The New York Times has a problem with memoirs. Stephen Elliott responds in his Daily Rumpus email:
“Today I read an article in The Times, The Problem With Memoirs. It’s among the meanest pieces written on the subject and people who despise memoir will find comfort. But the tragedy of the essay is it’s dismissal of an entire art form. Let’s say you didn’t like realistic paintings, there are people who don’t. It’s odd to say, Why oh why must you people paint!
“Among the many fallacies of the article (which include ascribing motives) is that it’s easy to publish a memoir. The author complains of the “share everything” generation. In fact a poorly written memoir is not easy (nor impossible) to publish. His critiques of the three memoirs may be valid, or not, I haven’t read them, but that doesn’t make any reflection on the form. Memoir, when not a strictly commercial enterprise, is an art, art is expression. A great memoir, like a great novel, is rare. Most books of every type don’t succeed. Some people prefer literary memoirs and protagonist/author novels (the two are closely linked), others prefer books where the author isn’t present, story-stories. But it’s just preferences. Certainly no one is forcing you to read a memoir, and they’re clearly marked.
“Under the author’s guidelines we wouldn’t have The Year of Magical Thinking, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, Jarhead. None of those authors “earned” the right to document their lives. You might not like these books, but do you really think the world would be a better place without them?”
3 responses
*applause*
Thank you for this, Stephen. BTW, circa 1997 I went to a PEN panel discussion called “The Problem With Memoir.†Frank McCourt, Kathryn Harrison and some others were on it. McCourt opened the discussion by saying something like, “Excuse me, but why does there have to be a ‘problem with memoir’? Does there have to be a problem? I don’t see a problem.†So this is an old trope, meant to be provocative. BTW blogged about this. http://firstpersonsingular.tumblr.com/post/2980917225/no-you-shut-up
The NYTBR piece was clearly snarky, and very old-school. I read a similar essay in the 2010 Best Spiritual Writing collection, “The Judgment of Memory” where Bottums argues that the old style of memoir is best — where “Family was not the disease, but the cure.” I think there’s a certain nostalgia associated with memory, and memoirs, which I called a “voluntary forgetfulness” in my essay on my husband’s brain injury, published in The Southern Review and The Legendary. Many writers (and reviewers) want to believe it was ever so better when we talked only about the blood, sweat and tears in a heroic manner.
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