While autobiographies make use of documentary records, memoirs are, almost by definition, literary representations of memory. And so, like memories, they may be inaccurate or willfully distorted. Memoirs are representations of memory, not of history.
The biographer Dorothy Gallagher notes that "Writing is problem solving; whether in fiction, biography, or memoir, certain basic questions have to be resolved". She continues:
In biography, at least, a writer leans heavily on materials gathered in research. Working with a trove of documents is constraining, but also in some ways liberating, as working a puzzle is liberating. The clues are in your files, and if you've done your job as a researcher, you have the tools to solve the puzzle. But when I turned to memoir -- the shamelessly naked core of a writer's necessary material -- I found myself traveling as light as any writer of fiction.
I have never written fiction, and this memoir [How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories] may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true to life. because, truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve her story.... A reporter of fact is in service to the facts..., but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims....
Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth?
It is as close as it can be....
The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life -- that one damn thing after another -- is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it's a package made to travel.
Everything that happened is not in my stories; how could it be? Memory is selective, storytelling insists on itself. But there is nothing in my stories that did not happen. In their essence they are true.
Or a shade of true... ("Recognizing the Book that Needs to be Written", New York Times, 06/17/02).
Similarly, Lisa Knopp has written in the Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) that
The act of making something from what is already there always involves a simultaneous creation and destruction.... Even what seems like the purest, most self-contained type of creativity -- turning the events, images, and ideas of one's life into a written story --is a destroyer. Writing about one's memories, trimming, padding, moving them around, reshaping them until they fit a readable or "tellable" form, changes these memories in great or small ways. What the writer remembers after her act of creation is not her memory of the event that is the subject of her essay or story, but the written account of her memory (as quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 09/27/02).
Publishing a memoir, as with giving an oral history, is an exercise in both remembering and performing. Bernard Cooper, writing in Baxter's The Business of Memory, notes that "The process of writing a memoir is insular, ruminative, a mining of privacies; once published, however, the book becomes an act of extroversion..., a performance of self rather than its articulation. The gap between these two experiences -- the creation of a memoir and the ramifications of having written one -- is wide enough, it seems to me, to bewilder even the most poised and gregarious among us".
Linton Weeks ("It's the 'Me' that Makes a Memoir an Incomplete Tale", Washington Post, reprinted in the West County Times, 08/24/03), notes that "A real autobiography traffics in facts: a memoir relies on memory" (autobiographies also cover a person's entire life, while memoirs may focus on only a small segment, typically childhood or adolescence). Weeks continues: "I feel that the memoir is the genre of our generations. The Me Decades are stretching out into the Memoir Millennium. The 'I's' have it". Weeks traces "memoirmania" to the publication of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time (1967) and Russell Baker's Growing Up, and quotes John Maker, editorial director of Publishers Weekly: "People want to find out what the secrets of other people's lives are, especially if they are attached to somebody famous. It's part of the cult of celebrity. Everybody's fascinated with the idea of being famous".
Phillip Lopate, reviewing Dan Barry's Pull Me Up: A Memoir, writes (New York Times Book Review, 05/16/04):
There seems to be a notion afoot that the memoir has overstayed its welcome, that there is something inherently tacky about the parade of seminobodies exhibiting their stumps of addiction or abuse. But most novels, poetry books, plays and biographies have been mediocre too, and no one's calling for a halt. I hope we can always celebrate a writer who, trying to make intelligent sense of life's confusions, gives us a memoir that is witty, self-aware, and peopled with strong characters.... [Barry] offers himself... as an ordinary-guy Everyman, with a writing style: "I know that my story is no different from any other story, that I am everybody, anybody, but it is my story, the only one I have."
Natalia Rachel Singer has introduced the notion of the hybrid memoir, "in which a writer presents a life through a lens that reflects both inward and outward.... [T]he best memoirists allow their life experiences to shed light on a culture, a historical moment, a time, a place, a social problem, a political issue that remains timely. Four such memoirists/essayists are George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Griffin, and Alix Kates Shulman" (from Singer's contribution to "The Short List: The Most Influential Books", Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/22/04).
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Memoir! A sweet word that, year after year, liberates writers caught between genres. Tell the story of your own life and you get some of the liberty of fiction and all the authority of nonfiction. Virginia Heffernan New York Times Book Review, 07/14/02 |
Consider the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss musician whose book, Fragments (1995), portrays a
young Jewish child's life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. As
Wilkomirski tells his story, he was born in Latvia in 1939, witnessed his
father's execution when he was 3 or 4 years of age, and was incarcerated in a
series of camps. At the end of the war, he was found wandering around Auschwitz,
and he was placed in an orphanage in Krakow.
