Memoirs are all the rage. On every
third show of “Fresh Air” I hear Terry Gross open with the words, “In his/her
latest memoir . . .” Soon the Pulitzer
Prize committee will have to create a new category to accommodate a form of
writing that is neither fish nor fowl.
My focus here will be on memoirs
written by famous authors (or about them, by a relative or friend or lover or
enemy). Ernest Hemingway provides a good starting point. How many books have
used him as the subject? He was colorful, he led an active life, he was
sociable. He wrote his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, which came out in
1964, three years after his death. An elegiac sense of loss pervades its pages;
he will leave Hadley and his child behind and become the bigger-than-life Papa.
But Ernest was a man who held grudges, so he included an unattractive portrayal
of Gertrude Stein and a mean-spirited one of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It’s natural for a person who works
with words to turn to their own lives for subject matter (especially if their
ability to create fictional worlds has dried up). Though some keep limits on
what they’re willing to reveal, in this confessional age such reticence seems
outmoded and even evasive. In 1990 William Stryon cast aside propriety with Darkness
Visible, in which he chronicled his bout with debilitating depression. He
restricted himself to his disease; he had no other enemy to attack, and his
only confession had to do with a past of excessive drinking. But more and more
authors are coming out with the dysfunction-deviation memoir. John Bayley wrote
about his wife Iris Murdock’s decline and death from Alzheimer’s; he included
all the gory details, and along the way disclosed her affairs with both men and
women. (A reviewer in Commentary described the book as a form of
“spousal abuse.”) Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss is about her incestuous relationship
with her father, which took place when she was an adult. Susan Cheever wrote
about her addiction to sex. Frederick and Steven Barthelme coauthored a book
about their gambling addiction (they lost over $300,000, much of it inherited
money). And Styron’s daughter, in Reading My Father, did the revealing
he didn’t. Including the fact that his depression, which he had found release
from with medication at the end of Darkness Visible, would return to
plague him (and those around him) all his life.
The memoir has become a therapeutic
activity: a way to release (or unleash) pain or to bare one’s darkest secrets.
Or to get back at someone. When Joyce Maynard was forty-four she wrote about a
ten month live-in affair she had with J. D. Salinger when she was eighteen and
he was fifty-three. Nobody comes out of this unsullied. The young Maynard was
not seen by many as an innocent waif but as someone with an eye on advancing
her literary career. Even her parents got heat for encouraging the
relationship. Writers who reveal and attack often don’t find a sympathetic
audience. Even Hemingway was posthumously criticized for his portrayals of
Stein and Fitzgerald.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical
Thinking has no mud to sling, no dark secrets to reveal. In it she
describes coping with loss and grief at the death of her husband, the author
John Gregory Dunne. Because it won the National Book Award in Non-fiction I’ll
use it to examine my “neither fish nor fowl” remark. Didion’s memoir beat out
three finalists: a biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an account of the attack
on the Twin Towers, and a study of ecological invasion. Was it fair to place
these heavily researched works in the same category as Didion’s personal piece?
Plus, Didion had the advantage of being an accomplished wordsmith. It would be
more fitting for her to compete with the seventy other memoirs published that
year.
Since the memoir exists as a
separate form of writing — not an autobiography, not a novel — it must abide by
a separate set of rules. If the Pulitzer committee creates a new prize for the
memoir I have some suggestions for guidelines. In a memoir (from the Old French
memoire, memory), the author should deal with an issue that’s confined
to a certain sphere. It should not cover a life (or a large chunk of one), for
that’s the domain of an autobiography; as a rule of thumb, one should look
warily at a memoir that’s over three hundred pages. And it should not be
written in the style of a novel. It can have narrative, dialogue, scenes; but,
since it’s bound to facts, it should retain the tone of a factual account. It
can certainly express the author’s feelings, opinions, etcetera; and, in a
memoir (as in an autobiography) avoidance of certain issues is permissible. But
it can’t invent.
Most memoirs abide by these
guidelines. Angela’s Ashes, however, presents problems. It was labeled a
memoir and as such won a Pulitzer in the Biography/Autobiography category (its
main competition was a work on Herman Melville). In reading Frank McCourt’s
book I often got the feeling that he was serving up an exaggerated (or, to put
it a harsher way, a sensationalized) version of events. A little research
backed up my hunch: many residents of Limerick, Ireland accused the book of
being a gross misrepresentation. McCourt’s mother, attending a reading by Frank
and his brother, stood up in the audience and shouted “It’s all a pack of
lies!” Others, it must be noted, corroborated the validity of Angela’s Ashes.
