Today, we’re talking about tastes and smells and how they can conjure up a strong sense of place or of a particular person (lavender always makes me think of my grandmother because she used to sew potpourri holders and put lavender inside). Tastes and smells can also make us think of our culture and of our childhood. All of these elements make for fantastic memoir writing.
First, make a list of your 10 favourite smells. Some of my favourites include the top of my cat’s head, the smell of garlic roasting, an orange being peeled, bread baking, or of laundry steam being vented from inside a building. Note that you can also do this exercise with smells you dislike: the smell of burnt hair and the smell of frying bacon would be on my list for sure.
Next, choose three of your favourite smells and jot down a few memories associated with each of them. Write down any other sensory details (taste, sound, sight, touch) you remember as well. Including these details in memoir is what really makes a piece of writing come alive for the reader.
Finally, choose one of these memories and write about it. See if you can evoke a sense of the place where the scene took place and/or an important person in your life through focusing on these sensory details. Share your writing in the comments section.
Sometimes, choosing a specific form for a piece of memoir helps us get the memories down on paper. This is especially true of difficult or even traumatic memories. This type of essay is sometimes called a “hermit crab essay” because, like a hermit crab who borrows a shell for another animal, these forms provide a pre-made structure that can house our writing.
Here is an excerpt from a hermit-crab short-story called “A Recipe for Disaster” by Eufemia Fantetti (reprinted with kind permission from the author). The story is from her award-winning short-story collection of the same name:
A Recipe for Disaster, Eufemia Fantetti
PREP TIME: Imprecise
COOK TIME: In Season
YIELD: Serves 2
Meet someone you are ¼ compatible with. Base this compatibility ½ on the fact that you are carbon-based life forms and ½ on your sad pasts.
Eve possesses limited skills in the kitchen. She knows the quote about how simple it is to keep a man as long as one is a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. She has no gusto for any of these roles.
Throughout Eve’s childhood, she sustained an endless series of pinches, a tight squeezing of a cheek or forearm skin with the ever-present question, “You eating enough?”
When Eve’s father left Italy, it was a poverty-stricken country recovering from political turmoil; a post-Second World War classroom photo shows his eyes bigger than his stomach, the small organ shrunken from malnutrition. Now the cost of a cappuccino is ridiculous in both countries and everyone loves Italian cuisine.
“Never forget,” says her father, as he roams the aisles of cheap produce at No Frills, “Canada best country for the food.”
Eve has met someone. His name is Adam. Their friends this funny, and fortuitous.
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Spend some time straining through failed relationships, measure each sordid detail together.
Adam’s family has also come from famine. “Everyone did.” He shrugs when Eve points this out. They are children of different diasporas, born after the mass exodus, each searching for small comforts in the form of food, hungry for a home. His family also lost their religion, switching from Catholic to Protestant generations ago, simply to survive. Eve’s family thinks the road to hell is paved with Protestants.
Adam and Eve are both atheists, him more so than her. Eve would like to believe in something—even if it’s only in the healing power of food: the redemption found in every morsel, every meal.
Try it yourself! Tell a story (fiction or non-fiction) using the form of a recipe. Share your writing in the comments below!