Wilkomirski
included in his book a group photo taken in a Polish orphanage around 1946: one of
the children is highlighted by the annotation, "Could this be me?". In
any event, he was relocated to Switzerland in 1948, and recovered memories of
his camp experiences during psychotherapy. Wilkomirski's book is vivid and
powerful. Jonathan Kozol, reviewing it in the Nation, compared it with
Elie Wiesel's Night, one of a true classics of Holocaust literature. The
book won a host of literary prizes, including the Jewish Quarterly prize
for non-fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography; the
American edition was listed by the New York Times as a "notable
book" for 1997. It has been called the "most successful Swiss book
since Heidi".
Fragments is also often cited as an example of the qualities of traumatic memory: it is fragmentary (hence its title), lacking in narrative coherence. Wilkomirski's story has also been touted as evidence for the success of recovered memory therapy. More recently, however, strong doubts have been raised about its provenance. In contrast to Night, it is lacking in specific details -- but then again, what do we expect from the memories of a 4-year-old child? More unsettling is the fact that few young children survived the camps. Children younger than 7 years were usually killed quickly after their arrival and apparently there were no children at all at Auschwitz.
Despite Wilkomirski’s photograph from
Krakow, Swiss adoption records
indicate that Wilkomirski was born Bruno Grossjean near Bern, Switzerland in
1941, to a poor, unmarried, Protestant woman. He was a public ward until 1945,
when he was taken in as a foster child by Kurt and Martha Dossekker, and raised
by them in Zurich; in 1957, he was formally adopted. Bruner appears in Dossekker
family pictures dating from 1946, and school records dating from 1947. He
attended university, worked as a musician and instrument-maker, became an
amateur historian of the Holocaust, and changed his name to Binjamin Wilkomirski
in the 1980s. Both his adoptive parents died in 1986.
It is now widely believed that Fragments is a work of "nonfiction fiction". It has become very common for writers to incorporate fictional scenes into nonfiction -- think of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, or the work of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. Just last year, Edmund Morris inserted himself, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, as a character in his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, following the president from a high-school football field in Dixon, Illinois, straight into the White House. Wilkomirski seems to have done the opposite: to incorporate nonfiction, details of the Holocaust gleaned from a lifetime's obsessive reading, into fiction -- a memoir which isn't based on personal recollection. The irony is that Fragments works as a piece of fiction -- but as one critic noted, "Nonfiction sells better than fiction".
Moreover, in a striking parallel to the views of some trauma therapists, some publishers seem to feel that it is not their job to fact-check their authors' memoirs. Arthur Samuelson, Wilkomirski's American publisher, noted that:
We don't have fact checkers. We are not a detective agency. We are a vehicle for authors to convey their work, and we distribute their information with a feeling of responsibility.
Similarly, Elizabeth Janeway, his American editor, stated that:
We don't vet books on an adversarial basis. We have no means of independent collaboration [sic].
Reliance on uncorroborated memory may be good for the publishing business, but it may not be good for history. But then again, it may not be good for the publishing business, either. After commissioning an independent investigation, Wilkomirski's German publisher withdrew the book from circulation.FN
In an article on "witness literature", Timothy Garton Ash referred to Wilkomirski as an example of a writer on "the frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction", but whose book lacks the essential "truth test" of "veracity" (On the Frontier", New York Review of Books, 11/07/02).
Reading Fragments now, one is amazed that it could ever have been hailed as it was. The wooden irony ("Majdanek is no playground"), the hackneyed images (silences broken by the sound of cracking skulls), the crude, hectoring melodrama (his father squashed against the wall by a transporter, dead women with rats crawling on their stomachs). Material which, once you know it is fraudulent, is truly obscene. But even before one knew that, all the aesthetic alarms should have sounded. For every page has the authentic ring of falsehood.
But it would be too simple, and wrong, to say that Wilkomirski lied. Apparently, Wilkomirski believes that his story is true: according to the New York Times, when the veracity of his book was challenged by his German publisher, he stood up defiantly and declared:
I am Binjamin Wilkomirski!.
Even his severest critics think that he is sincere.
