Who Writes a Memoir? 

Friends asked what inspired me to write a memoir. My son was blunter: “Mom who writes a memoir – it’s not normal.” Indeed, few of us write memoirs. Unless we are writers by profession or famous, I would venture to guess for most of us the route to inspiration is circuitous. I would like to focus briefly on how ideas, significant events, unrelated encounters – literally the stuff of life – can germinate subliminally and suddenly coalesce. The moment when you realize you are going to write a memoir, at least for me, can take you completely by surprise, but you may have been further along the way than you realized. 

Looking back, I can see several key elements were in place. I am reflective, introspective, curious, and empathetic, and I enjoy writing. Over the years I had occasionally captured in words, sometimes on scraps of paper, important emotional encounters or insightful ideas or a travel experience that remained particularly vivid. I had also written an essay, never published, on living through cancer, as well as notes on how we as a family coped with my husband’s three open-heart surgeries.

I am an art historian and, not surprisingly, visual. I can retain in my mind intensely remembered experiences before works of art or ancient archaeological sites, not only the visual details of what was before me but also the intellectual and emotional responses. 

While I was recovering from a near-fatal illness, I discovered a treasure trove of family material in my attic, including documents like citizenship papers and boxes of letters and old photographs, including one of my father’s brother, who died at the age of eighteen, which I had never seen.

As I looked at these photographs, some over a century old, I was astonished at the power of these images to unlock memories, to tell stories. I found myself overcome with emotion –  I even recall exactly where I was sitting on the floor, my back to the open attic door. I suddenly felt a profound responsibility to try to create a narrative of my grandparents’ and parents’ lives before their stories were lost forever. I was the only person alive who could do this. I was also for the first time in my life living in slow time, unencumbered by a crowded professional schedule.

For the next year I applied my skills as a researcher uncovering in archives and historical documents a significant amount of new information. I pieced together a chronological outline with key events and addresses. I had the facts, but I couldn’t write their story. Only in retrospect can I see that I wasn’t strong enough physically or emotionally to venture further. I had absolutely no idea at the time this was the beginning of a memoir. I went on to other projects, including writing a scholarly book on settling the South Carolina backcountry.

My husband and I moved to Atlanta to help our son take care of his children, for whom he had primary custody. I had been helping take care of them since they were one and three. 

We live a block away, and one day, as I watched them play in our backyard, filled with love and tenderness and gratitude for this gift, I began to think about my own grandparents and how important they had been to me as a child.

I was acutely aware of what a critically important role I was playing in my grandchildren’s lives, nurturing their imagination, tending to their tears, and providing a steady unconditional love.

As I stood there, I thought about our presence as parents and grandparents – how a silly game, a random comment, reading a favorite book, a special hug or a more confrontational moment – we never know which – can resonate deeply with a child, becoming an important part of what he or she takes forward into adult life.

My mind wandered back to my own childhood and then suddenly to those photographs I had discovered, eight years earlier, in our attic of my mother and father as newlyweds and young parents and of my grandparents as new immigrants to this country (my father was nine-years old when he arrived at Ellis Island.) 

I realized there was unfinished business. I knew, in order to write their stories, I would have to summon the courage to dig deep into my own past, which had been locked away for so long behind a heavy veil of amnesia. It slowly dawned on me that I should write a memoir and incorporate my parents’ history into my story. This was my circuitous route to becoming a memoir writer, and it took me totally by surprise. 

I found a different kind of inspiration with the process, letting my own story slowly unfold. There was no outline; it evolved organically; major themes changed midway. I returned to the photographs, no longer the diligent researcher, but rather now the vulnerable writer and empathetic granddaughter and daughter trying to decipher their lives, trying “to see,” to intuit meaning beneath the surface of the images as I so often had done as an art historian with works of art.

It was a slow journey, beginning with my retrieval of memories of the physical environment of my childhood, the smells of flowers in our yard and woods behind our house. It took time before I could enter the more interior spaces of kitchen aromas and family dynamics. I had no idea where it would end up, but I trusted the journey and learned remarkable new things. No longer the analytic strategic planner or scholar prone to footnotes, I found inspiration in a new way of writing, mindful of how I had to lead the reader by visualizing my environment, evoking my feelings, and conveying what I was seeing not just visually but also intuitively. It was liberating. 

—

Nancy L. Pressly, a graduate of Goucher College, received her master’s degree in Art History from Columbia University. She began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently held curatorial positions at the Yale Center for British Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art, where she organized several important exhibitions, most notably the acclaimed Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s at Yale.

In 1984, she became Assistant Director of the Museum Program at the National Endowment for the Arts; in 1992 was a visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art; and in 1993 she founded Nancy L. Pressly & Associates, a nationally recognized consulting firm specializing in strategic planning for some of the nation’s leading art museums.

She has authored numerous publications, most recently a book titled SETTLING THE SOUTH CAROLINA BACKCOUNTRY. She and her husband live in Atlanta, Georgia, close to their son and two grandchildren. Find her online at nancylpressly.com

UNLOCKING, A MEMOIR, Nancy L. Pressly

While recovering from a near fatal illness, Nancy Pressly discovers a treasure trove of family material stored in her attic.

Haunted by images of her grandparents and her parents in their youth, she sets out to create a family narrative before it is lost forever. It takes several more years before she summons the courage to reconstitute a path back to her own past, slowly pulling back the veil of amnesia that has, until now, all but obliterated her memory of her childhood.

In this sensitive and forgiving meditation on the meaning of family, Pressly unravels family dynamics and life in a small rural town in the 1950s that so profoundly affected her—then moves forward in time, through to her adulthood.

With an eye attuned to visual detail, she relates how she came into her own as a graduate student in the tumultuous sixties in New York; examines how she assumed the role of caretaker for her family as she negotiated with courage and resilience the many health setbacks, including her own battle with pancreatic cancer, that she and her husband encountered; and evokes her interior struggle as a mother as she slowly traverses the barriers of expectations, self-doubt, and evolving norms in the 1980s to embrace a remarkable life as a scholar, champion of contemporary art, and nationally recognized art museum strategic planning consultant.

Full of candor and art-inspired insight, Unlocking leaves the reader with a deep appreciation of the power of art and empathy and the value of trying to understand one’s life journey.

“A wrenchingly honest account that deftly combines a marriage story and an art tour.”
―Kirkus Reviews

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