Like Tess Monaghan, I am tempted to down a shot whenever I hear a television anchor misuse the word “ironic,” but I’m not sure I use the word correctly myself. Given that I have just trudged through my latest copy-edit, I’m not sure I’m entitled to mock anyone’s usage. This is my 14th novel and some problems do not appear to be abating — the subjunctive, my use of commas, my inability to remember if it’s Haussner’s or Hausnner’s. (The former, I think.) So is it “ironic” that, having finished, more or less, a book that takes a pretty skeptical view of memoir writing that I bought Abigail Thomas’s book on memoir writing while listening to Anthony Bourdain’s KITCHEN CONFIDENTIALl?
No, on all accounts. I admire Thomas extravagantly; her memoir, THREE DOG LIFE, was one of the best books I read last year. I admire Bourdain and decided to listen to his memoir, which I had read when it was first published eight years ago, because I had forgotten huge swaths of it. In fact, I had forgotten pretty much everything except: a) don’t eat fish on Mondays and b) don’t use a garlic press. But KC is very much a memoir. In fact, it belongs to the subgenre of addiction memoirs, but it is unique among those volumes in that the writer’s addiction is secondary to the main story. Perhaps more addiction memoirs should be written that way.
Even as my hand closed on Thomas’s book, a book that would seem to be an odd purchase for me — I will never write a memoir, in large part because of my memory — I heard Bourdain say, “Writing is treasonous.” The sentence caught my ear. It’s much better than Joan Didion’s assertion that every writer knows what he/she does is indefensible, an assertion that Janet Malcolm later cited.* I’ve always felt that Didion and Malcolm somewhat overstate the case, yet I was taken with this even bolder, broader statement. Writing is treasonous. And, as Bourdain makes clear, the writer betrays not just family and friends, but self. Every memory he shared, Boudain wrote/read, was reduced by the sharing. In a sense, it’s like selling one’s name for a portion of . . . was it really pottage? Was it really a name? I’ll be Googling as soon as I file this.
I am skeptical of memoirs. Show me a pair of quotation marks, and I assume that what sits between them was actually said, that it was heard by the writer, or established as fact by the writer via diligent reporting. I don’t assume everyone has a memory as bad as mine, although I do think most people who believe they have good memories are deceiving themselves. Just last night, the SO and I drove to a performance of the local “Stoop” series, a storytelling performance in which we have both participated. I said something about the seven-minute time limit. He said it was nine when he did it. I said, no, it was seven. Nine, he insisted, with great vehemence. I let it go. I will no longer argue on the basis of my memory, on any topic. We got to the theater and picked up the programs, which noted the Stoop was an ongoing tradition in which participants were given SEVEN minutes to say their piece. I pointed it out, not because I love being right, but because I will seize any opportunity to show someone that a memory upon which he/she has been insistent is wrong. My hope is that people will abandon memory-fueled disagreements, starting in my household, where people challenged on their memories tend to restate them at a higher volume.
So . . . was it really at the exact moment that I picked up Thomas’s book that I heard Bourdain’s words? It makes a better story, but is it true? Does it matter if it’s true? It does if I say so, and for now, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But when I read David Sedaris, for example, I don’t assume I’m reading factual essays, but hyperbolic reminiscences. There is a difference. And Bourdain’s memoir is structured in a way that doesn’t ask us to believe that he is remembering experiences exactly as they happened, but he is remembering them as he remembered them. Again, there’s a difference.
But note: the sentence is not, “MEMOIR writing is treasonous.” It is: “Writing is treasonous.” Which means my novel, with all its skepticism about memoir, also is a form of betrayal. Do I agree with that?
Damn straight.
*I’m pretty sure I’ve inverted the two women’s arguments, that it was Didion who said writers were selling people out, Malcolm who said we all know what we do is indefensible.
You should work the Stoop experience into the novel, accenting the SEVEN MINUTES. That will fix the SO.
It is “Ironic” that one of my favorite memoirs, BARNEY’S VERSION by Mordechai Richler (sp?) is a fictional murder mystery.
Amen to that.
Funny you should mention writing as treason. Right now, we’re in the middle of tech week for a new play, “Wise Man,” about a writer with memory problems, as well as how easily what the writer writes can be misinterpreted. We open on Thursday. (I’ve moved from writing the script on to marketing and sound design, and right now, I’m fabricating prop labels and prop book covers.)
The memory problem in the play turns out to be a little more serious than simple existence, but still…
I also love the books of Robertson Davies, many of which are nothing if not faulty memoirs of fictional people. I think I’ve mentioned him here before, but I can’t quite remember. (Unintentional, that.)
