again
.
—TK
Memoir beckons. Although the form dates back at least to Saint Augustine, it holds a particular allure for contemporary writers. Ideas about privacy and decorum have changed generally; even in daily life, Americans seem to expect more and more self-revelation from themselves and others. Authors who would once have felt obliged to wrap their own stories in the gauze of a roman à clef now feel entitled, or compelled, to speak to the reader without disguise. It feels more honest. And it can seem beguilingly easy, at least until one tries.
“Write about what you know,” writers are told, and it’s logical to conclude that what you know best is yourself. In fact, you may know too much. In honest moments we understand ourselves ascreatures of great contrariety. Many selves compete inside. How to honor this knowledge without descending into gibberish or qualifications worthy of a chairman of the Federal Reserve? How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
Postmodern wisdom has not helped, having cast the very idea of self, any self, into doubt. In his memoir,
Self-Consciousness
, John Updike writes: “That core ‘I’ that we imagine to be so crystalline and absolute within us can also be attacked and analyzed as a construct that human society bestows.” Updike resists this idea, with evidence that ranges from the mundane to the spiritual: the private quirks that endure through a lifetime, mingled with the sense that one also has a soul. He concludes with a definition of self that is universal and undeniable: “that window on the world that we can’t bear to think of shutting.”
To place yourself on the page is in part self-discovery, in part self-creation. The act feels like what a lump of clay must feel like to the hands of a sculptor.
This is all you have to work with, but you know there’s a face in there somewhere
. You write a paragraph in the first person. You read it over. You meet—as if for the first time, though the face does look familiar—the person who speaks the words you have written. You think,
That’s not me. This guy sounds downright mean
. You pull out his fangs.
Oh, no. Now he’s getting mushy on us
. Writers want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty.
Memoir, fortunately, doesn’t have to take on the burden oftotal self-representation. It can be confined to a time, to a relationship, to a side of one’s self that doesn’t pretend to encompass the whole, to a story.
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
is one classic example. Grant omits many important facts of his life: his drinking bouts; the means of his extraordinary rise, from working as a clerk in a dry goods store to commanding all the Union forces; his disastrous presidency; his humiliation and bankruptcy; the fact that he was writing his book in great pain from throat cancer, knowing his death was imminent. But the book is cited as one of the very few presidential autobiographies that deserves to be regarded as literature, for its lucid and dramatic account of the author’s Civil War campaigns. One of Grant’s biographers, Edmund Wilson, pointed out that the book has the unlikely effect of keeping the reader in suspense—“actually on edge to know how the Civil War is coming out.”
Memoirs, it’s said, were once the province of people like Grant, the great or at least the famous, for whom self-presentation is already an accomplished fact. Now the genre has opened, opened wide to writers with no prior claim on the reader’s imagination. The current abundance of new and recent memoirs can feel overbearing, and even alarming, a symptom of spreading self-absorption. But if the democratization of the form has helped to create that oversupply, it has also produced some distinguished books. Often they
.
—TK
Memoir beckons. Although the form dates back at least to Saint Augustine, it holds a particular allure for contemporary writers. Ideas about privacy and decorum have changed generally; even in daily life, Americans seem to expect more and more self-revelation from themselves and others. Authors who would once have felt obliged to wrap their own stories in the gauze of a roman à clef now feel entitled, or compelled, to speak to the reader without disguise. It feels more honest. And it can seem beguilingly easy, at least until one tries.
“Write about what you know,” writers are told, and it’s logical to conclude that what you know best is yourself. In fact, you may know too much. In honest moments we understand ourselves ascreatures of great contrariety. Many selves compete inside. How to honor this knowledge without descending into gibberish or qualifications worthy of a chairman of the Federal Reserve? How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
Postmodern wisdom has not helped, having cast the very idea of self, any self, into doubt. In his memoir,
Self-Consciousness
, John Updike writes: “That core ‘I’ that we imagine to be so crystalline and absolute within us can also be attacked and analyzed as a construct that human society bestows.” Updike resists this idea, with evidence that ranges from the mundane to the spiritual: the private quirks that endure through a lifetime, mingled with the sense that one also has a soul. He concludes with a definition of self that is universal and undeniable: “that window on the world that we can’t bear to think of shutting.”
To place yourself on the page is in part self-discovery, in part self-creation. The act feels like what a lump of clay must feel like to the hands of a sculptor.
This is all you have to work with, but you know there’s a face in there somewhere
. You write a paragraph in the first person. You read it over. You meet—as if for the first time, though the face does look familiar—the person who speaks the words you have written. You think,
That’s not me. This guy sounds downright mean
. You pull out his fangs.
Oh, no. Now he’s getting mushy on us
. Writers want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty.
Memoir, fortunately, doesn’t have to take on the burden oftotal self-representation. It can be confined to a time, to a relationship, to a side of one’s self that doesn’t pretend to encompass the whole, to a story.
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
is one classic example. Grant omits many important facts of his life: his drinking bouts; the means of his extraordinary rise, from working as a clerk in a dry goods store to commanding all the Union forces; his disastrous presidency; his humiliation and bankruptcy; the fact that he was writing his book in great pain from throat cancer, knowing his death was imminent. But the book is cited as one of the very few presidential autobiographies that deserves to be regarded as literature, for its lucid and dramatic account of the author’s Civil War campaigns. One of Grant’s biographers, Edmund Wilson, pointed out that the book has the unlikely effect of keeping the reader in suspense—“actually on edge to know how the Civil War is coming out.”
Memoirs, it’s said, were once the province of people like Grant, the great or at least the famous, for whom self-presentation is already an accomplished fact. Now the genre has opened, opened wide to writers with no prior claim on the reader’s imagination. The current abundance of new and recent memoirs can feel overbearing, and even alarming, a symptom of spreading self-absorption. But if the democratization of the form has helped to create that oversupply, it has also produced some distinguished books. Often they
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