Sandra Scofield
Author of Novels & a Memoir

"Occasions of Sin," in its groping sense of honesty and its plain-spoken, understated pain, has the attributes of a classic."
Art Winslow, Chicago Tribune 01/25/04

“She marks her memories with an intense, reverent seriousness.”

"Deeply reflective and heartrending--" Booklist


In 1958, when Sandra Scofield was fifteen, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found--a fractured family, a distracted, bedridden mother--nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality.

The bond between this sensitive girl and her beautiful mother, Edith, had been built out of their intertwined aspirations for holiness, achievement, and love. Hardly more than a girl herself, the young Edith had taught her daughter to love books, art, music, and then God. Her conversion to Catholicism opened a door to education, and more, to a world where spirituality and sensuality swirled together, ultimately confusing Sandra and failing Edith.

Scofield captures the incredible vulnerability of the child in love with no one yet but her mother. She renders the experience of the girl becoming woman: the terrible assault of pleasure and confusion and fear that is visited upon the adolescent body. She conveys the intellectual and emotional fervor of the young Christian questioning the dizzying experience of her faith. And she is shocking as she tells what happens in the fallout from her loss.

More than forty years later, she looks back on her Catholic girlhood and lifts the great shadow that has lain over her mother’s memory, forgiving her mother’s frailties, and her own.


Excerpt:

It has taken me a long time to understand that my memories largely shape the meaning of my life, and that sometimes memories are a trick you play on yourself. When you lose your mother at a young age, you lose a part of who you are; you spend years navigating what amounts to chaos without any sort of reliable compass. The more bewildered and ashamed you are, the more you avoid reflection, the more you lash out; it’s always someone else’s fault. The past is a site of great injustice, the place where your parents failed you; the place where you see, nonetheless, the only possibility for connection. Sometimes, parked in a car with a boy who hardly knew me, I would wonder what my mother would say if she could see us. I went from worrying about doing the wrong thing to striving for it. You’re not the only one! I might have been screeching to heaven. Now, when sex is freely discussed with good humor and no embarrassment in print, film, and among friends and strangers, I don’t know which amazes me more: this present easiness, or the memory of just how serious it once seemed to me. How much I lost, giving it away, when I thought it was a sin.

Why, when my mother was buried, was her person forgotten? Why did no one give me reason to admire her, my mother, my model? We never spoke of her accomplishments or her dreams (for her children, more than for her), never gave her credit for her passion and her striving.

Did no one stop to think that I might turn out just like her, just like I thought she was?

Sandra Scofield and her mother, Edith,
by the municipal pool in Wichita Falls,
Texas. Summer 1947.
Courtesy of author.

Q & A With Sandra Scofield, author of OCCASIONS OF SIN: A MEMOIR

Q: You’ve had seven novels published since 1991, and now you’ve written a memoir. Why the switch? And why now?
A: Lots of writers start out working with childhood memories; it’s what you’ve got to bring to the table, and it’s a natural impulse to explore them. But my childhood didn’t make any sense to me and so I jumped right past it to other subjects, maybe because I didn’t start writing novels until I was 40. In my last novel, though, Plain Seeing, I used some family stories, and I confronted one of the mysteries of my mother’s life—where she ran away to when she was sixteen. I made up the answer, and it was very satisfying. Later, though, I realized that I had completely avoided my own story--the motherless daughter--in favor of a daughter character with a very different life. And I had not written a single scene between the mother and daughter!

I’d opened the box and I couldn’t put the lid back on. I fussed for a year with a fictional narrative about the year of my mother’s death, 1959, but it was ragged. I got very discouraged, and then I just decided to start over and try to tell the truth. By then it wasn’t about writing a book, it was about finding out what I had to say about my mother. I knew right away that I was doing the right thing, but it was a long process to do it the right way.

Q: You found writing memoir to be quite different, then, from writing fiction?
A: Much more than I ever imagined! It’s much harder to impose order. You think, well, I’ve got all this “material,” I won’t have to invent. What you forget is that invention has many faces. First of all, memories are fallible and fragmentary and they float in pictures more than in story, so you do have to invent, in the sense that you have to find a way to put things together coherently. But you don’t know how to put them together if you don’t know what they mean. You have to figure out what the images are telling you; how they connect to events. I kept seeing this picture of myself on a bus in October 1958, running away from the nuns in Fort Worth to go back to my mother in Odessa. I knew it was significant, though that particular image never appears in the book. What it told me was that my desperation to return to her was part of the sinew of my story: She had been declining, I was losing her, because I wasn’t with her. That gave me the key to seeing my whole childhood. I thought I was my mother’s prop.

Secondly, in memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig deeper, into whatever artifacts you have, or you go to the library, or you just confess that you are making a best guess. Readers accept that. I think it makes them trust you. And it teaches you new ways to fashion a story.

Q: Some memoirists say that what matters is the “emotional truth,” not the actual facts. You don’t agree with that?
A: I have had that conversation a number of times. At the risk of sounding naïve, I have to say I was shocked when I read and heard various writers admit without chagrin that they made up scenes because they felt “truer” than what had happened, or because it was more interesting to combine or modify facts. I had assumed, as a reader of memoir, that I could trust the story, and I went into my memoir assuming a contract in which I said: This really happened.