Anne Tyler says something wonderful about this in DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT — following TMP rules I won’t look it up, but a character says that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives are all about what we _count_. Jobs, residences, heartbreaks, disasters, strokes of luck — memoirs are about what we’ve kept track of, which has very little to do with objective history.
And as for treason — maybe, but only in the sense that writing is an act of judgment about everything you write about. Ibsen said, “To live is to battle with trolls; to write is to sit in judgment over oneself.”
What, then, do you make of David Carr’s NIGHT OF THE GUN, an addiction memoir where he went back and re-interviewed everyone he could find and pored over all available documents of his misspent life?
The Grealy passage, quoted in Ann Pachett’s Truth & Beauty, was galvanizing to me. It shocked me, too, all the more because Pachett seemed okay with it. I admire both books, Grealy’s and Pachett’s, very much. But both writers have all but told me that I shouldn’t count on them to be factual.
The nonfactual memoir is fiction. Yet people are drawn to memoirs because they promise to be true and I think the average person equates truth with fact, not some higher synthesis of art.
An aside: A year ago, I met someone who knew Grealy and Pachett, appears in Pachett’s book in passing. “I didn’t come across very well,” he/she said. (Quote is from memory, so perhaps I shouldn’t put it between quotation marks.) I checked the book, didn’t find the portrait particularly objectionable. And that, more than anything, informed this book.
I honestly don’t want to fix my SO. But I would love to convert him to my view of memory.
Ask any trial lawyer about the fickleness of memory. The testimony of witnesses recalling events months or even weeks after the fact will not only contradict other witness’ recollection of the same events, they’ll contradict their own statements immediately after the event.
It’s why I like writing fiction: I don’t have to worry about my testimony being impeached.
I haven’t read Bourdain’s book, mainly because someone who has told me that, if I did, I would never eat in a restaurant again. Recession notwithstanding, I’m not ready for that. However, I don’t agree that sharing memories reduces them, unless of course he means it in the sense of “reducing” sauces, i.e., concentrating the essence of the ingredients.
I’m very interested in the idea of imagination betraying self in the very act of expression, as if the self was some solid, defenseless, separate, best-left-silent entity. That sounds fatuous, I know–it’s just that I’m not sure what betrayal means, then. I think there’s more betrayal in forgetting, and that exaggerated memorializing–even competing memories–might be better than oblivion.
My mother has just written her memoir, soon to be published by Kent State University. Her story is pretty compelling–daughter of an American soldier and mestizo mother living in the Philippines (fact #1–my grandmother was definitely more Filipino than not, a fact my mother doesn’t admit in print or person)–during WWII she and her sister and her mother had to live in hiding for five years–in villages that took them in then chased them out, in the “jungle,” dependent on the kindness of strangers. What is so interesting about her memoir is that she certainly betrays my grandparents’ very difficult lives and marriage and milieu by white-washing and mythologizing. The “truth” about them is so much more interesting. But is the flawed book better left unwritten? Absolutely not. If I wrote a competing narrative with the other sides of the story, who would I be betraying? Isn’t this cacophony better than silence?
Writing, whether memoir or fiction, is so similar to therapy, in that from memory, true or misremembered or downright falsified, we create a narrative we can live with. Nuala O’Faolain’s follow-up memoir, “Almost There,” is a wonderful evocation of both the hazards and pretty miraculous return to self that can come with the act of writing, memoir or no.
Boy, that was wordy. Sorry.
And I’m re-reading What the Dead Know. Even better the second time around–what a great book.
Speaking of facts and fictions and ironies – here’s a saying (intended as a compliment) that always strikes me as silly: “She’s FORGOTTEN more than he’ll ever KNOW about (fill in the blank)”
Leaving aside the (relatively few) things that really can be “known” (as opposed to believed), and given how everyone has their unique perception of the world, and then their own unique way or remembering and forgetting –
that statement has to be always true, and always essentially false, at the same time!
I haven’t read Carr’s book — I wasn’t up for another addiction memoir — but I thought it was a good-faith effort to solve some of these problems.
I heard there was a woman who went on Oprah who could, in fact, remember everything. Say a date, and she’ll tell you what happened to her that day. And she was MISERABLE. She never got over anything.
Given my reading habits, I clearly wouldn’t want to live in a world without memoir, just one where memory-driven writing was placed somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.
Yet I do feel writing is a form of treason. Going through my copy-edited pages, I was aware of the real people whose lives I used for inspiration, but also the real people who will be projected on my characters, however unfairly. There is a refrain through this book about who gets to tell stories. Why do you get to tell it? Why did you tell it that way? And — a sentence torn from my own experiences, one of my least-favorite sentences on the planet — “You’re telling it wrong.”
