To Call Each Thing By Its Right Name

I was thinking about Christopher McCandless the other day. Perhaps you remember him from John Krakauer’s book Into the Wild or from Sean Penn’s film adaptation. One of the final passages he underlined before starving to death in Alaska was Lara Antipova’s revelation in Doctor Zhivago:

For a moment she discovered the purpose of her life. She was here on the earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.

This passage held personal meaning for McCandless, who abandoned his given name for a hobo moniker, “Alexander Supertramp,” only to reclaim his birth name in his final goodbye.

It also seems to me that Lara Antipova’s discovery sets the ultimate standard for writing memoir. To write movingly, clearly, penetratingly, a writer must call each thing by its right name. No matter how complex the material, there can be no waffling, hedging, or evasion — language must be direct, exact, and truthful to resonate.

But clarity about the world is only possible with the same clarity about the self. No hiding behind a dramatic pseudonym.

Vivian Gornick expands this point in The Situation and the Story. When writing fails, she says, it’s because the writer doesn’t know who they are or what they are about within the constraints of the essay. The writer can be confused, adrift, and otherwise a mess in their personal life, but craft requires them to “know who they are at the moment of writing.”

Gornick helps me understand my struggle with fatherhood. The writing has been difficult because I’ve not been clear about who I am at the moment of writing. I’ve been different people at different times: the father finding reasons for his insecurities in childhood, the father trying to placate progressive readers with takedowns of traditional masculinity, but never the father with a solid core who writes with a clear message of love for his children. That is the father I need to become for the writing to come alive.

Self-knowledge cannot come at the expense of complexity. We also need to show change in ourselves for an essay to resonate. For Gornick, this means finding “the other in oneself” to “create movement, achieve a dynamic.” A memoirist often reveals “a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows — moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge.” But this must be a carefully choreographed emergence from shadows to light to feel purposeful to a reader.

It might seem strange that I am willing to share my equivocations about fatherhood so openly. But that is the commitment I made to you, dear reader, at the beginning of the year. Writing a book is not always a piecemeal project in which brick stacks upon brick until the whole is complete. Sometimes what’s required is circling back to the subject, rekindling sympathy for it, and starting fresh from that new certainty.

Christopher McCandless did not write a literal book, but he lived his life as a story. He thought surviving the Alaska wild was the only point that mattered, that his invented persona, Alexander Supertramp, was the vehicle to carry him there. But what he discovered, too late to carry it back into the world, was that his given name was the only one that rang true.

We edit ourselves to tell our life stories. We make the personae that we create fit within the constraints of each essay. But anyone who wants to write a memoir that rings true must first learn how to call themselves by their right name.

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