Who Should Write a Memoir?

Every once in a while the New York Times Book Review publishes a total trashing -- it's rare enough that it gets a good deal of attention when it happens. I'll never forget Lee Siegel's evisceration of Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon -- reading a review like that is like hearing about a friend's divorce: it makes you feel simultaneously sick and intrigued. How awful it happened to them! And Thank God it didn't happen to me.

The latest victims are three memoirs taken down by Neil Genzlinger in the most recent NYTBR. I haven't read them, so I'm not going to comment on them in particular (though I guess that hasn't stopped me in the past) but rather on a couple of things Genzlinger says in his piece. The first is something I agree with, that No one wants to relive your misery. Well, okay, *I* don't want to relive your misery. I mean, I don't think I want to. But somehow I feel compelled to. It's weird. A few years ago I read probably the most horrifying memoir EVER: Ten Degrees of Reckoning by Hester Rumberg. It's about a family who travel around the world in a boat until a huge tanker crashes into them. The mother of the family watches as each of her children and her husband sink beneath the waves. She somehow makes it to land and is never the same. OF COURSE. It's a memoir of such abject misery I honestly don't know why it was published, though I know why it was written.

I agree with Genzlinger when he says,

Say you get stuck under a rock and have to cut off your own arm to escape. If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop. You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.

Yet, as queasy as these sadistic memoirs are, I can't stop reading them. How awful it happened to them! And Thank God it didn't happen to me.

So I do disagree with Genzlinger: my disagreement is two-layered. First, I don't think the content of the life experience should determine whether a person writes a memoir at all. At all! People's lives don't vary much in terms of interestingness; what varies is how perceptive the writer is. If you're a terrible, blah writer, you could make being the first woman to open a rib joint on Mars sound stupid. On the other hand, someone like Alan Bennett makes his quiet life infinitely fascinating. Genzlinger implies you need either an interesting life or a talent for writing. I think you just have to be able to write.

Secondly, he blames writers for the flood of banal memoirs. But human beings have always written about their lives, for better or for worse, boring and silly or vicious or sadistic. That doesn't mean publishers have to publish it. Why do writers always get the blame for bad trends? Seriously, I don't know a single person who can crank out 300 pages of something they don't believe in. Every memoir out there had to be written -- someone had to memorialize her dog, or capture his traumatic disease, or remember a childhood.

But need does not necessarily translate to excellence. And it's the editor's job to notice that, in the end, isn't it? You can't blame a writer for lacking talent, but you sure can blame a publisher for pretending the subject will carry the day.

Suggested memes for eager trendseekers

from patchworkunderground.com.
It turns out porno quilting
is a real thing.

I've got a lot of very fine ideas for hit nonfiction memoir/self-help titles, but am too lazy to write them.  Would you like to?  You don't even have to share the money with me, just thank me profusely in your acknowledgements section.  Which, by law, must be at least three pages long.