In an interesting twist on the Wilkomirski story, a novel about the Holocaust, written in the first person, has been reissued as a memoir -- because that's what it actually is ("Holocaust Memoir is Reissued, No Longer Designated Fiction" By Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times 7/12/02). Jakob Littner's Notes from a Hole in the Ground by Wolfgang Koeppen (1992), was originally published, in 1948, as Notes from a Hole in the Ground by Jakob Littner, a Hungarian-born Polish Jew who was a stamp dealer in Munich before the war. Koeppen served as editor of the book. Littner died in 1950.
Koeppen himself emerged as a prominent German writer in the 1950s. In 1992, Judischen Verlag issued Notes under its revised title with Koeppen listed as author and the book categorized as "fiction". When Littner's surviving relatives protested the appropriation, Judischen Verlag (interestingly, a subdivision of Suhrkamp Verlag, which also published Wilkomirski's "memoir") replied that Koeppen had "given the notes an adequate form" and acknowledged Littner in the title. But the situation is more complicated than that. Reinhard Zachau, a scholar of German literature, discovered that Koeppen had changed Littner's text in important ways. More important in the context of memory, Koeppen seems to have made Littner's story his own. Commenting on "his" book, Koeppen wrote, "I ate American rations and wrote the story about the suffering of a German Jew. In so doing it became my story". Koeppen died in 1996. Littner's book has now been reissued under his original title, Journey Through the Night (Continuum, 2000), categorized as "nonfiction".
Questions of fact have also been raised about another autobiography, I,
Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), which chronicles the
life of a Maya Indian growing up in during a period of civil war which pitted a
right-wing government against left-wing guerillas, and landowners of European
descent against indigenous peasants. Menchu details the squalid conditions of
peasant existence, such as her lack of formal education and her youngest
brothers' deaths from malnutrition. She also related personal horrors, such as
an army attack on her village, the burning of prisoners in the central plaza,
the torture and killing of her mother and brother, the police execution of her
father.
I, Rigoberta Menchu is a very powerful book, which quickly entered the canon of Latin American Literature; it is one of the most popular books sold on college campuses, and won Menchu the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. There is no doubt that the conditions of the time in Guatemala were awful, mostly by virtue of government atrocities perpetrated in behalf of the oligarchy. At the same time, research by David Stoll (1999), an anthropologist at Middlebury College, has revealed that many of the specific incidents in Menchu's book were exaggerated or fabricated. Menchu received a junior high-school education as a scholarship student at an elite Catholic boarding school; she almost certainly never worked on a plantation; her father was killed in a land dispute with his in-laws; her brother was killed by the army, but she never saw it happen, and he was not burned in the plaza; her youngest brother is alive and well; two older brothers died of starvation and disease, but before Menchu was born. Stoll concludes that Menchu's book cannot be strictly autobiographical, because she simply did not have many of the experiences that she claimed to witness.FN
Menchu, for her part, replied that her story is "my truth", and that:
I have a right to my own memories
-- though more recently she has conceded that some material was historically false.
When the playwright Lillian Hellman published her memoirs (An Unfinished Woman, 1969; Pentimento, 1973; and Scoundrel Time, 1976), the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy (author of The Group, 1963) famously responded (on "The Dick Cavett Show", 1980) by claiming that "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'". Hellman sued McCarthy for libel, but died in 1984, before the case could be tried (McCarthy died in 1989). The Hellman-McCarthy episode, and the broader relation between the two women is the subject of two plays -- Ben Pleasants' Contentious Minds, and Nora Ephron's Imaginary Friends (which premiered on Broadway in 2002). Dick Cavett commented on the episode in a "Talk of the Town" piece published in the 12/16/02 New Yorker, strongly suggesting that McCarthy's remark, far from being spontaneous, had been preplanned without his knowledge ("Dept. of Litigation: Lillian, Mary, and Me").
Bernard Weinraub writes that Hellman "has been depicted in a series of books since her death as nothing less than venal, hypocritical and a liar whose memoirs were riddled with fabrications. By contrast, McCarthy was obsessed, even in her fiction, with telling the truth, down to the slightest detail -- truth that wounded lovers, husbands, and friends" (With Music and Malice in Every 'And' and "The'", New York Times, 09/29/02). The relationship between Hellman and McCarthy (who apparently met face-to-face only once) is dramatized in Nora Ephron's play, Imaginary Friends (2002), in which the two antagonists meet in Hell (reviewed in "Literary Lions, Claws Bared" by Ben Brantley, New York Times, 12/13/02).
