Memoir project- Kara Clapper

The way Trevor Noah talked about his family and how important they were to him is something that I took inspiration from while writing my story. Throughout his whole story he talks about how much his mother loved him, like in chapter 6 when Trevor writes, “It was discipline in the form of love.” And again much later in the book he writes, “But it doesn’t always work, because you’re giving the kid tough love when maybe he just needs love.” (pg. 161) Although there is more background and depth behind these quotes they both have one thing in common, love. I think that closely relates to the culture of family. “That you can love a person you hate ,or hate a person you love.”(pg. 188) I think this quote holds a lot of truth when talking about any family. Nothing is perfect and sometimes it is hard to love them but in the end loving your family no matter what is so important. In Trevor Noah’s own vignettes he explored a sense of not knowing where he belonged even in his family, which is a truly hard feeling. I think an example of this in the book is when his grandmother hits his cousins and not him because he was half white, and again when he said, “I was an anomaly wherever we lived.”(pg. 84) Struggling to belong is a hard thing to go through and Trevor Noah explored this feeling a lot in his book which helped influence how I wrote my vignette. A huge thing Trevor Noah used in his vignettes to reach the reader was humor. Humor is never something I’ve really used in my writing, but one thing I did try to do like Trevor Noah was use lots of description. While reading his story it was almost like you were in the moment because of the way he described things. I took a lot of inspiration from this and I wanted my story to be something that people would read and feel like they were part of the moment while it happened. The culture of one’s family is a very complex thing to describe. I tried to add in little details, moments that may not seem important but would end up contributing to the reader being able to understand and get insight on how my family works. One of the main themes of our unit was Identity, and specifically what influences our identity. A huge thing that influences my identity is my family which is why I chose to write this specific story. My family makes me who I am, every part of my identity has been somehow shaped by my family. That is why I think that family is so important, they are constantly shaping and reshaping us. Family and identity seamlessly fit together, and I wanted to show that by writing this story a story of a normal night with my family.