I think that understanding why one thing seems like another thing, or I should say, feels like another experience, is the key to understanding; but I’ve come down off my mountain now. I can understand better what other writers are saying about having to reconstruct their truth, as long as they tell the reader what they’ve done, why they had to, saying, perhaps: Some of this had to come from my imagination because I didn’t remember, or it didn’t make sense. It’s possible that a new genre is emerging, anyway. There are plenty of novels that are only lightly curtained over real events, why not the other way around? Each writer can present her license, her terms. I only speak for me.

Q: So you did fudge a little?
A: Not intentionally. I found, for example, that there were certain incidents that I had written about or even just obsessed about, and now I couldn’t separate the effects of my musing from what I actually remembered; I just let them all go.

I discovered that I had a lot to work with, actually. My grandmother saved a lot of the little stuff: school papers, report cards, letters between my mother and nuns and priests, between my mother and her—my grandmother. Oddly enough, there weren’t any of my own letters; I was shocked, because I wrote my grandmother a lot. There were stories and poems. And there were photographs, not so many, but they marked occasions, reminded me of clothing, and so on. I had my mother’s sister, too; we’ve always been close, and she’s a storyteller who had her impulses tamped down for a long time in a family where people didn’t talk about the past.

I learned that if I could find “one way in” to a scene, the rest of it came. And keep in mind, too, that I was always a brooder; I hoarded what people said to me, went over and over it, held it against them, made too much of it, brought it up years later. So I actually do remember certain bits of dialogue, like when the nun told me I would be a good girl if I would ask the Holy Ghost to send a gust to blow away my fancies! Or when my stepmother talked to me; I had a few letters from her, to me at college, too, so I could be very precise about her language.

But in the end, what you see in OCCASIONS is a kind of rosary of images: a bowl of cosmetics on the bathroom floor; my grandmother at the schoolyard fence; my mother putting damp clothes in the refrigerator to iron later; the silhouettes of pump-jacks and windmills in the evening sky. On and on. Those were the seeds, the links, the heart of the book, and they just kept adding up. Nested in reflection.

Q: You had a great subject in your mother. A tragic figure, would you say?
A: I don’t know. I was taught that tragic protagonists are important people to the world at large, and she was never that. We were really quite marginal folk. She was like so many other people: she had dreams, she had abilities; she just didn’t have the wherewithal, and she didn’t have the luck. And I don’t think of her as bringing things on herself. She had this great faith: in God, in love, in the value of learning. She was passionate about things she never got to see or do, but she just knew that I would, and I think I have. I think about her when I’m in a museum or at a concert, for example. She sent me into the world hungry for it. In many ways, I wasn’t yet prepared, of course, but that’s not her fault. It was her life that got cut short, after all.

I used to think she was responsible for all kinds of things, the way children believe their parents do good or bad things out of their power instead of their vulnerabilities. My life was a landscape that had been wobbling before, the roads trailing away to nowhere. My childhood finally stopped roiling. Now there’s a place for the people and the events in a story of that time: the nuns, the men, the mistakes, and, to my surprise, a great sense of joy. I had forgotten a lot of good things, until I wrote this book.

Q: People do say that writing can be healing. Are you saying that was true for you?
A: I wasn’t striving for that, though I do feel I more or less retrieved my mother. I certainly didn’t think of myself as engaging in any kind of therapy. The writer Patricia Hampl has said that when you write your life you live it twice, and the second living is “both spiritual and historical.” That was what I was looking for. I read her book, I Could Tell You Stories, early in the process and that remark had a big impact on me. It helped me form a set of goals:
Look back clear-eyed.
Put things into a perspective that takes in the temper of the times, and of the family.
Look deep inside my self to pull out my own history so that my past has a narrative form.
Open my heart wider.

Q: And what do you want for the reader?
A: The pleasure of the words and the images on the page. The recognition of my mother’s humanity. The surprise of seeing the ways that I’ve put experiences together, small incidents that add up to part of a life; and as a consequence welcoming thoughts about one’s own history. Maybe the reader will go away and write, or talk with loved ones, or read more memoirs.

If the past is dark, it’s scary and empty and haunted. I just say to the reader: Look, this is what I lived. I remember it. None of us did great things, we weren’t important, except to each other, but remembering is important. Writer Charles Baxter suggests that when we write our memories, we do a kind of battle against the corporate mentality; we stop being consumers, we’re individuals. I like that idea. I don’t think memoirists are narcissistic; they are conservators.

Don’t forget. That’s what I’m saying to the reader: Your memory belongs to you. The Polish writer Gustav Herling in a short story, "A Hot Breath from the Desert," tells a tale about
memory. A man's wife develops amnesia after working as a nurse in WWII. The couple are idle British expatriates, living in Italy. He cares for her, but slowly he despairs, and then blames her, for his own loss. Without his wife, that is, without her memory, HIS memory is going too, because there is no one else who knows him and is part of his memory.

That poor bastard, I think. If only he had been a writer.