Taylor Antrim, author of The Headmaster Ritual, takes easy shots at memoir zeroing in on Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is The Bomb and Alex Lemon’s Happy.
I should say up front that Nick Flynn and I have become friends in recent years, after I championed his first memoir (it’s easy to like someone who loves your writing). And that I also wrote a memoir, so of course I’m biased. If I didn’t think memoir was a legitimate art form I wouldn’t have written one.
Antrim doesn’t think of memoir as a legitimate art form. Here’s the money quote from Antrim: “Memoir writing is cheating.”
And here’s another:
So, what’s with all the memoirs? Are they somehow… easier? Is the storytelling bar set lower? Too often, memoir seems to me an excuse to be fragmentary, incomplete, narratively non-rigorous.
Antrim feels the memoir has less value than the novel. He thinks memoirs are easy. Left out of his commentary is a discussion of the reader. Why would a reader care if a book is easy or difficult to write? Or if the author cheated? Of course there are many bad memoirs, and probably as many bad novels. It’s easy (speaking of easy) to find one you don’t like and use it as a cudgel against a genre. A great memoir has to hold up to the higher standards we hold novels to, a point I made in my review of Nick Flynn’s first memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City.
Antrim doesn’t like Nick’s new memoir, and that’s relevant criticism if written well and explored. But what makes Antrim’s criticism irrelevant is that rather than criticizing the book he criticizes the form. He doesn’t like these new works because they are memoirs.
But what about This Boy’s Life, or any of Joan Didion’s personal work? What about Edmund White? I disagree with Antrim’s assessment of The Ticking Is The Bomb, but that’s not the problem. The problem is Antrim’s dismissal of memoir in general.
There is only one rule in writing a memoir, but it’s an important one: You can’t intentionally lie. This one rule has the effect of form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.
Antrim writes:
Flynn’s book is maddeningly free-form, pointillist, a childhood memory here, a Buddhist revelation there. We all have a darkness inside us; we’re all bewildered citizens of the world.
Rather than calling this a failed memoir (which it isn’t, in my opinion, I loved the book, which reads as a series of images building on one another, leaving the reader with a feeling of revelation, the book is an experience) he makes the case that the flaws he perceives arise because the book is a memoir. In fact there are many novels that could be criticized in a similar vein.
Antrim champions the author-protagonist novel, books such as The Bell Jar. It would be more interesting if he acknowledged how those books have also been attacked by critics making claims similar to Antrim’s, that they are indulgent, or easy. Jonathan Lethem used to be proud that he made up every doorknob, every brick in every building. And then he wrote Fortress of Solitude, his finest work.
Journalism is hard, underpaid work, and attacking memoir is low hanging fruit, especially when it’s so tied to the celebrity memoir and the platform writer, the worst impulses of the publishing industry. The Daily Beast has a history with this topic, here they talk about Michael Chabon and Sarah Palin as if they were part of the same literary movement (though they liked my memoir, thank you Daily Beast!).
Antrim is likely to get a lot of clicks on his provocative piece. A lot of those clicks will be people who agree with him, people who have similar preferences and would like to believe that their preferences for one kind of art are superior to someone else’s preferences for another.
24 responses
The argument that memoirs are “easier” is, well, easy, and lazy.
Creating a building out of bricks. I’m not sure if that’s easier than tearing yourself apart piece by piece.
There is no doubt that the world has its share of of lazy memoirists. (There are doubtless thousands of them, right now, thrusting half-considered unedited ramblings before longsuffering writing workshop teachers.) But memoir itself is not lazy, and when a book is written in a style you don’t like, that doesn’t mean the author failed to work hard to provide you with the book you wanted. It might mean instead that the author worked very hard to produce a work that isn’t your cup of tea. I will never understand why people pretend taste doesn’t exist in literature. Some people only like jazz and some only blues and some only a certain way of writing. That doesn’t make everything else bad; it makes it something else.
Eloquent rebuttal. As you say, readers don’t know or care if a memoir is easy or difficult to write, but I find it had to imagine that STOP-TIME or SPEAK, MEMORY were pounded out over the course of a long weekend.
One of my big problems with Antrim’s comments is that he seems to think he’s saying something new or insightful; he’s not. He’s recycling the same tired observations that people who don’t know much about nonfiction forms always trot out. A serious person would read what people like Michele de Montaigne, Theodor Adorno, Vivian Gornick, and David Shields have had to say about nonfiction writing in general (and Gornick and Shields on memoir and autobiography in particular). But such thoughtful reflection doesn’t really lend itself to snark, I guess.
I appreciated this article, Stephen. Antrim’s argument is moot. I am reminded of being in school and writing my final project to graduate. The class I took combined nonfiction writers with poets, and I remember workshopping these major projects through the semester and thinking: Wow, I turned in 50 pages, the this poet turned in 4 pages and those pages were not even full, and we’re getting equal credit. Not fair! They are not working as hard as ME! This was a very immature viewpoint that lacked understanding. So that’s how I’m chalking up Antrim’s article. Immature.
I’d be curious to hear what Antrim thinks of a book like THE MEMORY ROOM by Mary Rakow. Or WHY DID I EVER by Mary Robison, which (although these are not the words I would choose to describe it) is certainly “maddeningly freeform, pointillist,” and, in my opinion, one of the best novels EVER.
I’m stumped as to how someone could deem any of Nick Flynn’s work “non-rigorous,” narratively or otherwise, given the passionate attention to language and construction that is clearly visible in every sentence.