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In her twin biography Hellman and Hammett, Joan Mellen uncovered numerous deceptions in Hellman's account's of various episodes in her life. |
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Perhaps the most famous of these concerns an episode described in Pentimento in which Hellman recounted a trip she made to Europe before the outbreak of World War II, to help Muriel Gardiner, an Austrian psychoanalyst and childhood friend who was active in the anti-Nazi underground. The journey was depicted in Julia, a 1977 movie (directed by Fred Zinneman and starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Gardiner), but Hellman's version of events was debunked by Gardiner herself in her own memoir, Code Name Mary. Weinraub writes that "The story, according to a number of books, was a product of Hellman's imagination". |
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Thomas Mallon notes that McCarthy's battle with Hellman "would provide a rallying cry in the decade after her death [1989] for those unimpressed by a flood of literary 'memoirs', mostly by the young, that had scarcely more respect for the literal truth than Hellman had demonstrated in her best-selling recollections' ("'Our Saint, Our Umpire'", Atlantic Monthly, 11/02). |
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For her part, Mary McCarthy also published a memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), which many believe is her best book. |
| Dave Pelzer made it to the New York Times best-seller list with his memoir of his childhood abuse, A Child Called "It", and with two sequels (there was a time when all three books appeared simultaneously on the list). In 2005, his brother, Richard, came out with his own memoir, A Brother's Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse, which according to the publisher's advertisement "delves even more deeply into the family history" (New York Times Book Review, 01/16/05). |
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Bill Ayres, now a college professor, has published a memoir (Fugitive Days, Beacon, 2001) of his time as a leader of the Weather Underground. In an interview, which he had the misfortune (perhaps deservedly so) of seeing published in the New York Times on the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayres said "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough" ("No Regrets for a Love of Explosives", by Dinitia Smith). But in the memoir itself, Ayres is often cagey about the truth of his story. At one point he writes "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon". But then he goes on "I say 'I' even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that the Weathermen organized it and claimed it." Perhaps Ayres is trying to protect his former associates, if not himself as well. But there are other issues as well, that go to the relation between memory, history, and literature. In a review of the book, Brent Staples notes that Ayres needed to "claim" the bombing in order to write about it" ("The Oldest Rad", New York Times Book Review, 9/30/01). In his memoir, Ayres writes "Is this, then, the truth? Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." Asked by Smith to clarify, Ayres responded " Obviously, the point is that it's a reflection on memory. It's true as I remember it." In another interview published later that same week, ("Forever Rad" by Hope Reeves, New York Times Magazine, 9/16/01), Ayres said 'Memoirs are not records of events; they are memories.... I have a little disclaimer that says, "This is one version of events, not authoritative, not authorized, but one boy's story. Did I make things look a certain way that they weren't or purposely leave things out? Not consciously, but perhaps unconsciously. Someone else could say, 'No, no, it was like this.' And it's not like one of us has a purchase on the truth. I'm writing a story about how it felt to me, and I invite everyone to write the story about how it felt to them. It's the clash of stories that's the true story. It's collective memory that matters." |
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John Bayley, husband of the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote Elegy for Iris about the descent into Alzheimer's disease of his spouse, Iris Murdoch (the book formed the basis for the film Iris). As a kind of companion volume, he also wrote Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire (1999). "In a Proustian irony, as iris was losing her memory, Bayley was flooded with vivid recollections of his own, and recounts in bursts of vivid, lyrical reverie the unforgettable scenes of his youth..." (Daedalus Books, Fall 2002). |
| In 1971, Ernest J. Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, which eventually was produced as a movie (possibly made for television) starring Cicely Tyson. Gaines' book is presented as the recollections of a freed slave who lived to be 110 years old. Garrison Keillor reports that the novel was praised for its "uncannily authentic voice", and Gaines was "besieged" for "advice about how to interview elderly people, and how to get them to talk openly about their memories. He had to tell them that he had made the whole thing up, and had no idea how to do interviews " (The Writer's Almanac, Minnesota Public Radio, 01/15/03). |
| Hume Cronyn (1911-2003), the great American actor (perhaps most famous for his dual appearances with his wife, Jessica Tandy) wrote a memoir entitled A Terrible Liar (1991) -- the title referring not to the author, but to memory. |
