Boing Boing » memoir

Memoir of raising an autistic boy who found himself with Disney World's help

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 15:32:34 +0000

Back in June, blogged about Ben, a young man with autism who had a fierce devotion to the Snow White ride at Walt Disney World, and who was the last person to ride it, after more than 3,500 turns on it.

Ben's father, Ron Miles, has published a memoir of his life with Ben, in which he narrates his journey as the father of a child with a profound mental disability, his love affair with Disney parks, and Ben's development through the extraordinary adults in his life (including some very special and caring Disney cast-members). It's an unflinching -- and sometimes unflattering -- account of the challenges of parenting and the special challenges of parenting a child with autism.

I read it very quickly, and often had to dab at my eyes, but it's not a weeper, really -- there's plenty of hilarity and thoughtful wonder and appreciation of the sweetness of parenting as well as the difficulties. Here's the blurb I sent to Ron for the book: "Brimming with heart and tragedy overcome, this is a book that captures the tribulations of parenthood, the magic of Disney World, and the wonderful online communities that allow us to lend aid and comfort to strangers around the world."

It's called 3500: An Autistic Boy's Ten-Year Romance with Snow White, and it's just out, and I heartily recommend it to you.

3500: An Autistic Boy's Ten-Year Romance with Snow White

Little House on the Prairie, serial killers, and the nature of memoir

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:53:56 +0000

Over the weekend, I read a couple of the posts blogger Ana Mardoll has been writing in which she deconstructs some of the weirder/more objectionable elements of the Little House books. That sent me looking for an essay I'd read several years ago on the actual history of how the Osage people were removed from southeastern Kansas ... which is given a prominent, if rather warped, role in Little House on the Prairie.

I didn't find that essay, but I did find several references to a story I had never, ever heard before. Turns out, the Ingalls family's sojourn in Kansas might have overlapped with that of a family of serial killers. At the American Indians in Children's Literature blog, Debbie Reese writes about stumbling across the story in the transcript of a speech Laura Ingalls Wilder gave in 1937. Here's an excerpt from that transcript:

There were Kate Bender and two men, her brothers, in the family and their tavern was the only place for travelers to stop on the road south from Independence. People disappeared on that road. Leaving Independence and going south they were never heard of again. It was thought they were killed by Indians but no bodies were ever found.

Then it was noticed that the Benders’ garden was always freshly plowed but never planted. People wondered. And then a man came from the east looking for his brother, who was missing.

... In the cellar underneath was the body of a man whose head had been crushed by the hammer. It appeared that he had been seated at the table back to the curtain and had been struck from behind it. A grave was partly dug in the garden with a shovel close by. The posse searched the garden and dug up human bones and bodies. One body was that of a little girl who had been buried alive with her murdered parents. The garden was truly a grave-yard kept plowed so it would show no signs. The night of the day the bodies were found a neighbor rode up to our house and talked earnestly with Pa. Pa took his rifle down from its place over the door and said to Ma, “The vigilantes are called out.” Then he saddled a horse and rode away with the neighbor. It was late the next day when he came back and he never told us where he had been. For several years there was more or less a hunt for the Benders and reports that they had been seen here or there. At such times Pa always said in a strange tone of finality, “They will never be found.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder told this story in the context of explaining how the published stories about her childhood differed from the reality. She deliberately left out some things, she explained, because she wasn't trying to tell a 100% un-edited history. She was writing a children's book. Serial killers murdered by vigilantes doesn't make for great children's literature.

Which makes sense ... except that there's no way Pa Ingalls could have been involved in the vigilante justice meted out on the Benders. As blogger and literature Ph.D. candidate Kate points out at the Condensery, the Benders weren't actually exposed until 1873. This was two years after the Ingalls family left Kansas.

So why tell people that you left a story out of your memoir, when that story is not true? That's an interesting question, and I think it calls up some of the key issues involved with writing about your own past — especially your own childhood. How much do you actually remember about early childhood?

Laura Ingalls Wilder would have been only 4 years old when she lived in Kansas. I do remember things that must have come from when I was around that age, but the memories I feel most comfortable calling real aren't particularly detailed. Or long. Instead, what I have are more like still pictures, rather than short movies—a fuzzy scene, a bit of emotion that scene created for me, and that's it. But there are other "memories", too. These are more centered around stories. The visual memories I have of them are definitely more like movies than snapshots. And, not coincidentally, these are also the memories that most coincide with stories I know my parents told me about myself.

