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My parents never had a happy marriage, or at least not during the years that I was old enough to understand and form impressions of the world around me.  Certainly they must have been happy when they first fell in love, or when they moved to a beachfront trailer park in Hollywood, Florida, to await the birth of their first child, my older sister Susan.  But I was the third baby, and by the time I came along, the family trouble was deep.

When my mother finally left my father, I was age ten, and she pulled me out of school and told me of the separation after the fact.  In the five short hours since I had slouched at the kitchen table that morning to wolf down cornflakes and milk, a moving van had arrived, cleared the house of nearly everything, and my mother, my sisters, and I were in  a new home, new lives, utterly altered circumstances.  Mom knew what was coming, of course, had planned it for months, but I had absolutely no forewarning.  

Neither, it turned out, did my father.

I can’t write the memory of how my father reacted when he came home that evening to an essentially empty house, because I was not there.  But I can still write memoir around this incident, including my father’s possible reactions, by using simple phrases such as “I don’t know for sure, but I imagine …” or “My guess is that my father …”  What I envision says as much about me, perhaps, as it does about my Dad.

Likewise, I can’t write about the time when my parents fell in love, or moved to Florida, because I was not yet born to have such memories.  But I can again imagine, speculate, conjecture, and as long as I am honest with the reader, what I am writing is truly nonfiction.

Here are two exercises that use memories that you do not have clear in your mind to shape a piece of memoir: 

• Start a short memory essay with the words, “Even now I question whether I am remembering this correctly …”
  

• Write about a time your parents went into another room to talk, and you couldn’t hear what they were saying, but let us know what you as a child imagined was occurring behind those closed doors.  Or write about a time that your mother left for a weekend, and you had no idea where she went, and no one seemed to speak about it.  Or visit some similar mystery from your past, maybe an innocent enough mystery, but one that seemed significant at the time.  (And yes, this can be a happy memory, if perhaps the mystery revolved around a special birthday present or a new baby sister.)