In this conversation, two sociologists discuss how to balance personal perspective with an academic approach to memoir. From writing, to reading, to teaching memoir, these authors offer a unique perspective on the growing role of memoir in the academy and beyond. Tiffany Gayle Chenault is Professor of Sociology at Salem State University and the author of Black Woman Runner: A Memoir. Georgiann Davis is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and the author of Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family.
*
Jenny Rossberg: You’re both sociology professors who incorporated your scholarly expertise into the writing of your memoir. What it was like integrating personal narrative with scholarly writing? How did you strike a balance between the two writing styles in your books?
Tiffany Gayle Chenault: It’s called a developmental editor! (laughs) When I sat down to write, I thought, I don’t know how to do this. As an academic going through grad school, we are not trained to do this kind of writing. We’re not trained to write for a general audience. We are trained to write for other academics, which is kind of a disservice to the discipline, if we’re studying inequality, social justice, and change. Our writing needs to be accessible to everyone, not just a specific kind of person.
So I found two developmental editors who helped me strike a balance in my writing. They had to tell me, that’s too academic, people won’t understand that. My developmental editors would ask, how do you write? She told me to think about the pre-story, the backstory, forward thinking, flashing forward, and really maintain a throughline in the story. Sociologists are taught to write with just data and the facts, but she taught me to interweave those things more creatively, so that a reader will be truly engaged. You’re not preaching to someone, you’re informing them. Storytelling helps you do that more effectively.
JR: Can you describe how the perception of memoir is changing in the academy? And how did this inspire you to write your own memoirs?
Georgiann Davis: I’m a huge fan of the memoir genre, and I think of these stories as tools to help us think more critically about the social world. Books like Kiese Laymon’s Heavy or Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart are so well crafted, and help us understand the society around us.
I think my non-traditional educational background was actually helpful to me in writing my memoir. I dropped out of middle school and didn’t learn to write at a higher level until I entered graduate school years later. I was always reading newspapers and popular press kinds of stuff, like TIME Magazine, which helped me write in a way that everyone can understand, whether it’s your parents, your neighbor, the person at the grocery store, or the person in our classroom. In my experience, undergraduates are interested in vulnerability and positionality, so memoir is a great teaching tool.
Being an educated Black woman who understands the racism within the medical system, I felt like I had to be on the offensive.
As a scholar activist, I wish more of my academic colleagues would lean into their positionality when writing rather than avoid it out of fear of being viewed as biased as if there is such a thing as objectivity. Tell us who you are and what brought you to the topic. I don’t think we should only write about things we have personal experience with, but I do think we should explain who we are in the context of the topic. For me personally, whether it was my first more traditional, empirical book, Contesting Intersex, or this Five Star White Trash, my memoir, I like to center my lived experiences in a way that lets the reader get to know who I am as a person, and who I am as a thinker.
TGC: I also use memoir as a teaching tool to help students connect to deeper public issues in a way they can personally relate to, like Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz, for example. Students can connect with the memoirs and understand them, so we can have discussions without such highfalutin academic language.
The academy is still slow to embrace memoir. A lot of scholars think it’s too simplistic, or not rigorously researched. But at the American Sociological Association conference this year, there was a panel discussion about integrating narratives into sociological research, and the room was absolutely packed.
Sociology is always the why: why is this happening? Why this group of people? Why now? And memoir is a great way to combine objective evidence, like data and ethnography, while telling a story about the “why.”
GD: Exactly. The sociological imagination is at the core of the discipline; it’s about connecting personal troubles with public issues. That’s why I love doing sociology.
JR: Let’s talk more about what kind of personal troubles you both explore in your memoirs. I’m thinking about how you both write about your relationships with your mothers, and can’t help but compare it to I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. What advice do you have for memoir writers tackling hard personal relationships like this? And what can readers learn from these stories?
GD: For writers I would say the first step is to go to therapy. (laughs) But seriously, when I was writing—or rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, as writers know—I wouldn’t sleep well, or I’d wake up and feel incredibly depressed, because I was writing about these really traumatic situations. Revisiting these experiences was so hard, and processing them in therapy was really helpful.
I was very stigmatized for being intersex: I was born with an outside female appearance, but inside, I had ovaries, a uterus, and undescended testes that I didn’t know about. It’s a condition called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. My mother, advised by doctors, hid this from me, and even lied to me about why I received abdominal surgery to remove my testes when I was a kid. Doctors also encouraged my parents to sign me up, a fat kid with a mullet, for bariatric surgery when I was only fourteen. My family held onto a lot of dark secrets, but telling my story in a memoir means that readers might be able to learn from my experiences.
In my first book, I weaved a little bit of my personal experience being intersex with interview data that I collected. That process, revealing my intersex secret, was really freeing to me. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t dare to publicly talk about being intersex, and now it’s like saying what I ate for breakfast. I was also able to connect with intersex people around the world and felt freer than ever about my body. I revisit my intersex experience in this second book but in the context of a crap load of other traumatic experiences growing up in a culturally poor and economically struggling family where I was led to believe we were rich. I hope it leaves readers feeling less isolated about their own experiences while understanding how all of our lives are shaped by race, gender, class, you name it.
TGC: My mother and I were best friends. When she died, I went through this profound grief, because I had lost my person. But when I was diagnosed with breast cancer during COVID-19, and I had a whole team of doctors and carers assigned to work with me, I realized how much my mom had hidden about her own cancer. I didn’t know she had a team! She would get radiation, but she never lost her hair, so she just kept going. Everything was fine. She didn’t share anything with me or my father. She just kept being a Strong Black Woman.
Being an educated Black woman who understands the racism within the medical system, I felt like I had to be on the offensive. The fact that I was a runner meant that I was treated differently, though, and perceived as somehow healthier, or as a better person. I even ran several races in between cancer treatments.
But I realized that I was also clinging to this myth of the Strong Black Woman that my mother taught me. When you’re socialized as a Black girl in America, you learn how to deal with white people, how to navigate this system. It’s so hard to see this trope when you’re raised in it, it’s like a fish trying to understand water. It took a lot of work to realize I was drowning. I know I’m not the only one struggling with this narrative, so I had to be vulnerable and tell folks: this doesn’t work, so we need to stop with this narrative.
JR: You both use your memoirs to connect your personal experiences to broader discussions about race and racism. How did you write about the complex social issues, while maintaining your own distinctive narrative voice?
GD: I try to let authenticity guide me. Sometimes that means my humor comes through, even as I’m writing about dealing with medical abuse, criminal abuse, and familial abuse. I dealt with all of that adversity; I lived it, and I experienced it, and it hurt, it was painful. Many tears were shed. But I still ended up where I am today, a full professor of sociology at a state university, and I think that’s where white privilege acts like a security blanket that protects me in the most vulnerable times.
For example, in Five Star White Trash I talk about how after I got my GED, I went to a community college just outside of Chicago. I was pretty much one of the only white people in a remedial English class, and my teacher pulled me aside to say, why are you in this class? I explained I dropped out of seventh grade, but she still asked to see my test scores, and mentored me by encouraging me to test out of the remedial class. She let me transfer into her 100 level class, which counted towards college credit, when the remedial class did not. Did she ever approach her Black students with this kind of mentorship?
It took me years to realize it, but this is how white privilege works, in all of these small, seemingly insignificant ways. That’s how I ended up where I am now, and the process of putting it on paper really helped me understand what white privilege means.
TGC: When my mom died, I decided to run a half marathon in all 50 states to help process my grief. I got stories upon stories upon stories. I quickly realized you can’t just put on a pair of shoes and run; you have to look like a runner, especially in certain parts of the country. Black and brown folks are aware of what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, and you realize you have to be cautious, and aware of your surroundings.
I spoke to a lot of other Black runners, other Black women, about their experiences and started to say, oh, that happened to you, too? People like to dismiss incidents of racism and sexism as a one-off thing, like that person was just having a bad day. But I’m a sociologist, and I got data in all fifty states, so I know it’s not just a one-off person having a bad day. There are patterns here, and so we need to be more aware and attuned to how racism impacts things like health and exercise.
But there were also funny moments, like thinking to myself why am I a Black woman running in the woods when there’s bears? This is some white people shit. I think part of writing a book like Black Woman Runner means showing resistance, which for me, is joy. There’s hope when you ask, how do we get on the other side of this? Being able to engage people in these conversations is what we want, so people can start to question things that they wouldn’t question before. And that’s the realness of it.
__________________________________
Black Woman Runner by Tiffany Gayle Chenault and Five Star White Trash by Georgiann Davis are both available from NYU Press.