Fact-checkers can make sure that a biography of Melville has accurate
information, and an autobiography by a famous author is subject to scrutiny. An
unknown like McCourt got such scrutiny only after his book became a
best-seller. Actually, a rule that a memoir must contain no fabrication is already
in place, something that the author of A Million Little Pieces can
attest to. He told lies, he was caught, he faced scorn and disgrace.
When I read Tobias Wolff’s This
Boy’s Life it rang true. But, though it’s classified as a memoir, it reads
like a novel. At the end the boy falsifies his records and gains entry into the
prestigious Hill School. Years later Wolff wrote a novel (which reads like a
novel) entitled Old School, about a boy — a budding writer — who gets
into a prestigious prep school by falsifying his records (the cover has a
photograph of the Hill School cafeteria). Wolff might claim that in the first
book he was writing about things that actually happened, and that much in the
later one had no basis in fact. But elements of both place them in the sphere
of the autobiographical novel. Though Sons and Lovers closely follows
D.H. Lawrence’s life, it has always been considered to be fiction.
Recent authors of autobiographical
novels are Pat Conroy and Jamaica Kincaid. The Great Santini was about
Conroy’s abusive father, and he was the son in that book. Similarly, I see
every indication that Kincaid was the girl and young woman in Annie John
and Lucy. Both these authors have written memoirs. Conroy’s The Death
of Santini was completed a few years before his own death. In My Brother
Kincaid returns to Antigua to care for her dying brother. I haven’t read the
Conroy books, but I’ve read all three of Kincaid’s. In My Brother she
sticks to my rules about the limits of the memoir. The novels are novels, My
Brother is a memoir. Kincaid is the same person in all three, but the
telling differs.
Fiction, memoir, autobiography,
autobiographical novel — they share a kinship. In subtitling Jane Eyre
“An Autobiography” Charlotte Bronte was expressing the closeness she felt to
her creation. Because authors must attain emotional contact with their main
character, most novels have an autobiographical aspect. This is true even if
the character is abominable or crazy. In Evan Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist
and Robert Coates’ Wisteria Cottage there’s compassion for people who do
atrocious things; this compassion must stem from empathy. Of course, the degree
of affinity between a fictional creation and the author varies. A line could be
drawn; on one end we could put something like Look Homeward, Angel and
on the other Around the World in Eighty Days. At the halfway point, most
fiction would be on the side with Thomas Wolfe. Some authors, like Philip Roth,
would stay closer to him than others.
To write a memoir, or an
autobiography, or a novel in which you’re the protagonist takes a big ego.
Which is not criticism — not if the result is very good, or great. What amazes
me is how a person can remember so much. My past is a fragmented jumble. Even
chronology is shaky. If I try to recall an image of my boyhood home I come up
with a child’s crude sketch. I know emotions and an outlook on life were formed
in that house, but I couldn’t put it into a coherent narrative.
Authenticity is especially suspect
if an author is looking far back into his or her past. With the passage of time
one’s memory becomes more and more precarious. Part of my belief that This
Boy’s Life should be categorized as an autobiographical novel stems from
the fact that it was written twenty-five years after the events depicted. How
could Wolff remember so much, in such detail and with such specificity? In
conversations I don’t expect him to recreate the exact words spoken. Here
fiction must come into play: something along these lines was said. I accept
that a memoir must incorporate a degree of fiction. The question is, how much
is allowed before the scale tips?
And what about the human tendency
to rearrange life events to serve one’s needs, to make one’s role more
acceptable? I know I’m guilty of such rearranging, and I don’t believe that
authors of memoirs or autobiographies are immune from it. But, since we’re
seeing things through their perspective, they have a right to express their
feelings. In My Brother Jamaica Kincaid harbors a consuming hatred for her
mother; whether that hatred is justified is not the point. What she can’t do is
engage in intentional distortion to put her mother in a bad light.
Frederick Exley recognized the
dubious ground he was treading in A Fan’s Notes. It’s subtitled “A Fictional
Memoir,” but in a Note to the Reader Exley writes, “I have drawn freely from my
imagination and adhered only loosely to the pattern of my life. To this extent,
and for this reason, I ask to be judged as a writer of fantasy.”
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