Passive Daddy's Parenting Boot Camp

My Year Of Only Snacking

Vodka Buddha

1000 Prescriptions: My Harrowing Journey Through Hell To Purity

Fertility By Proxy: A Love Story

Baby Talk Saved Our Marriage

Kickball King: A 40-Year-Old Man Repeats Fifth Grade

Chimp Vs. Child: A Homeschooling Odyssey

Pill Pals

Bros Before Hoes: How Four Heterosexual Men Discovered Communal Gardening

The Hirsute Nearsighted Men's Midnight Samovar Society

The Videogame Organic Cola Cure

Hipster Tent City: Six Months In A Vacant Lot In Flatbush

The Power Of Clowning

Vow Of Silence

Canning Therapy

The Swap: How My Sister And I Traded Husbands And Why We're Not Switching Back

Laced: How I Overcame Drug Addiction Through Tatting

In The Margin: My Year Living In A Highway Median Strip

Kickboxing Librarian Sex Goddess Speaks

Philosopher Dogwalker

Mating Call Of The Thai Noodle Daddy

Cry Every Hour

The Booksellers' Noonday Forced Laughter Club

Krumping With Aunt Sue: How L.A. Street Dancing Healed My Family

Driving My Neighbor's Kid From Houston To Anchorage

The Lego Sex Life Solution

Par None: How I Found Myself Through Ironic Golf Playing

The Unemployed Academics' Five O'Clock Actors' Studio

My Year Of Muttonchops

Scavenge For Life

How I Found And Kept True Love Through Celibacy

The Netflix Marriage

My Year Of Buying Every Single Thing I Wanted

Multiple Orgasms Through Prayer

My Year Of Being Constantly Stoned

My Year Of Lies

Porno Quilter

The Truth

Rhian was working on something interesting recently--a personal essay. This is an unusual activity at W6HQ--we've always been pretty hardcore fiction writers. Back in grad school, we would roll our eyes when another personal essay came down the pike; we used to joke that the Montana license plate should read THE MEMOIR STATE, and the last line of our friend Gerri's bio, when she published her poems in magazines, was "She is not writing a memoir."

At least a little of this anti-essay sentiment was jealousy, I think--I can't speak for Rhian (especially now that she's a traitor!), but in my case, I just don't think I've had the life experience to make it interesting. Oh, my life has been plenty interesting to me. But, as I might have suggested in the comments of the last thread, it's been a life of sitting around making stuff up in my head.

I have tried my hand at a few. I wrote a couple for a Prominent Magazine, but each time the work disintegrated into a series of arguments with the editor, who wanted the essays to end differently. The editor would say something like, "Maybe when it was all over, you thought something like this." I: "But I didn't." Editor: "But maybe you did." In the end, I gave up--if it wasn't going to be true, I didn't want to write it. Period. Those pieces remain unpublished.

Maybe, however, I was wrong. Earlier this year I posted about an argument I had--a flame war, really--on a photography forum about a particular picture I dislike. My argument boiled down to the pedantic idea that a photograph is always a manipulation--that photography is not, in fact, a documentary form. The matrix of artistic choices involved in taking, developing, and printing a picture is so thick that little truth can ever be glimpsed through it. Now, if the photo were overtly fictional (as in the work of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Sandy Skoglund, etc.), we could relax and take what truth from it we liked. But the deceptive prospect of objective truth prevents us from actually seeing any truth.

I guess I felt the same way about essays and novels--an essay is never going to be true, so why not just write fiction? But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I oughta loosen up and embrace the winking nontruth of the personal essay. Perhaps readers are grown up enough to have absorbed the impossibility of objective truth in an essay, and in fact consider it a part of what makes reading one pleasurable.

Something tells me I've posted about this before, but it keeps gnawing at me. Whaddya say, should I give in and write some essays?

Trends in Memoir

Boy, are there ever a lot of memoirs out there. One keeps thinking the genre has peaked, but no. It used to be that you had to have a really unusual experience or a notable life to write a memoir, but that's not true anymore. This is what you need now: a life story with a "hook" (being raised in an unusual family, or in an unusual place, or with an unusual condition), a terrible trauma that you survived, or a wacky/strenuous challenge that you decide to undertake (eating a hamburger in all 50 states, forgoing plastic, etc.)

I really like memoirs, and I read a lot of them. For some reason they're easier to read than fiction, so when my brain feels fried (which it does a lot these days) I'll pick out the memoir from my teetering pile of unread books. So none of this is meant as criticism of the genre. It's true I'm slightly resentful of them, though -- I'm a fiction writer, and very loyal to that genre, and so far my life has not been memoir-worthy (I hope it never will be). And most memoirs are perfectly fine, but nothing I'd post about.

Mostly I'm just very curious about why this has happened. Experiences that once might have been channeled into fiction are now told straight, as memoir. Why? What changed since, say, the 70's? My mother used to read a lot of travel memoirs back then, but that and the autobiography of fame were really the only kinds of the thing that you could get back then. Why the hunger, now, to hear about a stranger's breast cancer, or young widowhood, or infertility?

