Research Is Key
Commonly the most boring part of writing any work of literature is the research. Many writers believe that research acts as a detriment to creativity. From students to professionals, writers will agree that research is boring and most importantly time consuming. Or is it?
Research not only can be engaging, exuberant, and entertaining but it can also lead to new ideas and creativity. Author Samuel Freedman would be the first in line to agree with this point. Freedman (the author of six books, columnist, and professor at Columbia University) is a proponent of using research to stimulate the mind. Freedman is also the perfect example as to how useful research can be. In his latest book, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005), Freedman uses his skills from his journalistic career in order to recreate the life of his mother before giving birth to Samuel Freedman himself.
Who She Was is a memoir about the life of Freedman’s mother from 1948-1953 and her death in 1974. Unlike other memoirs, which distort and exaggerate, Freedman is able to objectively illustrate his mother’s life. He chooses to include anything and everything that was relevant, from the type of movies she watched, to the type of clothing she wore, and of course her sex life. During the discussion he stated how a friend of his believes that, “every book has to start with a question and the whole book has to try to answer the question.” This was a clear justification for Freedman’s first chapter, which brought his own thoughts into the book. By the conclusion, there is no question as to who his mother was; since Freedman creates a portrayal that was better than anyone other than his actual mother could have written (though that is subjective in its own right.)
The book itself would not have been a masterpiece if not for the research that went behind it. During the discussion, Freedman spoke about one of his visits to China in which he ate half of a duck’s brain for ritualistic reasons, the other half eaten by one of his acquaintances. This experience stuck with Freedman while he was researching his mother’s life. He explained that half of the brain represented emotion while the other represented craft, in an attempt to show that in writing a memoir, there is a false divide between emotion and craft. Freedman reiterated (on more than occasion) how writers try to separate the two but in actuality, they should aid and compliment each other. He discussed how his own research was, “far from dull,” as the discovery period about his mother’s life was why he began writing the book in the first place, and that the knowledge he acquired stimulated his emotion. Though Freedman’s situation is distinct due to his prior lack of knowledge of his mother’s life, there was little to no emotion to any of her history before he actually began his research. Still, in a genre that sometimes resembles a soap opera, Freedman created a story based on primary sources, all the while providing emotion. For instance, when recreating his mother’s relationships, Freedman went directly to the source, such as Hy Nelson, in order to find out an aspect of his mother he had never heard about. Discoveries from interviews with Nelson led Freedman to emotionally crave more knowledge, thus he interviewed his aunt Fannie who then led him back to Nelson, which led to even more discoveries. Disconnecting emotion and craft would have created a rather bleak story, or a story full of assumptions and exaggerations rather than fact.
Though the book itself was written for only one purpose, the final outcome accomplished more than Freedman himself could ever had hoped for. Besides the aspect of craft and emotion, Freedman also discussed the importance of history from below stating how the lives of ordinary people can be extraordinary. Freedman introduced a remarkable concept referred to as, “The Periodic Table of Human Nature,” which stated that every human life breaks down into the same basic traits, such as love, hate, happiness, and sorrow. Though there was much more in the subtext of the book and in the actual discussion, the general theme was the false divide between craft and emotion. The theme itself is evident enough to any reader, especially those who have had the privilege to have an actual discussion with Samuel Freedman. Thus even when writing a memoir, though many think it can ruin and dull the story, research can actually serve to enhance and liven a story with realism and fact as opposed to speculation. And to those that doubt, they need look no further than Who She Was by Samuel Freedman.