I don’t think it’s possible to tell a story “wrong.” (Suppose it should be “wrongly,” but that’s not how most people speak.) And, as a writer, I can’t stand to hear those words. I also can’t stand being told that certain stories are off-limits, or belong more properly to someone else. I was about to compare writing to the Oklahoma land rush, but the fact is, I don’t even think you have to seize the territory first. Go ahead, squat where you want, calling it an homage if you must.
Of course I believe it’s possible to tell stories poorly, inexpertly, longwindedly . . . I could go on and on. But not wrong. Wrongly.
I found this sentence from Diana striking:
“I think there’s more betrayal in forgetting, and that exaggerated memorializing–even competing memories–might be better than oblivion.”
I read lots and lots about Lincoln, and (going from memory!) he laments the terrible possibility – when he was young – that he might live such an inconsequential life that after he’s dead, the world will be just the same as if he’d never lived.
And then, on New Years day 1863, when he signs the Emanicpation Proclamation, he comments that this will be the one thing, if anything, that he’ll be remembered for. Being consequential, and being remembered, seems to have been two sides of the same coin, and his great motivation. (and in his case, anymore, “exaggerated memorializing” competes mightily with grittier assessments of his life! A new biography of him by Michael Burlingame is soon to come out, and will run 2,000 pages in two volumes…but without foonotes, because there was “no room” for them!!!)
Anyway – my wife has the memory; and she’s one of those people that, once she ever drives to a place – she always can find her way again. (On vacation, for example, once we get where we’re going, she becomes the driver). Luckily for me, she can remember when I was a young feller and had hair and could make her laugh (which I can still sometimes do, whether purposely or not!)…
Marjorie,
That’s a terrible story, and the second part is even worse than the first. It’s bad enough that writers think that way, but most writers I know would never be excited about using that kind of experience from anyone’s life.
In fact, most writers I know would ask the name of your boss’s wife and do something really awful to her in a book, and throw in that co-worker as a bonus. Ah, if only I could reveal how I avenged a friend’s mistreatment by naming a particularly vile character after her tormentor. I will say that it’s PROBABLY not a coincidence that my former boss’s surname showed up, um, used for a character who is described as “not tossing talent away light. He heaves it away with great force.”
“…the real people who will be projected on to my characters, however unfairly.” Yes, now I see the potential for treason.
“Treason” may be strong, but it’s hard to have a writer in the family. I’ve been on the other side of this equation, worrying that some bit of fiction will be confused with my real life. But it would have been hypocritical to complain about it.
Ah, well, now I can share a memory here at TMP. My closest male friend is a playwright. One day, maybe five years ago, I told him why I was hired many years ago at my current job. The person who had the position before me was a very beautiful and vivacious single woman. My married boss had clearly had a sort of unrequited crush on her. So when he was looking to hire her replacement (she went off and married one of our richest clients, by the way), the boss’s wife (who apparently knew about her husband’s attraction) told him that he was to only hire someone as unatttactive to him as possible. (An oh-so-helpful co-worker told me this later.) When I told this to my writer friend (and it was painful to relate. I can think i am ugly, but i don’t want others to think it!), his eyes filled with excitement and he asked if he could use that in something he was writing. I said sure, but I wanted to say to him (sarcastically) that I was glad that my misery provided him with good material.
–Marjorie
Memory is a very strange thing. Some things I remember very well, others not. My sister remembers things from our childhood, even about me, that I don’t remember. Yet there are things I remember well.
My memory of a car accident years ago was very strong–what happened. It was a vivid memory. But I was told that it physically could not have happened that way. I thought about that and realized that “this is how I remembered that; that doesn’t mean I’m right.” It means it’s my memory of it, a very stressful event.
So I’ve come to realize that there are things I’m sure of and other things where I say to myself that this is how I remember something, but I wouldn’t swear under oath that it was exactly that way.
“You’re telling it wrong.”
I promise not to look up the details, as per Memory Project rules, but there is a marvelous James Thurber story about a man who was so demoralized by his wife constantly telling him he was telling a story wrong that he took to only telling about his DREAMS, as he could not be contradicted. There was one dream in particular that he told over and over, about flying in the sky and being pulled over by a traffic cop.
One time, he’s telling the story and he says “So I pulled over to a curb…”
“You pulled over to a cloud,” says the wife. “You’re in the sky, you would have pulled over to a cloud.”
Then she smiles at the listener.
“He always gets that story wrong.”