| Roger Angell, beginning a memoir in the New Yorker (06/07/04), notes that Memory is fiction -- an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. John McCrone, a British science correspondent, writing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, calls memories "cognitive reconstructions," and goes on to say that our brains, though not well evolved for retrospection or contemplation, never give up a reshuffling process in their effort to extract what is general and what is particular about each passing moment of life. Garry Wills, in his book "Saint Augustine's Memory," writes, "The past... is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again.... In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered." |
| In 2004, the satirist Tony Hendra (alumnus of the National Lampoon and co-star of the parody documentary This Is Spinal Tap) published a best-selling memoir, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul (Random House), describing his spiritual growth through his friendship with an English Benedictine monk (reviewed in "The Saint and the Satirist" by Andrew Sullivan, New York Times Book Review, 05/30/04). Hendra had quite a life, lots of sex and drugs as well as rock-and-roll: his redemption began when he was banished to a monastery at the age of 14 for having an affair with a married woman. But soon after the book appeared, Jessica Hendra, his daughter from his first marriage, publicly accused Hendra of incest ("Daughter Says Father's Confessional Book Didn't Confess His Molestation of Her" by N.R. Kleinfield, New York Times, 07/01/04). Hendra denies the charges, and the public editor of the Times, wrote a column in which he discussed whether the daughter's claims were newsworthy ("When the Right to Know Confronts the Need to Know" by Daniel Okrent, New York Times, 07/11/04). Jessica Hendra's own memoir, in which she details her charges against her father, was published in 2005 (How to Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir, written with Blake Morrison). |
| Also in 2004, the Australian unit of Random House withdrew Forbidden Love, a memoir published in 2002b Norma Khouri (and published in the United States in 2003 as Honor Lost, by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. In the book, Khouri, a Jordanian Muslim woman, recounts the story of her friend Dalia, who was killed by her father for becoming involved with a Christian man. In 2003, Jordanian woman's groups claimed that the book had factual errors and inconsistencies; after an investigation, Random House Australia determined that the book was probably fiction. For example, while Khouri claimed she grew up in Amman, Jordan, when her family actually emigrated to Chicago when she was three. Instead of leaving Jordan out of fear for her safety, she left Chicago for Australia in the midst of a fraud investigation ("Publisher Says Memoir is Probably Fiction" by Edward Wyatt, New York Times, 08/14/04). In response, Khouri "admitted that she changed some facts about her background and made up names, dates, and locations of some events in the book.... But... Ms. Khouri insisted that the basic story was true" and that "she had 'literary license' to make the changes to protect friends still living in Jordan" ("True But Not So True" by Ben Sisario, New York Times, 08/18/04). |
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Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop by Joseph Lelyveld (2005), a long-time journalist for the New York Times, contains the following remarks about memory: "History may be linear, but memory, at least mine, isn't; it runs in loops". Andre Aciman, reviewing the book, cites L.P. Hartley's famous line (from the Go-Between): "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Aciman continues, "In the country of the past, events follow a coiled logic all their own and frequently come not in one but in many versions; faces, places and dates are shuffled around, and remembered feelings are blunted in ways sure to soften the pinpricks of conscience. In the land of the past, everything jells to just about the right consistency, so that however often we visit, we know we'll come back unchanged, untouched, unhurt. And this -- at least at the beginning -- is what this memoir promises: a safe circle-line tour around the landfill each of us calls the past" ("In a Tantalizing Labyrinth of Painful Memories" by Andre Aciman, New York Times, 04/01/05). |
| A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (2003), a tale of substance abuse and redemption, was selected by Oprah Winfrey's television book club (Winfrey described it as "raw" and "so real"), a selection that propelled it to the top of various best-seller lists. However, a report on The Smoking Gun website, picked up by the New York Times ("Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny" by Edward Wyatt, 01/10/06), found substantial inaccuracies in the author's account of his life. For example, Frey claimed that at one point he spent three months in prison, when in fact it was only a few hours. Wyatt reported that Frey said that he originally envisioned the book as a novel, but following discussions with the publisher (Doubleday), decided to present it as a memoir, following in a literary tradition (e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac) of publishing autobiographical fiction -- as if publishing a fictional memoir was in the same category as publishing an autobiographical novel. |
According to Wyatt: "The discrepancies and Mr. Frey's reported admissions of falsifying details of his life raise questions about the publishing industry's increasing reliance on nonfiction memoirs as a fast track to the best-seller list. It is not at all uncommon to see new books marketed as nonfiction containing notes to readers saying the author has altered the time sequence of events, created composite characters, changed names or otherwise made up details of a memoir.
As the controversy grew, Frey agreed to add an author's note to subsequent editions of his book, presumably clarifying that some of it is fictional. Such a note, in fact, appeared in a sequel, My Friend Leonard, published in 2005, before the controversy broke ("Memoirist to Add Author's Note", by Edward Wyatt, New York Times, 01/14/06).
