I'm not quite sure what it is about the memoir form that has never appealed to me. Perhaps it is the feeling that an author has a burning need to share the details of his or her of life and view of the world, which seems to me to be an egotistical, narcissistic activity. I can't recall reading a memoir I loved or even felt like I learned something from. I'm sure there are terrific examples of memoirs that I'm not aware of, but whenever I find myself reading one, I am so hyper-aware of the author's tendency to novelize his or her life, to have it fit nicely in form and arc and meaning into the shape of a novel, that I can't help but feel manipulated and lied to. I guess the recent unsurprising revelations about fictionalized (read: made up) memoirs have made me even more suspicious.
That said, I actually read three memoirs in recent months. The books are quite different from each other, but all fall into one or more of the traps or failings I mentioned above. The first book is Denial by Jessica Stern, chosen by my book group at work. Stern is a world-renowned expert on terrorism who had never really dealt with her own experience of terrorism: she had been raped as a teenager. The book is a local story, with Concord, Cambridge, and towns in central Massachusetts forming the backdrop for Stern's journey. What is it a journey of (or from)? I guess it's a journey to understand the meaning of why she is such a difficult, unfeeling person, and an attempt to understand her shattered, screwed-up family, especially her cold, unfeeling father. It was not a pleasant experience to read Denial and if you ask me about it, I will deny ever having read it.
I picked up the next memoir because I loved Alison Bechdel, the writer and illustrator of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For". Bechdel is funny, smart, and insightful, and she has always had a keen sense of people, politics and the world. Her first memoir (which--shh!!--I actually loved) was in graphic form and was based on her experiences with her father and the books she loved. It was brilliant. I was hoping for more of the same when I bought "Are You My Mother?", but was incredibly disappointed. It could have been titled "Are You My Therapist?" because she deals as much with the therapists she's had over the years as she deals with her relationship with her mother. In the end, however, I wondered why I was reading this and why I should care about her journey (there's that word again) of self-discovery. It felt self-indulgent and self-obsessed. Unlike her first book, I wasn't really that interested in how she got there (plus I couldn't keep her therapists straight).
The third memoir I've read recently was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend this Never Happened (again chosen by my work book group, but meant as an antidote to Denial). Lawson is a blogger who writes (among various things) about her husband, motherhood, her work, her OCD, her fears, her obsessions, her journey towards normality, her crazy Texas family, taxidermy, and anything else that pops into her strange and funny mind. The first third of this book is drop-dead funny but funny only takes you so far. After a while, I found myself wondering if any of the stuff she describes ever happened (the title is a funny reminder of that), the dead deer, the stuffed squirrel, the kitchen fires, the blurted faux pas, and on and on. There's no real structure to the book, as it feels like loosely-linked blog entries. She also has this meta, parenthetical voice (and footnotes) reminding us that she is there and she is aware of how we might be reading what she has written, kind of like she's given voice to her internal editor. I couldn't finish it.
Themes running through these works: self-obsession, the journey towards self-acceptance, not especially good writing, unlikeable narrators--people I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like to meet.
I'm not going to waste my breath (or my fingers) anymore. I'm done with memoirs for a while.
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