Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven Book

What is a memoir but the ultimate chance to reconstruct one's own history? In 2013, the question seems obvious, but the genres of autobiography and memoir seemed to live an unexamined shelf life for decades. These tell-alls, sometimes poignant, frequently salacious, went largely unquestioned until 2006, when a massive controversy erupted over James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces. A six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had manufactured, embellished, or otherwise misrepresented the facts of his own life story. After a whirlwind media frenzy, during which the author was interrogated by book-club czar Oprah Winfrey, Frey admitted the truth. He and his publishers at Random House apologized, and the book was reclassified as "memoir/fiction." One year later, Susan Richards Shreve published her memoir Warm Springs.
Despite'or perhaps because of'the nasty press generated by Frey's work of truthiness, Shreve is candid about her own nuanced writing process. On page 3, she writes,
I've been looking for traces in my childhood that will bring the years I spent at Warm Springs into some kind of focus. In its intention, the process is very much the same as it was when I lived there and turned my attention to discovering what remained.

Shreve's acknowledgement of these memories, these traces, transforms an otherwise straightforward document into a provocative deconstruction of the memoir format.
The story itself is fascinating, and a worthwhile record of the shifting cultural landscape of the 1950s in America. More interesting to me, however, were Shreve's frequent references to her own role as a truth-maker, a trait she inherited from her parents. In describing a fictional date with fellow patient Joey Buckley, she wrote,
I saved stories for my parents to make them happy…and the stories had some truth, along with the addition of a happy ending. I added the happy ending perhaps by nature, perhaps in my own defense. A child can cover a multitude of sadness simply by inventing happiness. (page 9)

Again and again, Shreve describes the characters that she created and embodied and the stories she played out. Her mother was a frequent confederate, and the narrator describes the "double dance" of polite fictions maintained between and perpetrated by the two of them. From time to time, the young Shreve would enlist other patients into her fantasies, as when she invented a half-game called "March of Dimes Day":
In this game of the March of Dimes, we would not be ourselves. We would create a persona, invent a dramatic story such as the one contrived for the foundation for Donald Anderson, recreate ourselves as an advertisement for polio recovery in order to earn us consideration as the polio poster child. (page 183)

Not all of the other girls bought into the game.
"We're all going to make up who we are then, right?" Polly asked. "That's kind of like lying."
"No it's not," Marianna said. "It's like telling a story, which is different from lying."
"So that's all we do," Polly said. "Make up a story?"

And then they do.
Shreve is a natural-born novelist and storyteller, given to embellishment and invention. For the same reason, and because she doesn't hesitate to admit it, her voice is a powerful contribution to the landscape of modern memoirs.