Sorry to nit-pick on an aside, but I take issue with the claim that formal poetry is more powerful than free verse. This seems like saying representational paintings are more powerful than abstract art.
I will jump on Elisa’s bandwagon here. It was Robert Frost who said poetry without rhyme and meter is “like tennis without a net,” a Taylor Antrim-ish sentiment suggesting free verse was “nonrigorous” and a kind of “cheating.” Of course it isn’t, as anyone who’s ever read Ginsberg, or Jorie Graham or Mark Doty or many, many other contemporary masters knows.
It seems to me that Stephen’s suggestion is that we judge individual works on their merit, not on preconceived prejudices regarding form. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction – these are called “creative writing” precisely because we value the new, imaginative, and innovative approaches over what is tired and traditional. Up with free verse! Up with memoir!
Andrew: Exactly. Memoirs aren’t “too easy,” and neither is free verse.
Andrew’s exactly right. My point was that saying a memoir has less value than a novel is like saying form has less value than free verse.
I reread this piece just to be sure. I am not stating in this essay that free verse is better/more powerful than formal poetry. You can choose to read it that way but it’s a misreading and out of context.
As the whole James Frey debacle proved, it’s a lot easier to get yr memoir published then it is yr novel. When the converse happens, writers like Elliot and Flynn will be the first to call their work novels instead of memoirs. That’s why some people like to attach the word “easy” to the production of memoirs. Because it’s the path of least resistance. That’s what people mean by “easy.”
Are Stephen and Andrew agreeing about something? Crap. That’s no fun at all.
Viktor, I did first call my work “novels”, four times in fact.
Yeah, I know you did Stephen. But you could have called them memoirs. That you didn’t was obviously a mistake, big boy. You have learned the error of your ways, though, and that’s what most important.
Publishers do have lower literary standards when considering the publishing of memoirs vs novels, but that won’t necessarily continue. There was a time/event that sparked the near decade long love affair with memoirs: 9/11/01. With that, readers wanted memoirs and not novels, real life provided drama enough, and people wanted to understand their world better. They craved true stories: ones in which, Elliott points out, the author can’t intentionally lie, which is a difficult writing restriction if you need to shoehorn in a plot to a situation that didn’t naturally build climatically. Many great autobiographical writing and stories emerged as people turned to the form. A form new to a writer takes time to master. Stop-Time and Speak/Memory are the gold standard, and their excellence shows memoirs are not easy. Each work should be judged by its merits, as should individual works in any form.
Viktor,
James Frey might have proved that at one time it was easier to get memoir published than fiction, but he also might have screwed the pooch for future memoirists, him along with the other writers who were busted before their books came out end embarrassed their publishers. Of course, I write neither, so I don’t have any real sense of what’s easier or harder to publish. I know from talking to my writer friends that no one outside of celebrities (writerly or otherwise) is having an easy time getting their books into print, so maybe the difficulty is all relative.
“I am not stating in this essay that free verse is better/more powerful than formal poetry. You can choose to read it that way but it’s a misreading and out of context.”
I didn’t read it that way. I read exactly what you wrote, which is this: “This one rule has the effect of form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.”
You stated that _form_ is more powerful than free verse, and that’s what I’m contesting. I think free verse can be just as powerful as form, just as a memoir can be just as powerful as a novel. I don’t see how I’m misreading anything or taking it out of context.
I think, Elisa, in the context of the entire piece it’s fairly obvious how you’re misreading it, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just obvious to me.
I also think free verse can just as powerful as form, as I’ve already stated, which doesn’t contradict, I think, the effect of “form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.”
What’s that old story about the poet who couldn’t figure out how to write about the most painful events of her life until she constricted her feelings into an archaic and elaborate poetic form? “One Art”? And she’s hardly alone. Meanwhile, others don’t need or want that constriction, or maybe just not all the time, but it does often have that effect.
I don’t see how memoirs are easier to write, but perhaps they are easier to sell. People who are not inherently interested in books see reading something “true” as less of a waste of their valuable time. I am just the opposite: As a self-abosrbed, introverted, arty bookish type, I am deeply interested in literature and completely uninterested in the real lives of people I don’t even know–unless their telling of their lives becomes literature. That for me is the only deciding factor. In addition to the titles listed by others,and obvious folks like Rousseau, I would place in this pile: Speak Memory – Nabakov, My Last Sigh-Bunuel, Beneath the Underdog – Charles Mingus, and the fascinating All I Need Is Love by Klaus Kinski. Also I really laughed a lot at my friend Oran’s book, Long Past Stopping, but being interested in a friend’s memoir is different, I suppose. On the other hand, I guess there are some moments when, as a novelist, I could complain about the drudgery having to make everything up myself, but then maybe I need to get out more and do something worth remembering.
I suppose Antrim’s piece was kind of silly, but that special silly that happens in arguments where great literary truths become secret surrogates for matters of preference or taste. Much writing about writing has this special sheen to it, the sprinkling of hyperbole, the fighting of the good fight that doesn’t need to be. I guess I don’t much like writing about writing, unless it is writing about writing that I like. Go figure.
Generally, as fights over imagined boundaries and make-believe qualities go, I prefer the sort where at question is who would win in a fight between a particular super-hero and a movie monster. Batman versus Jason– there you got something.
Are you kidding, Murray? Batman would totally fuck Jason’s shit up.
Publishing a memoir takes guts. To me there is nothing better than a powerful memoir that shocks you, excites you, or inspires you!
Why the need to categorize and divide?? What does an avocado have in common with an orange? Both taste great.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.