Our cultural propensity for memoirs.

At the conclusion of Memoir Week on Slate, it seems that "everyone has a story to tell" in the words of FireStarCat, with the Fray becoming at times a promotional showcase for fledging writers who believe they too have a book in them.  

First, let's hear it from a published professional. SamuelPablo gives us this glimpse into his memoir-writing experience:

I was so physically exhausted after finishing Why I Committed Suicide that I tried to avoid telling anyone in my family about the book at all.
It was only when Why I Committed Suicide started to receive media attention because it is the first book ever posted on MySpace that the content became an issue. Suddenly I went from obscure writer to unpublished author champion and internet marketing guru. I wasn't prepared for my family finding out about the novel and the backlash from my them was pretty severe. Nobody ever remembers the details of situations the way your personal emotions are attached to it.

FireStarCat attributes the increasing prevalence of the memoir to today's confessional, tell-all culture in which "everyone's ego trip seems to warrant a long diatribe, which would be better written as fiction":

Long ago, say in the 40's, 50's and 60's, most famous writers wrote their first novels as autobiographies, mainly disguised, but sometimes like Tom Wolf, they would admit to it. Then they became famous, (Hemingway never wrote an autobiography, his life was in his books) and a very few would deign to write a memoir or autobiography…
Almost everyone has a story to tell, as any interviewer knows. Currently, people like to drag the proverbial skeletons out of the closet for the same reasons that we are inundated with media hype-shock value. And we surely don't need a How I wrote this book on top of it…

If one attempts, and (groan) publishes a memoir I hope it changes the reader in an uplifting way, presenting the truth as a positive experience.

Situated somewhere between the genres of autobiography, fiction, and perhaps journalism, memoirs have a curious literary and epistemological status, as many of our readers were quick to point out.

Glee faults memoirs for claiming to be factual accounts while being based on memories inherently "fraught with distortions and inaccuracies." The problem with memoirs, responds MaryAnn, is their tendency to blur "that line between fact and fiction." A better way to measure their "truthiness" is along "a continuum, not just an either/or thing. At one end of the continuum is downright lies or made up stuff (see, e.g. James Frey). At the other end is total veracity or total recall…" She also reminds us here not to "assume that confessional poetry means telling facts and that the speaker 'I' equates with the writer."

The emergence of blogs, defined by LuxLawyer as "an ill-defined middle between public writing (intended to be published) and something truly private (a diary)," represents something of a grey area for writers and their reading public. In her own blog, topazz struggles with "holding myself back from getting in too deep, when getting in too deep is exactly what I need to do. At some point you have to stop straddling the fence and jump it, you have to write your life as you really live it, write the people in your life as they truly are, warts and all. Anything else is just glossing, and without depth."

Which puts topazz in good company, as 81% of Americans polled share the same irrepressible desire to tell their life stories, according to this lament by Joseph Epstein. AC … 12:50pm PST

Saturday, Mar. 24, 2007