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.