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Today’s Memoir
Michelle Bliss
Today’s Memoir
Today’s memoir is difficult. It’s difficult to read, to enjoy, and to find meaning within. Today’s memoir is what Linda Flower calls “Writer-Based” prose—prose meant for the writer alone. It has not been transformed into “Reader-Based” prose—prose meant for an audience that is written by someone who can acknowledge that there are other people in this world. Today’s memoir is narcissism at its fiercest because it lacks the beauty, reflection, and truth that are required of meaningful creative nonfiction.
Today’s memoir is forcefully sad and dejected. It tries to pull on the reader’s supposed “heart strings.” It is now associated with photo albums and scrapbooks as a haphazard way of preserving disparate snapshots of one person’s life. Inexperienced writers can go to websites like www.writemymemoirs.com and www.memoir-edit.com and pay to have the help of professionals who, I can only assume, treat memoir as a mass-produced factory item. They roll each memoir down an assembly line to be fitted and hammered and cut for standard language and standard narrative structure to become standard stories. And I just have to wonder, are standard stories worth telling?
To take it one step further, today’s memoir is almost subconsciously associated with a plethora of contemporary media, including: touchy-feely talk shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil, inappropriate media commentaries on subjects like celebrity gossip and hometown tragedy, and contrived reality television programs that force The Biggest Loser or The Survivor to overcome personal struggle for a large monetary gain. These examples are in addition to every ho-hum blogger who publishes his or her diary entries on the internet for the world to read.
The phrase “today’s memoir” sounds all-encompassing, when in fact, there are wonderfully creative and artful memoirs being published and shared (one of my favorite collections of personal essays, The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, comes to mind). However, I use the phrase “today’s memoir” to denote a sense of a common reputation that creative nonfiction has acquired in academic and literary circles where people must have come across too many confessional memoirs of personal triumph. There is nothing wrong with personal triumph, of course; it’s just that a story about overcoming tragedy, abuse, or natural disaster, does not carry the depth of meaning that its subject matter deserves if is not contained within a crafted work of literature (rather than confessional diary entries) created by a writer who strives for beauty, reflection, and truth.
The reputation that nonfiction has garnered—as an unimportant, conceited non-pursuit—is devastating to those of us who want to study, write, and read thoughtful nonfiction. The effects of being labeled “the bastard children of creative writing,” as one of my teachers so lovingly told me, trickle right down to introductory nonfiction classes—but that’s only if a writer can even find one to register for. In fact, few universities and colleges offer creative nonfiction workshops or forms classes at the undergraduate or graduate level. Many of the schools that do offer opportunities in nonfiction for Creative Writing majors are still developing those programs. And inside actual nonfiction classrooms, students and teachers debate over what makes good nonfiction and spend too much time trying to define—and defend—it as a genre, instead of actually writing it.
So, today I want to talk about what contemporary memoir should aim to achieve—beauty, reflection, and truth—and how Jo Ann Beard’s book The Boys of My Youth accomplishes this triad. But before that, I’m going to define what memoir is, what creative nonfiction is, and I’m going to be bold and defend a genre that needs a little encouragement every once in a while.
Defining and Defending
A memoir is an autobiography, a biography, or a report of the proceedings of a learned society, according to the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, which was reissued in 2007. The terms “nonfiction” and “creative nonfiction” do not have entries in this dictionary. In fact, “nonfiction” is merely included in a list of other “non-words” like nonessential, nonmarketable, and nonproductive. But I would like to argue that nonfiction, especially creative nonfiction, is not a “non-word.” It does not simply mean “the opposite of fiction.” To be classified as a “non-word” just adds to the confusion of what nonfiction is.
When friends and family ask me what I study and try to write, I never know what to say. How do you tell someone in a casual conversation that creative nonfiction consists of journalism, personal essays, memoirs, documentaries, travel and food writings, biographies, and hybrid forms; that nonfiction requires truth, objectivity, research, memory, and reflection; and that nonfiction should ultimately strive for beauty, compassion, awareness—possibly even change?
Maybe next time someone asks, I’ll try to explain that creative nonfiction
is unclassifiable, so much so that Douglas Hesse, in “The Place of Creative
Nonfiction,” describes cataloging books like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air as “a haphazard venture” with differing classifications across state lines
(237).
Maybe I will also explain how creative nonfiction breaks the rules; that in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Literary Nonfiction,” Lynn Bloom wonders “Why does every collection of essays—and every collection of essays about essays—define essays right up front, and then labor to justify devoting a whole book to the subject?” (944). She goes on to proclaim:
“Yes, such free-form writing is much riskier than conventional academic articles;
the essayist balances precariously on the highwire, vulnerable, exposed for all to
see. Yes, writing literary nonfiction is a lot harder than it looks, for it is
unpredictable in form, mode, and language” (947).
Bloom points out that when “…we can relax enough to enjoy the obvious benefits of self-expression, discovery and delight, we’ll find that “essay” will require neither definition nor defense” (947).
My hope is that one day creative nonfiction will find itself as grounded in academia as poetry and fiction, so that instead of defining and defending ourselves, we can simply write our essays and articles and memoirs, relishing in how good it feels to relate to one another by sharing truth, discovering meaning, exploring the unknown, and preserving history—all in an attempt to raise awareness and to spark many more questions to answer.
Beauty
Every story, no matter how interesting or dramatic or horrific, needs to be transformed into a piece of literature that allows readers to converse with the text and draw their own conclusions. Much of contemporary memoir has the story, but the act of storytelling, of providing vivid scenes, character descriptions, and plot within poetic prose, has been forgotten. Although such stories, with their raw material, may initially seem provocative and powerful, their luster always fades because they have not yet been crafted into a meaningful work for a critical audience.
