The attraction of memoir is (dis)honesty

I have been thinking about writing lately. I am seeing if I can go from one who reads to one who writes. It is a humbling challenge especially when I read lines like "I was a young woman of occasional good looks" or references to childhood as the murky sea-floor while the world of adults happens up on the surface of the ocean (Nuala O'Faolain, Are You Somebody?, 1996). Now that is writing but then again, she was someone who dedicated her life to the literary way. I am just playing.

I have always thought to write about my family. If no one does it before me, I will write about the women who came before. Because of world wars, migration and Nazi ovens, my foray into the past can only go so far. In fact, the furthest I can get is my grandmother who died many, many years before I was even a thought. But my grandmother and my own mother are interesting enough in their own right to fill at least several hundred pages.

This is what I know about my grandmother: She survived the war. She was beautiful and blonde and jumped from a train on her way to a death camp. She loved to skate, something my mother, for all her effort, was never able to master. She had an affair with a well-known writer who demolished her in a short story. She was bossy and proud and smart. She was good at maths at the local gymnasium.

This is how I would recreate her:
-Summer in Poland, in a thin dress with washed out flowers on it, squinting maybe, as she looks across a field of dry grass. I would like to feel the ambition coursing through her veins, reaching into her hands, pushing down into her feet, putting her on edge. It is a small town.
-I would like to give a voice to her own survival. Everyone who survived did so through luck and finger-nails-scratching-the-dirt determination, through conniving and betrayals, and walking on when you really want to turn back. And then they all came here and pushed the horrors of what they'd seen and done far, far away. I would like her to speak. To speak with pride. To say out loud the inherent victory of "I survived" that wipes out any hint of shame.
-I would have her skating in fur-trimmed coat and warm gloves; laughing and looking like a cross between Ingrid Bergman and me. Maybe a cigarette between gloved fingers (let's make them turquoise) and that old fashioned, too bright, chalky lipstick from the fifties. Men watching as she glides past, her legs encased in stockings. Snow on eyelashes and laughter in frosty gusts.