How to Write a Beautiful Memoir

Excerpts from Nin Andrews' Son of a Bird

I first met Nin Andrews in the early 1990s when I began publishing her prose poems in my journal, The Prose Poem: An International Journal The Prose Poem That’s when she had become well known from her comic masterpiece, The Book of Orgasms. Nin is truly one of the masters of the prose poem, though she has also distinguished herself as a fine verse poet, writing frequently about her childhood on a farm in the South.

In her new book, Son of a Bird: A Memoir in Prose Poems Son of a Bird, she combines the Southern lyricism of her verse poetry with her mastery of the prose poem. I truly hate hyperbole, but, in all honesty, I don’t think I’ve read a memoir quite like this one. Many memoirs often seem painfully self-conscious and/or whiny. The “I” in memoir rules the day, and Nin’s “I” is observant, humble, likeable, and never harsh on the cast of characters around her. It’s a voice that is mesmerizing, a voice you can listen to all day, as the below excerpts suggest.

For a recent, excellent interview with Nin on the new book and on writing memoir, go to NinInterview/Essay

For more about Nin, go to Nin

For one of her poems and a commentary on it, go to NinPoem

from Son of a Bird

“The past is gone and you can’t get it back,” my father always said. But I want to tell him, you can still visit. The farmland is there, and my mother’s shadow lingers in the doorway of the stone house. I can see her now, tilting her head, as if listening for the songs of the heifers in the fields, the horses in the stalls, the Rottweilers and beagles in the front yard under the tulip poplars, the thirty stray cats in the hayloft or sleeping in the sun, the six sows in the sty before we ate them, one by one, the Andalusian rooster and his nine hens before the red fox picked them off, running across the alfalfa field each morning with a fresh kill in his mouth. Gone, too, is the parakeet my father kept in the tack room, the parakeet that died from heatstroke or lack of water and once, a peanut, and was always replaced by an identical yellow-green budgie who dehydrated or was cooked on a July day so hot, the barn felt like a frying pan with the lid on tight. (After a while, I never knew which parakeet was in the cage—Tony or Tanya or Tina or Teensy or Tallulah.) And the bees my father kept in wooden hives that flew through the holes in our screens and drowned in our cocktail glasses. The black racers and rat snakes that slithered across the floorboards in our attic. Snakes, according to my mother, were better than the Orkin man at keeping the rodent population down. I lay awake at night, listening to the swish-swish overhead, the sound like ladies’ skirts sweeping the floor as they danced.

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Our house began as a stone square. My father, an architect, added two wings onto it to accommodate the ever-expanding family. By the time I, the last child of six, arrived, it was shaped like a U. Children’s bedrooms were on the two sides of the U so we could look out our windows and see each other getting dressed. “I see you naked,” one sister would call out through an open window. Another yelled back, “I see you in your polka-dotted underpants!” From 7:00 to 8:50, I watched my sisters doing their homework, framed in the yellow light. At 9:00 sharp, the house went dark, the day ending with a flick of the switch—like a movie without credits. I lay back in bed and listened as the night sounds began: horses kicked their stall doors; tree frogs clung to the window screens and sang to one another; owls screeched and swooped over the fields, and the rooster crowed and crowed—my father always said that was because he was an Andalusian rooster and came from the wrong time zone.

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The only time the lights came back on in the night was when one of us was sick. I’d sit up in bed and listen after a sister cried out, “I don’t feel good!” My mother never woke—she slept through screams, thunderstorms, howling dogs, ringing phones, strangers and policemen knocking on the door. My father, half-asleep, drifted into our bedrooms on sock feet. In one hand he held a glass of water, and in the other, a Bayer aspirin. He believed in Bayer, owned stock in the company, said it cured everything—nausea, diarrhea, flu, canker sores, nightmares, pink eye, insomnia. “Take this,” he’d say. “You’ll feel much better.” If one pill didn’t work, he’d give us another. I can still feel the little pill entering my bloodstream like a tiny white tooth.

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Come spring our farm turned green overnight. Peepers started to sing, and the flowering began, the hills turning red and pink and white, petals floating in the air like wings. Our male dogs ran off, following the scent of bitches in heat. With no bulls in our fields, the heifers humped one another. The geldings bucked and ran along the fence line as mares sidled up to them on the other side, lifting and swishing their tails. The neighborhood carpool driver, Mrs. Humphries, wouldn’t give us rides anymore—not after she stopped her station wagon one afternoon and waited for Tigger and Elaine, our two tabby cats, to finish mating in the middle of the road. “Cover your eyes girls,” Mrs. Humphries said. She didn’t want to expose her daughters “to all the indecent goings-on.” University students drove up our dirt road day and night, pulled over by the fields, tore off their clothes as they ran through the tall grass. Abandoned shirts hung on barbed wire fences; panties dangled from cattails. My horse stopped just short of trampling a couple on an afternoon ride. The pier on the trout pond was a favorite spot. If I wanted to swim, I let the Rottweilers scare lovers off. Usually, they dove into the lake’s cool green water, swam around naked till I asked if they were getting bit yet. The trout were always hungry. They nibbled pendulous body parts.

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Summer days, I lazed in the tall grass and watched buzzards float overhead, wondering whose carcass they’d pick clean next. I listened to cicadas sing, pulled their hollow shells from the bark of hickory trees. I built hay forts, and once, stole the burger out of Trig’s, the farmhand’s, lunch sack, replaced it with a cowpie (this was the day after he gave me a black eye). And I got more whippings than I could count. After a while I didn’t feel a sting. I learned not to look my father in the eye. Not to beg. Not to cry. Before he even asked, I said, “Nope, I didn’t do it. I wasn’t playing in the hayloft. I didn’t touch Trig’s burger. I would never steal a lollipop from the candy jar,” even if a chewed stick was hanging from my mouth. I said, “My friend, Penny Sue, gave it to me.” Or “my swim teacher, Miss Patsy, said it was mine—for swimming the butterfly.” “Is that why I saw you climbing on the stool, fishing in my sweets jar?” he asked. “Must have been someone else,” I shrugged. “Must have been,” he smirked, a way-off look in his eyes. Like he was trying to decide how much he wanted to smack me. And how much he admired a liar like himself.

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My father often joked that he was the father of one lady, a gentleman, two girls, and two strange birds—in that order.

Lisa, the first, was the only lady in the house—she came from another planet where people washed their hair and hands and listened when he talked. She was the only sister with a room of her own. She stayed in that room with the door closed, dolls lined up on her bed, china animals arranged on a shelf above her desk, not one of them broken, not a dust mote settling on anything she owned. Even her closet was organized with her shoes, clean and polished, no manure in the treads, her dresses and blouses, pressed and hanging from smallest to largest. I wasn’t allowed to enter—not until I was old enough not mess up her things. She said she wondered why Mom never taught us proper hygiene. Once, after I knocked on her door, she pulled a tick that was hanging behind one ear like a fat brown pearl.

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The gentleman and second born, Jimmy, was sent away to prep school after eight years at one of the all-white private schools in town where he clowned around so much, he never learned to read properly—or that was how my mother explained it. When he was given the SSATs, the standardized tests for prep school admission, he scored so low, she wondered if the circles were misaligned. She blamed his teachers. “All that money down the drain,” she sighed, adding, “he was never Harvard-bound.” My father insisted that he just didn’t apply himself. “If it were one of the girls who struggled in school, I wouldn’t have worried,” he said. “Girls, after all, don’t need to make it in the world.” My mother nodded, adding that I had been their last hope for a replacement son, someone who could follow in my father’s footsteps. Before I was born, my name was George.

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The favorite child, number three, was Sal with her squinty grin, her head cocked to one side, her auburn hair pinned back in tortoise shell barrettes—she was the first sister allowed to grow her bangs. The rest of us had the same haircuts—bobs with bangs, cut every month at Watson’s Beauty School where novice beauticians practiced on us. “How come Sal is allowed to grow her hair?” “How come Sal gets to go horseback riding with Dad before school?” “Why is Sal always sitting in the front seat?” “Because she’s nice,” my father said, “unlike the rest of you girls.” In school, she won all those prizes for teacher’s pets. Spirit awards, they called them. Or best all-around athlete or pupil or smile. Behind her back, I called her Tinkerbelle.

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“Let’s go to the barn!” my mother said every day after school, pushing us out the door before we unzipped our jackets. Everyone except Louisa, who stayed behind on the green flowered couch in the living room, kicking one leg, twirling her hair, reading Little Women for the hundredth time. She didn’t take care of a calf, didn’t like horseback riding, didn’t feed the pigs or chickens, didn’t build hay forts, never mucked stalls. “How come Louisa doesn’t own a calf? Why doesn’t she do barn chores?” I asked. “Louisa is not a farm child. She’s a genetic anomaly—sort of like Stuart Little,” my mother explained. “That’s the thing about motherhood—you never know what or who is going to come out of you.”

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L’enfant sauvage was my mother’s nickname for Julie, the fifth-born child. “She could have been raised by wolves,” she said. Julie lived in the woods, adopted baby birds and snakes, bringing them home to raise. As soon as she was old enough, my mother sent her to nature camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When she returned, Julie announced that her favorite classes were taxidermy and snake handling. She spent our summer vacation in Maine picking up snakes and searching for dead animals. We’d be driving along the freeway, and she’d spot a carcass and shout STOP at the top of her lungs. My mother called these roadkill sightings. The Ford Falcon would screech to a halt. Julie would climb out of the car to inspect a dead deer, raccoon, or squirrel. Usually, the dead weren’t fresh enough. It’s kind of like selecting vegetables or fruit, she explained. You want the dead to be just right. She had trouble finding the perfect specimen.

One afternoon my mother and she went grocery shopping, and when they returned, Julie was carrying what she called a nice carcass they’d found on Route 1. She dumped it onto the kitchen counter, sliced it neatly, and slid the raccoon out of its fur. “Skinning an animal is as simple as taking off its jacket—that is, if it had a jacket,” she said. She held up the shiny sack of entrails for me to admire. “See? They’re encased just like they’re in a Glad bag.”

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss