Dinty W. Moore’s rebuttal to Lorrie Moore’s essay in the New York Review of Books, in support of memoir-writing defends the genre and points out the absurdities in Moore’s adamant dismissal.
Memoirs and their questionable reliability have been the source of some recent contention, but Dinty Moore makes a case for the memoir as an authentic art form.
“She is entitled to her opinion, certainly. But it is absurd, I think, to suggest as she does that if you are going to write about someone you love, especially someone you love who is deceased, you should use your imagination and fictionalize them, because that is what they deserve. We are doing them a disservice by choosing an inferior genre? Come on.”
5 responses
I have to say, having read both Moores’ pieces, that Dinty takes Lorrie’s comments out of context and makes them sound far worse than they are.
I also think that she makes a good, and fair argument — she read three memoirs, two of which she perceives as deeply flawed. As a fiction writer, she clearly sees a way in which those two memoirs could have been transformed into more successful fictions.
She’s not decrying memoir in general, and, in fact, there’s nothing offensive to memoir in her entire piece save perhaps one line about the “back door” being where the money is. Her review of the third memoir, a self-published book, is actually pretty complimentary, and focuses on what she seems to think is essential to the memoir: there is something special about the person telling it.
Totally agree with you, Amy. And I’ve read the two memoirs Moore discusses. I thought she responded to them very thoughtfully (both memoirs are compelling enough, and/or emblematic of what gets published, to spend time considering what may or may not work). I haven’t read other essays/reviews that very seriously consider those books, but reviewers writing about the Bialosky memoir, in particular, seem to focus on the subject, what happened and how it’s sad, and that’s about it.
Just wanted to say I appreciated Dinty’s post and the defense of a perfectly fine genre. I’m actually not a novelist, so switching isn’t always an option. And… I’m really glad that these people (some of whom also wrote fiction or poetry) took the time to write their lives beautifully in memoir form: James Baldwin, George Orwell, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Jill Christman, Bob Cowser, Staceyann Chin, Vivian Gornick, Joan Didion, Meridel LeSeuer, Floyd Skloot, Suzan Erem, Bill Roorbach, Dinty Moore, Joe Mackall, Kathleen Finneran, Eduardo Galeano, Michel de Montaigne, Isabel Allende, Peter Gay, Mary Karr, Jessica Handler, Susan Griffin, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Griffin, Aaron Raz Link, Sonja Livingston, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Lee Martin, Debra Marquart, Wangari Maathai, Thomas Lynch, Daniel Mendelsohn, Patti Smith, Lee Martin, Cherri Moraga, John McPhee, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Rodriguez, Sue William Silverman, Kathryn Harrison, Janisse Ray, Mim Schwartz, Scott Russell Sanders, Peggy Schumaker, Lauren Slater, Deborah tall, Robert Root, Peter Trachtenberg, Natasha Tretheway, Terry Tempest Williams, Richard Wright, Tobias Wolff… and I will doubtless be embarrassed for all the many I have forgotten…This is just the tip of a very big and irreplaceable iceberg. I think if you don’t do much reading (over years) in a genre, it’s very difficult to assess a genre as a whole. Once you do start to familiarize, you realize how huge it is, and that it becomes impossible to makes statements about the genre as a whole. Let it be the summer of memoir!
I don’t think he quotes her out of context. She sets a rather sarcastic and dismissive tone in the second and third paragraph, implying that you have to be important on the world stage to be memoir-worthy, that the budding memoir writers are “helpless before [their] own life, and unsure of how to write the autobiographical novel” (as if memoir is for people who don’t have the chops to write *real* literature.) Her mini-rant on David Shields was rather shrill.
Once you get through that setup, it’s hard not to see the rest of the review as a take-down with an agenda.
Ray,
I think the only way you come out of that second paragraph thinking Moore is “implying that you have to be important on the world stage to be memoir-worthy” is if you ignore the questions “Are you connected to a fascinating and underexplored chapter in history in any manner whatever?” and “Are you a trenchant thinker with incisive analytical powers?” and “Do you have a social cause you would like to advocate strenuously?” You don’t have to be important on the world stage to answer any of those questions in the affirmative. And in fact, the memoir she comes closest to praising is the one with arguably the least claim to that importance, Jerry McGill’s self-published memoir.
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