Finding a memoir's touchstone in its opening pages

Written by Aimee Liu

The hunt for my father’s treasure box begins. Photo by author.

Have you ever really considered the purpose of introductions…or forewords…or prefaces…or prologues? Do you even know the difference between these various types of “front matter”? I’ve written in most of these forms, but I never gave their distinctions much thought until recently, when I was poring for the umpteenth time over the opening pages of my memoir-in-progress. What, exactly, should I call these pages?

Turns out the options are all very similar, but not interchangeable:

Introductions generally belong to the realm of nonfiction. They explicitly summarize the promise of the book to come, often including a preview of the book’s contents and structure. Insider tip: Introductions very often originate as book proposals. If they can sell an agent and editor on the value of the book, why shouldn’t they work the same magic on prospective readers? That’s why you’ll almost always find Introductions in books by successful nonfiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell, Brené Brown, and Atul Gawande, to name a random few. They know how to deliver a powerful pitch.
Prefaces also typically appear in nonfiction, especially academic books. They are stand-alone essays that relate to the book without summarizing it. Often, they signal the author’s qualifications or reasons for writing the book. Most textbooks have prefaces, which appear before the Introduction.
Forewords are written by someone other than the author. Think of them as extended blurbs that praise the writer or the work to come. They often are added to new editions of older works, to explain why the work deserves to be re-released. They also appear in scholarly editions, textbooks, and reprints of classic novels.
A Prologue, unlike all of the above, is an integral literary component, like a chapter, and usually appears in fiction and memoir. In novels, the prologue is essential to the book’s plot, serving as a fictional frame or set up for the story to come. Prologues may be narrated by a secondary character speaking from a different place or time than the rest of the book. Sometimes the prologue works in tandem with an epilogue to bookend the story. In Lolita, Nabokov played with this device by inventing a fake “foreword” by an imaginary scholar to introduce the “case” of Lolita; the fictional foreword was actually the novel Lolita’s prologue.

I’ve been wrestling with all these terms because the opening of my memoir, at least as it now stands, technically qualifies as Introduction, Preface, and Prologue. I did originally write this section to explain the project to my agent. It does forecast the central plot and some of the themes of the story. It also explains why I felt compelled to write the book. And yet, the writing is consistent and continuous with the rest of the book. This section doesn’t stand alone. I hope it whets the reader’s desire to keep reading.

See what you think, and meet me on the other side:

