Memoir On a Hill: Finding the Best Way to Tell the Story of America

“What this country needs right now is The Great American Memoir!” said no one. “It needs a memoir that will not only unify the fractured American spirit, it’ll douse wildfires and lower sea levels. It’ll make homeownership affordable. Hell, it might even lead to a new Outkast album.”

How could I not answer the call?

Most days, I work over at the Fiction Dealership. I sell the best new and Certified Pre-Owned novel-length falsehoods I can get my hands on. It’s a bespoke trade, defined by childhood imagination, social inequities, and handcrafted exaggerations. I love it. And over the years I’ve been more successful than I thought I’d be. But, all the while, I’ve seen what the folks across the street at the nonfiction dealership—Memoir Mart—have been up to. Every couple of years they roll out a shiny new memoir with a full-leather interior and new lyrical essay technology that fulfills the self-examining promise of the genre that we’ve all been waiting for and, hell, it’s a sales bonanza over there for months! Pure gravy! Meanwhile, I’m over here on the fiction side of the street—green-eyed and sullen—trying to find a way to get a piece of the action.

All we’re ever really moving off the lot is the promise (lie?) that there’s some sort of meaning buried on the other side of a life’s daily chaos.

Now, I’ve studied the must-read craft books. I’ve read the “best memoir ever” memoirs. I’ve fawned over, and even pretended to be (long story), famous nonfiction writers just to get a taste of what it must feel like to be a Ta-Nehisi Coates or James McBride. So, hopefully, you’ll believe me when I say that I well understand how, in theory, nonfiction is the act and art of taking a real event (or chain of events) and, typically, assembling said event(s) into a narrative or an argument with some sort of meaning-making by the end. 

Make no mistake about it: storytelling salesfolk like me, all we’re ever really moving off the lot is the promise (lie?) that there’s some sort of meaning buried on the other side of a life’s daily chaos.

A good memoir is alchemical. It transforms the lead billet of a lived experience into the shimmering gold nugget of epiphany. It either warns us that “Here, there be dragons” or reinforces to us the message that “Dragons, too, can be slain.” It’s a good way to make a living. 

So I decided to throw my hat into the ring.

A few years back I won a big award and wound up selling my chrome-plated fiction door-to-door in Europe. I decided to keep track of as much as I could. I journaled every day—just like I hear those memoir folks do—and then, when I was done, I figured I’d have hundreds of pages of quality penmanship on my hands that I could sell for enough money to retire. That was the plan. Clean and easy. But then when I got to Europe I found out the hard way that European shoppers were a different breed from those back home in the Land of the Free. They asked different questions. The didn’t ask about the warranty on what I was selling or how much of it was based on my real life. No. They wanted more than that.

But I did my best and I chronicled it all.

When they asked: “Does America terrify you?” I wrote it down. When they asked “You’re a teacher, yes? How many students have you lost to shootings?” I wrote it down. When they asked: “Why haven’t you left America?” I wrote it down. I knew, after a lifetime of selling fiction to reluctant buyers, that these were good questions. I know a barn find when I see one!

All those questions got me thinking. All that thinking got me writing. And I felt like I might be onto something with my move to this nonfiction “Everything must go” business. I was already imagining myself on the best talk shows, the bestseller lists, the ol’ Barack Obama Summer Reading List. I wanted it all and I could see it all coming for me. All because I was finally writing The Great American Memoir!

And three months later, after staring into the gaping maw of the American reality—unpolished by fictions—I gave it up. Set fire to the whole damned project. Three months of trying to tell my little slice of the American story with the rules of memoir left me a shell of my former self. I didn’t trust anybody. I was afraid to go outside. My relationship with my girlfriend was strained because of all the cynicism I’d been infected with. And all because, when I wrote about America for those three months in the way it actually showed itself, I found myself completely preoccupied by the fact that America is a pretty terrifying place.

Let’s go back to 1989 for a moment. It’s a chilly, January 11 and Ol’ Ronnie Reagan is on the television saying goodbye. He’s got that calm voice of his and that half-assed cowlick hair and, toward the tail end of his speech, he starts in about how he sees America as a “shining city on a hill.” Now, this is where Ronnie had it a little bit right: America is, indeed, a shining city on a hill. 

“A tall proud city,” Ronnie said. (Sure, she’s tall enough and there’s no shortage of pride in America.) “Built on rocks stronger than oceans,” Ronnie continued. “Windswept. God-blessed. And teaming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace.” (Well…he missed the mark on that last one, but nobody hits all homers.) “…Standing strong and true on that granite ridge,” Ronnie said.

Now, the first thing to know is that this was a fiction. I’m no Ronnie defender, but even he knew it was a lie. He called it his “dream.” And, sure enough, that’s all it was: a dream. Ronnie knew he was writing fiction—just like me—and he told you so up front. No harm in that.

But fast forward a few years and along comes Donnie. And Donnie says that Ronnie’s City on a Hill was a real thing once upon a time! He says Ronnie was selling us memoir that January night. And Donnie goes on to say that, now, shining city was full of killers and foreign infiltrators and that ol’ Lady Liberty needed to be holding an AR-15 in place of her torch. Fiction salesmanship if I’ve ever seen it! But, being who he is, he marketed his version nonfiction. He called it The Great American Memoir and took home two elections and several billion dollars for his troubles.

Donnie worked both sides of the street. In Hollywood they call it The Texas Switch: you swap one actor for a stunt double and the audience never catches it. Donnie did it with genre and the American story. He took the flawed frame of American history and slathered half of it in Bondo and the other half in the cheap paint of nationalism and advertised it to millions as “factory-new.” He said “Just pay attention to the way I tell you it happened.”

He took Reagan’s City on a Hill, which was only ever the musing of an old man, and told us “Not only is it nonfiction, it’s our memoir! It’s the American story! It’s the gospel! And we’ll kill anybody that tries to do any fact-finding!”

As someone descended from the bodies buried under its foundation, I plan to keep telling my story of this flawed city, this blemished beacon.

And the thing is: I think he might be right. After trying to tell the nonfiction story of America as I see it, I’ve come to realize that America really is a city on a hill. But the thing about it is this: the hill on which America stands—and you can only notice this if look down long enough, like I did for those few months—you start to notice that it’s not granite this ol’ beacon of freedom is standing on, but piles and piles of bodies. Layer upon layer of bloodied sediment. Compacted graves of the indigenous as foundational pillars. The bodies of slaves as cement and rebar. All of it buttressed and built up higher, generation after generation, by the impoverished, the infirmed, and the plain ol’ unlucky. Each and every one of them gruesome fodder for that windswept, god-blessed city which, like the profit margins of its most valued inhabitants, must rise higher each day, if only by blood-soaked millimeters, so that the we don’t all sink into the ocean of its self-made fear: the fear that we might all be consumed by the city’s ceaseless hunger.

Given enough time and leeway, Donnie and the gang will show us all exactly how mutable the American Memoir can be. Before long, America will tell us all there is no blood beneath her fingernails, no bodies in the basement. And her story will get more polished over time. The dents will get covered up. The rust hidden. It’ll get done so well that even old veterans like me, who have been in the business of selling lies in the hope of telling truths, will start to wonder what was real and what wasn’t. We might start to believe.

Unless, of course, we keep writing. Keep putting down the words. Keep telling the truths. Whether you work over there selling nonfiction at Memoir Mart of you work here at Fiction City Cars. Keep telling truths. Keep writing. 

The Great American Memoir? Doesn’t exist. Never has. Never will. America has never been “great.” It’s only ever been America. But as someone descended from the bodies buried under its foundation, I plan to keep telling my story of this flawed city, this blemished beacon. It won’t fix the cracks. It won’t stop the shootings. It won’t get Outkast back together. But whether it’s fiction or memoir, it’ll be the truth. It’ll be the way America is: a city on a hill, sometimes steeped in shadow, painted red with blood but, sometimes, when the light catches it just so, glowing, shining, luminous and strangely beautiful.

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People Like Us by Jason Mott is available from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.