tell the sorts of stories that Grant didn’t tell, stories that on the surface, anyway, don’t reflect kindly on themselves.
Confession as a means of reconstructing the self can have a keyhole-like fascination for the reader. Perhaps every memoir
should
reveal something the author doesn’t reveal in daily life.But confession carries various risks. A sly vanity can lurk in a recitation of misdeeds, a reveling in one’s colorfulness:
Oh, what a bad girl I was!
Or one can end up presenting a much too limited concept of the self. Some, though not all, recent stories of addiction fall into this trap and leave the reader thinking, “There’s more to everyone than the love of vodka.”
How the writer conveys present knowledge of past experience is a delicate problem for all memoirists. The question of how much to reveal in constructing a self on the page merges into the fundamental question of how much to interpret and how much simply to describe. When to comment on the past, when simply to portray it in all its starkness and let it speak for itself? It can be tempting to disown the past only to celebrate the present self.
What a fool I was! (But how clever I am now to see it.)
And all the while the reader knows that previous selves are not so easily discarded.
Self-exploration, including confession, almost always involves other people. Some of them are bound to be offended by an honest memoir. But the good and honest memoir is neither revenge nor self-justification, neither self-celebration nor self-abnegation. It is a record of learning. Memoirs, by definition, look backward. They are one response to Kierkegaard’s dilemma that life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. Memoirs survey a past with the benefit of the knowledge that experience has yielded. With
The Education of Henry Adams
, Henry Adams created the perfect title. Every memoir worth reading could be called
The Education of the Author
. The “I” has been somewhere and it now knows something that it didn’t, and that is a thing of value for writer and reader alike.
•
Here are some basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist:
• Say difficult things. Including difficult facts.
• Be harder on yourself than you are on others. The Golden Rule isn’t much use in memoir. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.
• Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure.
• Stick to the facts.
Stick to the facts
. The words sit there in all innocent simplicity, as if sticking to the facts were no more complicated than stopping at a red light. But the facts are often at issue in memoir, and in a way that goes far beyond the fraudulent memoirs that from time to time scandalize the publishing business.
In an author’s note to his memoir,
Lost in the Meritocracy
, Walter Kirn says, “There are, I suspect, a number of inaccuracies, but no deliberate deceptions.” Most memoirists, struggling for accuracy, would endorse this rough code of conduct: faithfulness to fact defined as faithfulness to one’s own memories. Of course, this does not entirely resolve the issue.
Like the act of remembering, the act of writing your own story inevitably distorts, if only by creating form where disorder reigns. To make sense of your life or a portion of it is to tell a story, and story often stands at odds with the ferment in whichyou have lived. That’s one point of a story: to replace confusion with sense. The impulse of memoir is itself a fictive impulse.
What is true in macrocosm is true in microcosm. At the level of moment-by-moment rendering of the past, the factual becomes all the more problematic. One can see the problem enacted, in a brilliant form, in Frank Conroy’s memoir,
Stop-Time
, a modern landmark in the genre. When the book
Confession as a means of reconstructing the self can have a keyhole-like fascination for the reader. Perhaps every memoir
should
reveal something the author doesn’t reveal in daily life.But confession carries various risks. A sly vanity can lurk in a recitation of misdeeds, a reveling in one’s colorfulness:
Oh, what a bad girl I was!
Or one can end up presenting a much too limited concept of the self. Some, though not all, recent stories of addiction fall into this trap and leave the reader thinking, “There’s more to everyone than the love of vodka.”
How the writer conveys present knowledge of past experience is a delicate problem for all memoirists. The question of how much to reveal in constructing a self on the page merges into the fundamental question of how much to interpret and how much simply to describe. When to comment on the past, when simply to portray it in all its starkness and let it speak for itself? It can be tempting to disown the past only to celebrate the present self.
What a fool I was! (But how clever I am now to see it.)
And all the while the reader knows that previous selves are not so easily discarded.
Self-exploration, including confession, almost always involves other people. Some of them are bound to be offended by an honest memoir. But the good and honest memoir is neither revenge nor self-justification, neither self-celebration nor self-abnegation. It is a record of learning. Memoirs, by definition, look backward. They are one response to Kierkegaard’s dilemma that life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. Memoirs survey a past with the benefit of the knowledge that experience has yielded. With
The Education of Henry Adams
, Henry Adams created the perfect title. Every memoir worth reading could be called
The Education of the Author
. The “I” has been somewhere and it now knows something that it didn’t, and that is a thing of value for writer and reader alike.
•
Here are some basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist:
• Say difficult things. Including difficult facts.
• Be harder on yourself than you are on others. The Golden Rule isn’t much use in memoir. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.
• Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure.
• Stick to the facts.
Stick to the facts
. The words sit there in all innocent simplicity, as if sticking to the facts were no more complicated than stopping at a red light. But the facts are often at issue in memoir, and in a way that goes far beyond the fraudulent memoirs that from time to time scandalize the publishing business.
In an author’s note to his memoir,
Lost in the Meritocracy
, Walter Kirn says, “There are, I suspect, a number of inaccuracies, but no deliberate deceptions.” Most memoirists, struggling for accuracy, would endorse this rough code of conduct: faithfulness to fact defined as faithfulness to one’s own memories. Of course, this does not entirely resolve the issue.
Like the act of remembering, the act of writing your own story inevitably distorts, if only by creating form where disorder reigns. To make sense of your life or a portion of it is to tell a story, and story often stands at odds with the ferment in whichyou have lived. That’s one point of a story: to replace confusion with sense. The impulse of memoir is itself a fictive impulse.
What is true in macrocosm is true in microcosm. At the level of moment-by-moment rendering of the past, the factual becomes all the more problematic. One can see the problem enacted, in a brilliant form, in Frank Conroy’s memoir,
Stop-Time
, a modern landmark in the genre. When the book
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