The essay “The Family Hour” (from Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth)
talks about some of Beard’s childhood experiences with her alcoholic father.
Beard could have simply told the reader that her father was an alcoholic,
describing her feelings about him and the difficulty he caused in her life.
Instead of doing that, she shares a story from her perspective as a young girl
and allows the reader to make his or her own judgment on the events that took
place. She does not scream about how her father wronged her. The essay is
emotional, yes, but that emotion is a product of the beauty of this text—not
from the arrangement of shocking facts. Instead of using the details of her
story as a crutch, Beard gives the reader a provocative glimpse into her life
back then: “This is our house in
Instead of giving a profile of her father, Beard provides specific details of the ways in which her father moves and acts around the house. “My father is cracking our morning eggs into a bowl, dish towel tied around his waist, a spatula in his back pocket. He’s singing the ‘I’m a bum’ song that drives my mother nuts” (113). Little glimpses of her father’s actions, and how he interacts (or doesn’t) with his wife and children, carry much more depth than a profile of who Beard’s father was and what mistakes he made throughout his life.
Additionally, a good deal of what the reader learns about Beard’s father comes from her mother’s dialogue, either with him or with her sister. This idea of a young girl overhearing the arguments between her parents and her mother’s anger (which is shared with her sister in-person and over the phone), allows the reader to jump into the narrator’s shoes and gather information about her father through bits and pieces, here and there—just like she had to. Here is a very telling, and timely, fragment of a conversation between Beard’s parents: “Who do you think you are?” she asks him. She has her face right up in his. “Dean Martin? Because he’s nothing but a lush, too” (116).
Creative nonfiction, and memoir specifically, cannot just be themselves. They must incorporate fiction-like narrative structures and devices and they must possess the poetic prose to push them past shock appeal, so that they are able to create and find meaning, and ultimately beauty, within the factual stories they offer. I think that beauty allows nonfiction writers, especially memoirists, to share instead of tell.
Reflection
In addition to sharing a story, nonfiction writers should strive to include their own reflection about what happened. This does not need to be a direct statement. In some instances, the writer can be direct, as in Beard’s essay “Against the Grain” which begins with: “It’s okay to be married to a perfectionist, at least for a while. Just don’t try to remodel a house with one, is all I can say” (71). She goes on to describe all of the things her perfectionist ex-husband said and did during a remodeling process before their divorce.
In addition to providing an immediately reflective statement on the situation she is about to discuss, Beard provides reflection through many of the choices she made in crafting her essay. She effectively uses second-person narration to place the reader in that exact house being remodeled, which helps the reader fully understand the aggravation of working, and living, alongside an exhausting perfectionist. She also does not refer to her husband by name, and instead, simply calls him “the perfectionist” throughout the entire piece. This is a clever, and painful, way to convey the distance between them that her husband’s anal, commanding behavior has caused. Just see how you feel about him after these examples:
The perfectionist comes in on his way from a completed task to a waiting, un-begun one. He notices you standing there and grins. "It doesn’t get done that way, does it?" he kids you (71-72).
The perfectionist is feeling very sensitive about that particular uneven line, since he tried and tried to make it straight…You, in fact, feel encouraged knowing that an uneven, almost jaggedy, edge will be hiding in the house. You tell the perfectionist this in joking way and he stares at you for a long moment and then smiles uncertainly (72).
"Just be sure not to glob it on," he says gently, and then retreats again, into the rest of the house, which is structurally unsound but possibly still fixable, just like you (73).
Tying her husband’s idiosyncrasies to the process of remodeling their house is incredibly insightful. Beard draws connections between the structure of the house and of her own marriage, showing that the remodeling process is twofold. By the end of the essay, the reader understands that their relationship is not fixable.
Truth
In an era of memoirists and journalists who fabricate small details, big
details, and sometimes entire stories, striving for truth is of the utmost
importance for the vitality of nonfiction as a genre. A select few have broken
the promise of honesty and integrity, made by nonfiction writers to nonfiction
readers, so that the rest of us are scrutinized (aka screwed!).
The only way to gain that trust back, is to let the reader into the actual writing process, when necessary. Every reader deserves to know when they are reading about memories that are foggy and the writer is trying to convey thoughts and feelings more so than actual dialogue and events. Every reader deserves to know when the writer is using a composite character or a composite situation to represent a series of relationships of moments. Every reader deserves to feel like he or she can trust the writer. Without that trust a story or book loses its purpose to find meaning .
In the essay “The Boys of My Youth” Beard is honest with the reader about using a composite party scene. Throughout the essay, Beard includes a series of phone conversations with her best friend Elizabeth when they talk about Beard’s struggle to continue writing while going through her divorce. During one of their phone calls, Beard says, “I tell her I’m working on a party scene. ‘Which party?’ she asks suspiciously. ‘What am I doing at it?’ ‘It’s sort of a composite of all parties, you know?’ There’s silence at the other end. ‘It’s just a party, party, is all…’” (193). As a reader, I was thankful to have a clear explanation from the writer about the nature of the party scene I was about to read. Once I knew that the scene included memories from several parties, I was willing to accept the events that were described as an attempt to show the reader what Beard now associates with that partying time during her teenage years. It may seem difficult to be this honest, but the benefit of having no secrets as a writer far outweighs the detriment of lost trust among readers.
This need for truth is deeply connected to every nonfiction writer’s struggle to create beauty and provide reflection. When shoddy fiction is masked as nonfiction, like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, it reminds us that in a mass media culture, gory and dramatic headlines, and their ensuing details, are of interest to too many readers. We must set the wishes of our media-entrenched society aside, and work towards the beauty, reflection, and truth that can make works of nonfiction infinite.
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