Although writing a memoir is generally construed as an act of individual remembrance, Phillip Kennicott has introduced the notion of a collective memoir in his comments on the 9/11 Commission Report, issued in July 2004:
[The] writing style is essentially that of America's busy industry of personal confessional. It is the tone of the trauma memoirist.... The 9/11 Commission Report is a collective memoir, and the language of memoir has exorcised the cant from its pages....The 9/11 Commission Report begins like an idyll, with perhaps the exact words that many of us, were we writing our own memories of the day, would choose.... [A]gain and again the language in this report returns to the memoirist's tone of tempered sadness.... In the middle of this endless parade of facts are sentences that remind one more of a solitary writer pondering the problem of how a single moment can forever alter our ability to see the past as once we saw it. Memoirs of tragic events, if well written, both recall the past and put the past behind the author. the writer must prove him or herself changed, in some way. A memoir that shows the author still caught in cycles of recrimination and pain is a memoir probably best left in the author's desk drawer. The authors of the 9/11 Commission Report seem aware of that too, but they don't have the luxury of documenting change or growth in our national security policies. In that sense, it is half a memoir (Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 08/09-15/04).
Other reviewers compared the report to Proust, for its treatment of memory, and to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, for its adoption of multiple perspectives. Perhaps it is not too surprising, then, that the report was nominated for the National Book Award in the area of nonfiction, displacing other political titles in that election year.
Christopher Booker, in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (Continuum, 2005), argues that just seven basic plots run throughout world literature (including movies, plays, and operas as well as novels and short stories):
Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Rebirth
Comedy
Tragedy
According to Booker, these plots are deeply rooted in the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and deviations from them are perverse if not pathological. In fact, Booker complains that modern literature has moved away from the "psychological 'center of gravity'" represented by these archetypal plots (see "The Plot Thins, or Are No Stories New" by Michiko Kakutani,New York Times, 04/15/15). Assuming that the classification scheme is truly comprehensive, one wonders whether it might apply to memoirs as well.
Along the same lines, William Grimes, surveying publishers' catalogs for Summer 2005, proposed a tongue-in-cheek classification of memoirs ("We All Have a Life. Must We all Write About It?" by William Grimes, New York Times, 03/25/05).
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The retired-statesman (or -bureaucrat) memoir.
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The traumatic-childhood memoir. | ||||||
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The substance-abuse memoir. | ||||||
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The spiritual-journey memoir. | ||||||
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The show-biz memoir. | ||||||
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The spirit-of-place (or vanished-era) memoir.
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The illness memoir. | ||||||
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The sexual-exploit memoir. | ||||||
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The bad-job memoir. | ||||||
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The anti-travel memoir. |
Grimes writes that "[memoirists'] efforts may be as fundamental as breathing. John Eakin, an emeritus professor of English at Indiana University, has argued that human beings continuously engage in a process of self-creation and self-discovery by constructing autobiographical narratives. In a sense, we are the stories -- multiple, shifting and constantly evolving -- that we weave about ourselves, and this storytelling urge may even be hard-wired."
(Auto)Biography SoftwareIn 2003, the National Geneology Society issued a Software CD-ROM, Personal Author: Write Your Life Story! -- "We all have stories to tell about our lives, but who has time to write a book?" (advertisement from the Quality Paperback Book Club, Summer 2003) -- containing "1000 memory-jogging questions". Personal Author is a software system developed to help people write their autobiographies (and biographies of other people, too, for that matter). www.biography.software.com
Another company, Echo Memoirs, provides a service which assembles turns interviews, photographs, drawings, documents, and letters into a hardcover book. Price as of 2005: $6000 for the first copy, $200-$250 for additional copies. www.echomemoirs.com |
Some Recent Scholarly books on memoir:
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But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives, by Nancy K. Miller |
"...presents the definitive defense of the memoir, that much-maligned genre" (Wayne Kostenbaum, quoted in a publisher's blurb).
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Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, by James Olney |
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How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, by John Eakin |
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Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections by Roger J. Porter |
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Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative by David Herman |
| Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser |
On March 20, 2007, the Fordham University Center on Religion and Culture sponsored a "Headline Forum" with Mary Karr, author of the memoirs The Liars Club and Cherry, on The Conscience of a Writer: Telling the Truth in Poetry and Memoir, addressing such issues as whether memoirists can take liberties with historical truth, and the nature of "poetic truth". The announcement of the forum includes the following quotation from Karr: "Writing my own memoirs, I know God is in the truth. You must testify and recant, type and delete" (New York Review of Books, 03/15/07..
This page last revised 03/14/07 12:19:36 PM.