JRL thinks it's marketing. A book about, say, adopting a baby from China (there's one on my store's new book table right now) has a ready-made audience: the thousands of people who've adopted from China. Or adopted at all. Everyone who knows someone with that experience will buy it for their friend as a gift. Same with the cancer memoir on the same table, and the autism one.

There's some truth to this, I think. Publishers are nervous these days, and books are expensive, and we might feel that they need to be educational somehow or giftable, to coin a term, before we shell out $27.95. Will I give my sister a literary novel from an unknown first novelist? Um, no. Will I give her a memoir about being gluten-intolerant? You bet.

But I don't think it's entirely the publishing industry pushing this stuff at us. I think there's an appetite. Some of the appetite for fiction has shifted. We want to read about real life. Did we not want to read about real life in 1975? In those days, the big beefy not-especially-well-written drama was big. We wanted to read about imaginary famous or rich people doing spectacular things. We didn't want to read about someone's terrible, but not famous, mother. (Joan Crawford yes, Mrs. Bilinski down the street, no.) We didn't care, in those days, about your obsessive compulsiveness.

Or did we? Maybe we did, but publishing was reluctant to get with the program. I remember being excited, in 1983 or so, about Go Ask Alice, the drug addiction memoir that was so titillating I had to stand in the library stacks in my snow boots and read it because my mom wouldn't let me get it out. Maybe there was a kind of literary snobbishness in publishing then that we're finally getting over.

Anyway, it's fascinating. These days, the terrible mother Mrs. Bilinski might get a whole memoir, if her daughter has literary ambitions. Who'd have thunk! And when will it end? It's got to end somewhere. Doesn't it? I certainly hope so, before one of my sons writes a book about how his mother limited him to an hour of computer time a day and wouldn't let him drink soda.

Blogging's Influence on Books

I was skimming through the ARC of Jennifer Lancaster's humorous weight-loss memoir, Such a Pretty Fat, and was rather taken aback at how... tedious it is. It's got lots of energy and a good premise (she's a fat person with no self-esteem problems) but sheesh, she goes on and on and on about herself and her terribly cute daily minutiae, to really an absurd degree. It's like having lunch with a pathologically self-absorbed person: after a bit all you can do is nod and say Uh-huh and keep glancing at your advancing-way-too-slowly watch -- but it goes on for 300 pages! I found myself wondering, Since when does a mildly amusing anecdote about your dog -- the kind that only barely qualifies for speaking aloud, when you have nothing better to talk about -- deserve to be written down for a mass audience?

Oh, yeah. Since blogging.

Such a Pretty Fat is basically a bunch of blog posts tied together with some contrived and unbelievable story lines (she keeps buying Barbie heads while high on Ambien) in order to turn it into something that resembles a book. But its heart is a blog. And though I'm not really interested in daily-life blogs (why, I wonder? The intimate lives of complete strangers should be interesting to me, but they're not), I'm sure Lancaster's is a fun one. She's very clever. She's probably terrifying to be around in person: one of those people who snarks so viciously about everyone around her you go queasy thinking about what she's saying about you when you're not there. A blog is the perfect medium for her.

But as a book... I don't know. Obviously I'm a fan of blogging and think it's going to be vital to the future of literature (somehow or other), but I hope that future doesn't look like this, like a blog: less edited, less reflective, more self-centered, and with a lower bar for being funny and interesting. Since there's no paper to waste online, you might as well ramble on and on until you accidentally say something worthwhile. Hell, I've done it myself. But a book costs money and uses natural resources and one expects a little bit more.

Have I just contradicted JRL's pro-blog post of a couple nights ago? Oh, well. We contain multitudes.

What's The Point, Again?

So another mighty memoirist has fallen. I'm probably not the only one to feel completely unsurprised by this development--and also not terribly surprised that it was Riverhead who was re-suckered. (Full disclosure: they used to be my publisher, but rejected my third novel because it was "odd.") When you live by the lurid confessional, you die by the lurid confessional--or in this case, continue dragging your moribund ass into the future by the lurid confessional.

