling like I was being taught. It felt more like a supportive conversation with a learned friend. I preferred the chapters where she talked about her own experience of writing her own memoir pieces, rather than the sections involving other writers - they weren't poor but just depended more on me knowing about the reader she was discussing, which in some but not all cases I did.
November 4, 2017
I liked the way the paper back cover felt, literally - to my hands holding the book. It felt as if it was a book that should be held and read over and over again. I enjoyed the opening story but nothing else. I didn't feel that this was a book about memoir and am baffled by all the great reviews of it. The author displays a fluent educated prose but that doesn't necessarily equate to an enjoyable read.
October 6, 2014
Sublime. Hampl explores memory, identity, and the stories we tell about our lives. She writes about her own life, but also about Anne Frank, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Czeslaw Milosz, her elderly Czech tutor, St. Augustine, and my favorite, Edith Stein. A rich, important book - which also delves deeply into 20th century history, especially WWII. Can't wait to read more of her stuff.
May 24, 2015
I have read (A Romantic Education, The Florist’s Daughter) and reread (Blue Arabesque) books by Ms. Hampl. I did not enjoy this book. Her analyses of other memoirists seemed a little forced and were about authors with awful life experiences. Give it a pass and read The Florist’s Daughter instead.
October 26, 2009
A nice collection of essays. I found the ones about memoir to be the most compelling, but even the one about Sylvia Plath held my attention - and I thought I'd never read another literary essay after graduation. haha.
December 6, 2008
Lovely essays about writing memoirs and reading them, the writer's life and the worthiness of a life making sense of the ordinary.
March 21, 2013
Not what I was looking for at the moment...
September 14, 2010
Some chapters of this book were well above my experience level to fully grasp. I picked the ones I could relate to and had to let go of the others.
October 30, 2014
Some of the middle chapters were a bit dry, but the beginning and the end were fabulous--full of insights into why people write memoirs, how they pursue it, and why it is meaningful. Awesome.
May 9, 2016
Such a beautiful and teasing book. I wanted to be told the stories, and I was, and yet there seemed to be so much more untold.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews