Tom Lake – Ann Patchett’s Imagined Oral Memoir

 Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, Fiction, Memoir, Truth, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

My Aunt Julie and I have an ongoing debate – one that is resolved by each of us pursuing our own path while respecting the other’s.  She claims that nonfiction books are the way to learn about the world, and she doesn’t like fiction because it is just made up.  I think that that fiction tells us a lot about how human beings function.  I find pleasure in reading because I am learning something about humans – about characters and how they are imagined by people who are close examiners of others – and of themselves.

In a sort of compromise with my Aunt, I have considered writing a memoir – which would be nonfiction in so far as such things can be, dimmed by time and reconstructed by the forces that shape our memories into approximations of what actually occurred.  But I would intersperse it with the paths not taken – the person I might have become had various alternate routes been taken through my life.  Somehow these alternate versions and I would be having a conversation about the various routes taken, and one of the questions would be, what is it that is essential in a character and what is shaped by the events that a person encounters.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel, an easy read, approaches this question in a more linear manner.  She tells the story of a critical moment in her life, a moment when she was a dating a man who would become a movie star, to her now grown daughters, who are sequestered with her on the family cherry farm in Northern Michigan during the pandemic with their father - not the movie star.  

The central premise of the book, that her children are interested enough to hear her tell the story of her early life over the course of weeks, even to hang on to her words, is hard to believe.  When I asked the reluctant son about his thoughts on the manner, he acknowledged that the fact that the story involves a celebrity – one of his favorite stories of my youth involves my running into Brooke Shields at the gym when I was living in a small town and she was there shooting a movie – but he acknowledged that it is a brief story and anything longer would have been as uninteresting as the rest of my stories.  So, chalk one up for the Aunt Julie on that score…

The other problem with the story is that the narrator supposes that the spot that was chosen for the family cemetery, a spot on top a hill, would have been the place that the farmhouse should have been as it is the loveliest spot on the land – but the original family reserved it for the cemetery so the dead could enjoy the beauty in perpetuity.

A nice thought, but a spot on top of a hill in Northern Michigan would not have been a place to put a house when a farmhouse was being built five generations ago.  First, there would be no water on top of hill.  Carrying water up the hill, or even pumping it up there, would have been an unnecessary luxury.  Second, there would have been no protection from the wind in winter – and conserving heat was much more important than the views.

So, once my gripes were out of the way, I was drawn in by the story and also by the quality of the writing.  It really is a lovely piece about the connections – and disconnections – between a mother and her daughters.  There is enough gritty reality – the mother felt, but has never told the children this – consumed by them when they were little.  The eldest daughter, as a rebellious adolescent, aware that her mother had dated a movie star, was convinced that she was his child and became obsessed with him and his way of life which was so different from the simplicity of their life on the farm.

And what child isn’t convinced that they would not have sprung from their quotidian parents?  Why are so many fictional protagonists orphans?  And don’t we all imagine that we are highborn?  Since this is a truth that is buried in fiction, I will chalk this one up for the Reluctant Psychoanalyst in his debate with his Aunt Julie… (impartial judge that I am).

The characters that come to life in this book – unlike in many memoirs – are the players around the narrator – though there ends up being more than a bit about the narrator herself, we do get to know her.  And this is a lovely mirroring of the plot.  The narrator realizes her limits, something that is very hard for us to do, and chooses a path through life that suits her, even though she is offered a path that she might have desired not because of who she is, but because of what she would have been led to believe that she, like everyone around her, must desire.  But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

The narrator is careful to bring to life her three daughters, and to distinguish between them, giving them each to us as a precious, cared for, and unique individual who cares for the others, for her mother and for her father, and who has unique experiences of having her life interrupted to hang out on the family farm during the pandemic doing the labor that is needed (picking the sweet cherries) to keep it afloat when the seasonal workers are not migrating with the crops because of the pandemic.

She also brings to life – slowly and carefully – the characters she knew back when.  As she tells the story of the summer at Tom Lake to her daughters – with asides to us about the parts that her daughters don’t need to know about.  These individuals have convened to put on a play – several of them, actually, at Tom Lake, a vacation spot in Northern Michigan.  Yes, in the vicinity of the farm she would someday call home, but it is not at all clear, for a very long time, how that connection will be made.

But the play she is called to be the lead in is Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  A play that was produced at my High School when I was a student there – though I did not see it then nor have I seen it since.  The central premise of the play seems to be that life in a small town is not just good, but unbelievably good; so good that those who experience it don't appreciate just how wonderful it is. It is a play about life and death in a small town.  It is central to the repertory of the American Theater, and the mother/oral memoirist is playing Emily – the lead in the play.

She had played the role before, and her Uncle, a movie producer, saw her in it, took her to Hollywood, and she acted in a movie he produced.  While that movie is awaiting release, she auditioned to play the part in a revival of Our Town on Broadway, wasn’t taken, but when there was need for her in a Summer Stock production in Northern Michigan, she was available and was flown in.

 There she becomes a part of troope of players including the future film star, the director of the show, and the understudy for the role of Emily; the part she plays.  The movie star’s nobler and more stable older brother rounds out this group, and the group together spontaneously make a pilgrimage to her future home, and they all, each in their own way, fall in love with it.  

As the two stories unfold – the romantic and professional entanglements at Tom Lake and the development of the family connections through the telling of the story of Tom Lake and the ways that each of the children, and the mother, experience the story – a deeper story is being told.  It is the story of finding a path in life that allows one to become the person they were intended to be.  The children are convinced that their mother should have become a movie star – not been just a one hit wonder.  They are asking “What if?”. 

We, too, are asking “What if?”  Their father, mostly off stage, is aware of the story, which we are not, and we are impressed with his willingness to have her tell it.  He appears not to be threatened by what is to come.  The children and their mother settle on the word trustworthy to describe him.  I think reliable is, perhaps, a more apt description.  He turns out to be a rock.  The mother, who might have floated along in life, reconnects with him, and that allows things to settle into place.  She withholds part of the story from her husband and children, but tells it to us so that we can see that she is not quite as stable, this life was not quite as inevitable, as she wants them to believe.  This is not a criticism of the mother’s character, but an acknowledgement in what is, I think, a powerful reversal of the usual experience of a memoir.

To recap:

This fictional memoir is, I think, more realistic than many because:

1.    1.  It does not assume that the end is inevitable – especially as the mother/narrator acknowledges that she was more star struck and more adrift than she would be comfortable with her family knowing.  We are let in on an aspect of the human condition that might actually be hidden by the kind of memoir that is presented to the “public”: in this case her family.  Instead, we are given an opportunity to see into a part of the memoirist’s mind that perhaps even she would not let herself see.  When the author is creating an alter ego she can have a different relationship with her than she might have if she were the memoirist herself.

2.   2.    It does not assume that the end is inevitable – there is lots of room for chance here – and for other outcomes.  Her children are lovely – each of them – as well as brutal and limited.  And other children, with other partners, in other corners of the world, would also have been lovely, and brutal and limited.  She ends up in this spot largely by chance.  That is the way of the world.

3.    3.   The memoirist does not strain to justify herself.  She acknowledges her limitations – and, in doing this, she is able to choose a path that suits her, not one that she has to make suit her.  She is a character actress who can play one leading role well.  She was not cut out to be a leading lady – and the role of being a leading man is not all that it may be cut out to be – it may require a certain instability of character to convincingly take on a rainbow of roles.  The movie star literally turned himself upside down before every performance in order to prepare for his roles.

Of course, on the other hand, this memoir falls short of reality because:

1.    1.   It is a crafted novel.  The parts fit together all too smoothly.  The central character’s lack of regrets and certainty of place – especially being on a farm that is marginally able to financially survive from year to year while being simultaneously threatened by climate change – is unrealistically serene.  It is written to help us, the reader, feel good about the path that we have chosen.  We are all but made to identify with the memoirist.  We woulda, coulda, shoulda – and instead we landed in paradise.  When Freud said that he cured people of neurosis so that they could experience ordinary unhappiness, he did not envision a cherry farm in the middle of summer in Michigan with three grown children hanging on their mother’s every word…

2.    2.   The loose threads in this story are few.  Despite the numbers of characters that are included in the story, we feel settled about the vast majority of them by the end of the story, and have relatively little empathy for those who have been discarded along the way.  There is a neatness here that I don’t think is realistic.  The sense of closure, while it brought tears to my eyes, is inconsistent with the observation of the memoirist that her greatest moments of joy lose their sparkle over the years.  Of course this book will fade, but it is tied up with a bow and at the moment of its completion there is an unrealistic sense of all things being right in a world that is grittier and more complicated than that – including as it is being described here.

3.     3.  Finally, any book, whether fiction or non-fiction, about a life, is constrained by the particular path that life follows.  We cannot live those multiple lives that I would like to construct in my memoir…  We cannot know what the road untravelled actually looks like.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

          .