Two weeks before my father died, he asked me to bring him a box. It contained a fortune, he said. Then again, he was ailing and evidently losing his ninety-five-year-old mind. He couldn’t tell me what this box looked like or where it was located-- I refused to get my hopes up. While the promise of treasure can’t help but tantalize, I took Dad to mean simply that something he’d kept – hidden – had been lost, and now he felt an urgent need to recover it while he still had the chance. What this lost trove might consist of, I couldn’t imagine. To my knowledge, my father had never been given to sentimentality. However, it was no small thing that he’d tasked me with searching through his possessions.
My father was a hoarder, dedicated and secretive to the point of neurosis about his accumulated belongings. The bulk of these came from the local thrift shop, but amid the piles of junk lurked evidence of Dad’s childhood in Shanghai, his acting career in Hollywood in the 1930s, his early days as a journalist and wartime filmmaker and his later career at the United Nations. There were also letters, photographs, and artifacts connected to his father, who’d remained in China -- “behind the Bamboo Curtain,” as we used to say -- after the Communist takeover in 1949.
I’d always been fascinated by the mystery of this Chinese grandfather and his marriage in 1906 to my Kansas-born grandmother. I’d written two novels based on the bits and pieces of family lore that Dad chose to reveal. Most of the factual details in my stories, however, were drawn from outside sources, including two of my grandfather’s books, which I found in the East Asian archives at UCLA. My Chinese grandfather, it turned out, had been both a revolutionary politician and a classical poet of considerable renown in pre-Communist China. Dad did not deny this. He simply never discussed it.
This reticence bewildered the rest of us – my mother, older brother, and me. Did my father have something serious to hide? Or, did some fluke in his nature render him incapable of self-revelation? Unlike my mother and brother, both born storytellers who loved nothing more than to enthrall an audience, Dad was the king of monosyllabic answers. Especially when asked about his personal background. Particularly when queried about life events before 1953. That was the year he became a U.S. citizen. It was also the year I was born.
What do you remember about China, we’d ask. Or California in the 30s. Or Washington DC during the war. “Oh, it was all right,” he’d say. Or, “It was so long ago…”
And yet, if you asked him the date that Haile Selassie rose to power in Ethiopia, or the name of any prime minister in Europe between 1900 and 1970, or the models of aircraft used as bombers during either World War, he’d produce the correct answer without hesitation. If he couldn’t, he’d berate himself without mercy.
My father allowed himself no excuse for misplacing an objective fact, and no reason to remember a subjective one. It sometimes seemed as if his default setting was to erase his own life. This did not sit well with my mother, who, as his wife of more than sixty years, considered herself to be central to that life. Whatever he was hiding simultaneously involved and excluded her.
With me, it was a little different, and this may have explained why he entrusted me alone with the mission of finding his lost treasure box. In temperament, I’d always been my father’s daughter. We both could waste hours on minutiae: the placement of a comma, the location of a lost paper clip, a synonym for “practical.” We both treated rules and laws as iron-clad commandments, and we were persistent to a fault. Each year of my childhood at Christmas, the two of us would stay up alone, late into the night, silently bent over the living room coffee table until one of us slipped the thousandth piece into our annual jigsaw puzzle. “There,” we’d say in unison. “Perfect job.”
We craved the illusion of perfection. Order. Completion. Anything less than flawlessness would leave us ripe for criticism, and with criticism came shame, judgment, inner turmoil, and conflict. We were both innately, even cripplingly, conflict averse, so Above Reproach represented a zone of emotional safety. To be infallible seemed the ticket to peace.
As I grew up and away from my father’s orbit, I experienced a host of failures and recoveries that taught me true perfection is not, in fact, synonymous with flawlessness. Rather, it’s a state of grace that forgives and even welcomes deviation from the rigid path between “right” and “wrong.” Peace is achieved not by avoiding mistakes but by confronting and learning from them. And miserable as conflict still makes me feel, I’ve learned to accept it as a necessary part of human interaction – even within myself. Surviving it has more to do with compassion and resilience than it does with unquestioning adherence to the authority of rules.
It’s taken me most of my life to reach this counterintuitive view of perfection, and I wish I could have found a way to share it with my father. Unfortunately, all those stories he never told us contained secrets that kept him tethered. He was hamstrung by guilt over past transgressions and shame over humiliations that he could no longer recall. Simultaneously squeezed and torn by competing loyalties his whole life, he behaved impeccably as a way out.
And yet, I could sense his yearning for grace – or was it forgiveness? -- in this missing box. Why else demand it now?

Part of me thinks I’m using this labeling issue as an excuse to procrastinate, that I’m just rearranging deck chairs on this Titanic project. But the first pages of any literary work are critical. If you don’t make the right choices right off, the whole project will sink. Besides, tinkering with this opener has helped me refine and revise my vision for the work as a whole. Even if I pull it from the final draft, it’s served a valuable purpose.

Does it even matter what we call it? To get a handle on this question, I turn to three other memoirists I admire, to see how they label their front matter:

Cheryl Strayed, opens Wild in media res, in a quick scene that the rest of the memoir won’t catch up with for many chapters. She labels this preview a Prologue, as if it were fiction.
Susan Cheever begins Home Before Dark, her memoir about her father, John Cheever, by briefly explaining how she came to write this book after his death. She calls this opening a Preface.
Mary Gordon named her memoir about her father The Shadow Man— a title that could very well apply to my memoir about my father, as well. Gordon opens this book with a chapter-length section introducing herself as an author with mixed emotions about her dad, a man she adored as a child and condemned as a woman, and explaining her mission in researching the truth about this man and their relationship. Toward the end of this section she offers a statement that every memoirist can surely identify with:
Perhaps anyone writing about herself at such length must fight the impulse to apologize. The terror that no one will care. So I approach you, the reader, in a way I wouldn’t ordinarily, asking indulgence and attention.
Gordon elides the whole issue of labeling her front matter by calling it instead: “To the Reader”

Gordon’s example gives me an option I hadn’t considered and also warns me that I really am worrying about a detail that doesn’t warrant the time. In the final analysis, I could jettison all the preliminaries and plunge straight into Chapter 1. Or, I could label my opener “Touchstone.” No one would challenge me.

But for now, these pages really are my touchstone for this project. They remind me what I’m writing about and why, what I’ve promised my readers— and what I must deliver in the end. Whatever I do or don’t end up calling them, I’ll doubtless keep returning to them, as I find my way.

Why Does "Front Matter" Matter?

Finding a memoir's touchstone in its opening pages

Aimee Liu

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