It's pretty well-established scientifically that our memories do not represent a 100% accurate portrayal of history. And that's not just in relation to childhood memories. Adult memories can be manipulated, too, and we can manipulate ourselves. An io9 story from back in January looks at a couple of different studies in the literature on this.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the UC Irvine, has spent some time coordinating memories. She had experiment subjects come in and look at a little book of life events; three their own, one not. Each event was recounted to the researchers by the subject's relatives. The fourth event, being lost in a shopping mall, was created by the researchers. The relatives merely confirmed that that event had never happened to the subject.

The false event has four parts: an extended period of being lost, crying, being helped by an elderly woman, and being found by a family member. Twenty-nine percent of the subjects remembered the made-up event. Twenty-five percent of them continued to remember the event after being outright told that it was made up, insisting that it happened.

To me, the body of research on false memories suggests that Laura Ingalls Wilder might not have been lying when she told a story about her family crossing paths with the Bloody Benders. If you think about it, it would be pretty simple. A young Laura might simply have heard her parents talking about the Benders, misconstrued the situation, and created memories that fit her understanding. In the course of telling the story to friends and family, her parents might have changed it themselves — a simple "and it turned out they lived right down the road from us!" story became, over time, a story of participating in the downfall of the serial killers. However it happened, it happened. And it's completely reasonable to think that Laura honestly thought the story she told was completely true.

Which brings up some questions: How accurate should we ever expect memoirs to be? Is a memoir supposed to be a personalized account of researched history, or a personal story of one's own (inherently inaccurate) memories? I don't know that I have a good answer for that. But I'm curious to hear what you think.

• Read the rest of the Ingalls/Bender story at American Indians in Children's Literature
• Another version of that story, as written in the unpublished manuscript, Pioneer Girl
• The Condensery blog on factual inaccuracies between Laura's story and history
• Io9's story on the creation of fake memories

IMAGE: A stereoscopic photo showing the excavated grave of one of the Bender's victims. From the Kansas Memory site.

Rudy Rucker's autobiography: Nested Scrolls

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:00:23 +0000

Rudy Rucker sez, "So I decided that I’d better write my autobiography before it was too late. What with death and senility closing in! I didn’t want my autobio to be overly long or dry. I wanted it to read something like a novel. Unlike an encyclopedia entry, a novel isn’t a list of dates and events. A novel is all about characterization and description and conversation, about action and vignettes. I wanted to structure my autobiography, Nested Scrolls, like that."

In addition to the Tor edition, there's a fine limited edition from PS Publishing.

Nested Scrolls reveals the true life adventures of Rudy Rucker--mathematician, transrealist author, punk rocker, and computer hacker. It begins with a young boy growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a businessman father who becomes a clergyman, and a mother descended from the philosopher Hegel. His career goals? To explore infinity, popularize the fourth dimension, seek the gnarl, become a beatnik writer, and father a family.
All the while Rudy is reading science fiction and beat poetry, and beginning to write some pretty strange fiction of his own--a blend of Philip K. Dick and hard SF that qualifies him as part of the original circle of writers in the early 1980s that includes Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, John Shirley, and Lewis Shiner, who were the founders of cyberpunk.
At one level, Rucker’s genial and unfettered memoir brings us a first-hand account of how he and his contemporaries ushered in our postmodern world. At another, this is the wry and moving tale of a man making his way from one turbulent century to the next.

Nested Scrolls

Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:18:42 +0000

Hyperbole and a Half, the brilliant, frenetic, illustrated memoir, tackles sudden depression, its effects and eventual cure in the long awaited new installment.

I spent months shut in my house, surfing the internet on top of a pile of my own dirty laundry which I set on the couch for "just a second" because I experienced a sudden moment of apathy on my way to the washer and couldn't continue. And then, two weeks later, I still hadn't completed that journey. But who cares - it wasn't like I had been showering regularly and sitting on a pile of clothes isn't necessarily uncomfortable. But even if it was, I couldn't feel anything through the self hatred anyway, so it didn't matter. JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

Adventures in Depression (via Beth Pratt)