Perhaps the publishing industry should be asking itself whether inadequate fact-checking is not, in fact, the real problem. Its dismay is akin to that of the sad couple who, after inviting their alcoholic uncle to their wedding and providing him with an open bar, cannot understand how he could be so rude as to drink himself sick and vomit all over the bridesmaids. Publishers are in the habit of paying enormous advances to people who can provide them with extraordinary life experiences, and so what do you think is going to happen? People are going to generate some, that's what.

I was talking to the writer Paul Lisicky today (interview here) about this very thing. He's a guy with a fairly regular life, who managed to write a wonderful memoir about it. What's extraordinary about Paul is not his experience (gay coming-of-age, abortive church-music recording career) but about the way he has chosen to see that experience. His book is good for the reason that all good books are good--the world is interesting to him, and it is interesting to hear him talk about it. It's people like Paul whom publishers should be rewarding--people who, with their work, can show readers that their own lives are valuable, that their own experience is worth treasuring, and analyzing, and talking about--instead of people who pretend to be what they're not. Good writers enrich readers. The value of their work extends outside itself. It offers a new paradigm for understanding the world.

The ironic thing is that every memoir is fictional, in a way--memory is an elusive thing, and all experience is subjective. But the good memoirist enters into a contract with his reader, a contract that goes something like this: "Though we both understand that this account is not objectively true, I, the writer, will do my best to present you with the world as I know it, in the most interesting possible way; and in exchange, you, the reader, will give me the benefit of the doubt." The more prominent writers break the contract, the fewer readers are likely to buy into it in the future. The entire genre is brought low by these lies, and while I certainly don't applaud the writers who are doing the lying, I have far less respect for the publishers who keep them in business.

Personally, I am too uncomfortable with the vagaries of memory, at least for now, to write anything but fiction. But I applaud people like Paul for managing to make art out of life, even if they didn't escape from Attica or balloon across Siberia. Bring your copy of "Love And Consequences" back to the store and pick up his book instead.

The Mistress's Daughter

Reviews keep calling A. M. Homes's new memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, riveting. And the first half of it is -- Homes describes how her loopy and desperate birth mother gets in touch with her after thirty years, and how Homes attempts to avoid her. If Homes seems a little, well, callous, who can judge her? She saves her fiercest wrath for her biological father, whom she names in the book and whose ass she describes. He may or may not deserve this treatment, but it was hard for me not to feel bad for him, which can't possibly be what the author intends.

So that bit, with all of its bitterness and fury, is indeed riveting -- like a drive-by shooting.

But then there's a long stretch of Homes imagining her mother's life, and an even longer trek through Homes's biological family history, and then a brief but sweetly sentimental evocation of her adopted grandmother and the pleasures of motherhood. These pages are haunted by an invisible person: Homes's adopted mother. Who is she? She's mentioned throughout the book, but barely described. I suppose Homes didn't want to write about her, but a reader can't help but think about her, a lot.

Memoirs have two layers: what the writer intends to say about her life, and what she doesn't say, but what comes across anyway. In this book it's difficult to separate the two, because Homes clearly wants to strip the genre of its pleasing nuggets of received wisdom and its easy conventions. But does she mean to sound so mean? Maybe she does, and maybe it's my own queasiness with brutal honesty that's the problem.

Or maybe there's no problem at all. After all, I read the whole thing.

Serial Memoirs

I'll read pretty much any memoir, because I find it interesting to see how people take the raw and meaningless material of their lives and slap into narrative shape. However, I think we should call a moratorium on serial memoirizing. Too often a writer puts out a really excellent, juicy memoir (like Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is about her affair with her father (!)), and then, once she's established herself as a memoirist, follows it up with one or more lesser books that cover very similar ground (Harrison's The Mother Knot). These follow-up memoirs tend to toss together lots of unrelated material in a fragmented fashion, and almost always include therapy scenes, in which we are forced to watch the writer healing from the traumas of the other books. Okay, I'm banning therapy scenes, too.

How about this: from now on everyone (even those of us with nice parents and no drug problems) gets exactly one memoir. After that, you have to move on to other people.