After some severe ripples in the force that began last November, life is finally returning back to normal.
The kids go to school. I sit at the computer for four hours. I wash my face and go to the gym. Do a couple of errands. Shower. Collect the kids from the bus. Help them with homework. Do a load of laundry. Make dinner. Then return to the computer to answer e-mail and such. It's very boring, but boring is absolutely necessary to get work done.
I've written a couple of articles in the past couple of months, but I could do more. For the first time in ages, I thought about a book that I started a while back and put down in the midst of a different set of crises. Maybe I should look at it again.
I started writing something that is very like what I do here at Apt. 11D – a mixture of memoir and politics. The crises were the major reason that I put it down, but I also had doubts about the whole memoir thing.
Have we been memoir-ed out? Why should I give a crap about a middle aged woman's Brooklyn brownstone and her self tranformation through yoga? Why should I care about Naomi Wolff's new orgasm? Why are the best women writers of our time telling us about yoga and orgasms and their parenting choices? Why have women put themselves in the memoir ghetto? Can't we do something else? I still don't have answers to those questions.
Elizabeth Wurtzel's piece in New York magazine is a prime reason that I stopped working on the memoir. I didn't want to write something like that.
But Katie Roiph steps up to remind us that there are good memoirs and gives some examples of quality writing in this genre.
Michael Berube's latest MLA speech (a good speech, btw) refers to a passage in Patrica Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy
(a good book, btw) which talks about her decision to leave academia and become a writer. It struck me that a good memoir shouldn't be about me, me, me. It should make some points about the world or politics or life. It should make an argument in there. I don't think enough memoirs do that.
Well, this morning I'm going to work on a new article proposal, not the book. But I may open those old files and just to remind myself where I was. Maybe I'll start working on it tomorrow.
UPDATE: Katie Roiph linked to DFW's "A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again." Just reading now for the first time and loving it.
Apt. 11d 
“It should make some points about the world or politics or life. It should make an argument in there. I don’t think enough memoirs do that.”
See Florence King’s “Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady,” for a funny, non-navel gazing memoir.
LikeLike
Over the holidays, I devoured the memoirs of Jennifer Worth about her years as a midwife in the East End of London in the 1950s (now a tv show on BBC, a very good one). The books (there are three–Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse, and Farewell to the East End) are extremely well-written. But there’s not a lot of navel-gazing. These are books about important work done by people who got very little respect but a lot of personal satisfaction from this work. They also address the positive effects of nationalizing health care in Great Britain. I can’t recommend these books more (or the tv show). I am not a fan of the memoir genre (I’m allegedly supposed to teach the memoir as a writing genre in my comp classes, and I rebel and leave it off my syllabus because really, who wants to read any kind of memoir from an 18 year old college student), but these books were wonderful.
LikeLike
I would have a different vision for a “good” memoir. I don’t want our hostess to take this personally, but there’s no reason why the average person’s political insights are likely to be of lasting value or interest. The kind of memoirs I find interesting are the kind that reflect the texture of daily life, so that the reader can see what is the same, and what is different, in other times and places.
Here are two examples. My great-grandfather wrote a memoir (only in typescript, which I have). He mentions that he and his sister used to see wagon trains heading west (this was in 1870s Illinois). He and his sister felt sorry for the children on the wagons, because they knew that all the Indians had been removed west of the Mississippi, and now the children on the wagons would have to live with the Indians, which my great-grandfather and his sister evidently found unappealing. That’s the sort of strange, childlike thought one can understand (because childhood mental processes haven’t changed), but obviously it’s not a thought any of us had growing up.
My grandfather never wrote a memoir, but he told me lots of stories. The first person in his neighborhood who got indoor plumbing said, “It’s so great; when you go out, you don’t have to go out.” “Go out” was a euphemism in that time (which still survives in the word “outhouse”), but it hasn’t survived in common discourse.
LikeLike
Do you really think Naomi Wolf is one of the best women writers of our time? Why? (Serious question) I just don’t get it.
LikeLike
Footnote 40 on the “Professional Smile” in “A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do
Again” made me a fan of DFW. Some of these great pieces, including Didion’s essays, are more like anthropology written by participant-observers than truly introspective memoirs.
LikeLike
My review of that book was going to be titled, “A Supposedly Good Author I Will Never Read Again,” but after the title the review turned out to be superfluous.
LikeLike
I’m a memoir reader (though I agree with Wendy that I have absolutely no interest in the memoir of a 18 year old — though I might, in the memoirs of their mothers, and if you’re supposed to teach it, I’ve found oral histories of parents taken by their children to be absolutely fascinating, though perhaps that’s not really memoir writing).
I like memoirs that give me a slice of life into another person’s experiences. Y81 contextualizes this in the another time and place, but for me, another person is another time or place and I like seeing their life.
But, the caveat is that they have to be a fairly self-aware person, not prone to over-navel gazing, contemplative, but not self centered. I think that’s part of what “It should make some points about the world or politics or life” means to me. Not that it should tell me who to vote for (observations about politics), but that it should relate the person’s experiences to the world.
I like reading about mothering and children and have always wanted to read more about older children (though I know why parents don’t, since the stories of older children are at least as much about them as they are about their mother).
LikeLike
Other good memoirs:
The Egg and I (life on a chicken farm in rural Washington–the author got sued within an inch of her life by former neighbors).
The Gulag Archipelago (it has a lot of autobiographical content)
Lidia Chukovskaia’s Notes about Anna Akhmatova (three volumes of diaries and notes, including lots of stuff from the Stalin era)
Cheaper by the Dozen and the sequels, especially the parts about their mother
Natan Sharansky’s Fear No Evil
There are good memoirs with a lot of content about the author’s childhood (C.S. Lewis said that he found that the most interesting part of autobiographies).
LikeLike
So, I started reading the DFW piece and realized that reading about why a person with intractable depression finds “supposedly fun things” not fun does not translate all that well to a non-depressed person. So far, I’ve learned that cruises don’t cure depression, which is not a surprise to me, though it might be to others who hope that things that other people find fun will cure depression.
A doctor, whose blog I read on occasion, once wrote that she can tell that her medications are off when she notices one thing (usually a sad thing, but it could be something that doesn’t meet expectations) and assigns the weight of the world’s sadness to it (an extreme version might be a pimple, with the sadness of war, famine, and disaster attached). That’s what the article reminds me of.
(Oh, it it is kind of funny, if you kind of don’t like cruises to see a writer attach the sadness of the world to them).
LikeLike
Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris in London and Homage to Catalonia are pretty famous and I know y81 is a fan of The Road to Wigan Pier.
LikeLike
I enjoyed reading the Egg & Cheaper by the Dozen, but the problem with both of those, for me, if I’m reviewing them as memoirs, is that they are a bit like facebook posts or scrapbooks, they avoid the sadness and are not real for it.
Cheaper by the Dozen (especially the later books) starts with the death of the father, which must have been traumatic but ignores any trauma. The Egg has similar glossing of conflicts and distress. The books work at the level they’re written, but they’re the kind of books, that, after I read them, I look for more info on the real stories.
Books of the same genre, set in Hawaii, are Armine Von Tempski’s “Pam’s Paradise Ranch”, “Bright Spurs”, “Born in Paradise.”
LikeLike
The Egg and I is pretty much all misery (a teenage bride trapped on a remote farm, with a much older husband who isn’t quite what she expected, facing ceaseless toil, with no electricity or plumbing in a part of the country where it rains practically non-stop 10 months a year), but presented with a smile. It’s the telling that is light–the actual content is very dark.
LikeLike
Correction: Betty Macdonald was 20 when she married her first husband.
LikeLike
If you want something like a memoir, but that doesn’t avoid sadness, this was very interesting. The writing lighter than the content, but the content is really bleak.
LikeLike
Betty MacDonald wrote Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle? How could I possibly not have known that (time for a Wikipedia donation).
Yes, the Egg & I is the genre of making humor out of unpleasantness (which must have actually been quite a bit darker, to result in a woman leaving her husband in 1931). As are the Little House books. I’m not actually looking for darkness, though, but realism.
Hey, found “Onions in the Stew” (the fourth in the MacDonald series, and set in war time Seattle) is available on Kindle (though the new book is selling for $900).
I recently read a Peg Bracken (I hate to cookbook) memoir that impressed me (though it is a collection of disconnected essays). I found Bracken quite insightful. The book is written from the vantage point of a Hawaii retirement home, reflecting on her growing up in the middle of the US.
LikeLike
“which must have actually been quite a bit darker, to result in a woman leaving her husband in 1931”
Oh, yes. But on the other hand, their farm life was a sort of self-imposed Depression avant la lettre. She gives her first husband a pretty fair treatment in The Egg and I, but you can tell (without her saying so explicitly) that he loved the farm much more than he loved Betty.
I read Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I (a memoir of a stay in a TB sanatorium in the late 1930s) in high school and laughed so much that my classmates thought I was sobbing. One of these days, I’m going to have to get hold of her Anybody Can Do Anything, which is about her efforts to support herself during the Depression (post chicken farm) as a divorcee and mother of two.
She died at 49 of cancer. Her literary career was amazing for a woman with so little time to work with.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is another memoir that’s worth reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Castle
Her childhood and parents remind me of mine (minus the nomadism, alcoholism and mental illness, thank goodness).
LikeLike
Thanks for this. The piece you linked to read like a really boring Facebook entry for someone you’d likely unfriend. Personally I have never understood why anyone would read those dreadful Gretchen Rubin books about happiness — Pages about how she likes to abstain from certain foods or how she gets upset when making gingerbread houses with her kids when they get messy. I wonder if it relates to Roiphe’s remarks about honesty. It does seem like the bad memoirs are often the ones where you feel like the author is lying to you or perhaps to herself. (Rubin keeps perkily declaring that “it doesn’t matter” that her husband appears to be almost completely uninvolved in childrearing, doesn’t like her family, hates the kinds of events she enjoys, etc. etc. etc. There’s also another one whose title I can’t recall written by a woman who overcomes breast cancer who appears to be completely emotionally enmeshed with her family of origin and who has a really strange relatinoship with her husband that had that same effect on me.) I always think that if you end up trying to diagnose the author of the memoir with some psychological sydrome then there’s a problem with the book.
I also thought the “eat, pray, love” lady was narcissitic though so maybe that’s my problem.
LikeLike
It’s not a memoir, but for an example of how to talk about your lives at length without seeming self-indulgent, the three people featured in Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns – about the Great Migration of African Americans northward – are great. It is also an anecdote to the self-indulgence I feel when I worry about my own problems.
LikeLike
Y’know who wrote a terrific memoir? Barack Obama wrote a terrific memoir.
It’s open, it’s honest, you can tell he thought about the question of why anyone should care enough to read about his life. There are insightful portraits of his parents and grandparents that illuminate both his life and the wider context in which he grew up. I’m not usually much of a person for either biography or memoir, but it’s a really good book.
LikeLike
I also thought the “eat, pray, love” lady was narcissitic
You were not wrong about that.
LikeLike
Out of Africa and Dreams from My Father. Kenya brings out some great memoirs.
LikeLike
“It’s open, it’s honest, you can tell he thought about the question of why anyone should care enough to read about his life.”
For some definitions of “honest.” Memoir writing involves a certain amount of fictionalizing to tie up loose ends and fill in blanks and neaten things up.
One area where Obama seems to have done quite a lot of tidying was the episode where he paints himself as having turned away from a high-flying corporate job, whereas his job description was considerably more humble (he was just writing stuff for a down-at-the-heel business newsletter, a pretty bohemian outfit). But for the purposes of the memoir, he needed the job to be more important and corporate than it really was.
The headline of that NYT article is, “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say.”
LikeLike
Women memoirists who are seen as coming from any sort of of privilege get labeled “narcissistic” and “self-indulgent” whenever they dare reveal potentially ugly truths about their lives– especially when their truths violate the cultural rules we women all have to follow. Other women are the most vocal enforcers of these rules, because there’s something about these narratives that are deeply threatening to their sense of order about the world.
Educated white women (Gretchen Rubin) are punished by the culture when they write about their marital challenges (even when the tips their experiences provide are helpful to most marriages). They’re punished when they reveal they’ve had affairs; they’re punished when they leave an otherwise ok marriage to a “good” guy (Elizabeth Gilbert). They’re punished and called “child abusers” when they reveal they use any parenting strategy outside the dominant American cultural norms (Lenore Skenazy, Amy Chua, Ayelet Waldman).
I don’t know about you all, but I’m interested in what the smart women rule breakers of our time have to say, even if I would never do what they do in a million years. No, I don’t want to read about “a middle aged woman’s Brooklyn brownstone and her self tranformation through yoga” either, but that’s not what I think you’d write @laura. To write something like Wurtzel’s piece or nothing at all? That’s a false choice.
LikeLike