In fact-checking a piece I’ve written on ten memorable memoirs — if it gets published, as I hope, I’ll link here later — I found this exceptional
<a href=” http://redravine.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/the-ant-the-grasshopper-ann-patchett-lucy-grealy//”>piece</a> on Truth & Beauty. It’s a treasure trove of good links.
Vantage point is a crucial issue in memoir. Who gets to tell the story? Why? Does the mere fact of being a writer entitle one to own a story that belongs to many others? You’ll find one of those questions, almost word-for-word, in the first chapter of LIFE SENTENCES. It takes me back to the old theatrical joke used in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, when a certain actor is asked to describe ROMEO AND JULIET. “It’s about this nurse,” he begins. Don’t most of us tell stories this way?
It’s a snow day in Baltimore. I didn’t get them off as a journalist; I don’t get them off as a full-time novelist. But I enjoy being surrounded by people having an unexpected holiday. It was the blizzard of 2003 that brought me to Spoons to write; I had such intense cabin fever that I had to find some way to get out of the house.
Laura, talk about POV in “Life Sentences”! You have a mosaic of POV here. One of the aspects I loved. But this lucky reader here is not going to be a spoiler.
“The Facts, As I Knew Them”, are we going to be reading about your next novel, TFAIKT, here shortly?
Enjoy the snow!
I wish I could find the interview where Ann Patchett said she was amazed that anyone came away with a negative view of Lucy Grealy from T&B. I believe that she was a good friend who set out to write a book about someone she loved, but parts of that book absolutely seethe. Here’s one line I always remember: Noting the successes enjoyed by her friends, she writes, “Not it was my turn.”*
Admittedly, that can be read as a kind of self-deprecation, too. (“I’m not special, I just hit the lottery.”) In honor of the TMP rules, I wrote the above and am now checking it against the text. (Quick jog upstairs.)
“My fourth book made me an overnight success. Over the past few years I had seen many of my friends come to glory. [A list ensues] Now it seemed it was me.”
Ah, interesting how my own memory cooked that quote. “Now it was me” is different from “Now it was my turn.” More self-deprecating, less entitled.
Still, just glancing through the book in search of that quote, I found myself thinking, as I thought before, that I could never be friends with someone like Lucy Grealy. I don’t like to carry people, literally or metaphorically. I dislike people who ask for constant reassurance.
Then there is this passage:
“Several months after the publication of Lucy’s book, when she was the toast of both popular culture and all things literary, my second novel, Taft, came out. In the same way that all the rumblings that preceded Autobiography of a Face made it clear that it was going to be a big book, the comparative silence surrounding this novel made it clear that it was going to sink without a trace . . . and despite getting the best reviews I’d had, it did not seem to be selling outside of my immediate family.”
“and despite getting the best reviews I’d had, it did not seem to be selling outside of my immediate family.”
Woo! Dangerous ground!
Talent (or ability) is certainly a requirement for financial success, but what else?
“Now it seemed it was me” reads just as well as “Now it was my turn”, if the intent is to convey acceptance of winning at the ‘good luck’ roulette wheel, after ponying up the required ante
By the way, I am now 98.9% certain to be in attendance for the March 19 leg of the book tour – barring any major blizzards or errant asteroids – it’s a done deal.
And really, how can one go wrong when the offer is to see the author having a conversation in Carmel?
Laura, I would like to know the difference, in your mind, between memoir and autobiography.
–Marjorie (who has a snow day, too. No work today! Nine inches of snow and it’s still coming down.)
For me, there’s not much distinction, but others would argue that memoir has an implicit artistic license as long as it adheres to truth (as opposed to fact). And, as a reader, I’m okay with that practice. But I could never do it as a writer.
I’m not a writer so maybe this isn’t the point. I remember a different discussion here when the vantage point was discussed- Is it the Wide Sargasso Sea that is a different telling of some of Jane Eyre? There seem to be quite a few modern novels with different vantage points of Jane Austen’s stories(I have Captain Wentworth’s Diary).
I telework anyway on Mondays but right now- I look out the window and see neighbors out in the snow. One mom is a teacher so she is off today- she is taking her son via sled into the park behind out house. Two other neighbors are inthe street taking photos and here comes another neighbor with his son on a sled!
Yes, Andrea, there have been several books that re-imagine classics from different vantage points and I particularly love WIDE SARGASSO SEA. Also, Louis Bayard’s MR. TIMOTHY.
Thank God I filled the bird feeders. The black caps and tufteds are gobbling. Every so often I shoo the mourning doves who like to come and roost in the feeder. Snow day at Boys’ Latin. If I get these Huck Finn essays graded, I’ll kick back with Kate Atkinson and rest up for shovelling.
I’m reading the latest Kate Atkinson (WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS) and loving it.
Well Kate, and her third book in the Brodie series, must be in the wind because I am revelling in it as well. Combining comments made in a previous journal posting and this one; so do our “life sentences” we use to define ourselves to others fall into oral memoir if we embellish or combine several experiences into one story? I am guilty of this.
I’ve really been looking forward to LIFE SENTENCES. The effect of a memoir like Patchett’s on other people involved is so complicated. Another memoir I liked, THE DEAD GIRL by Melanie Thernstrom, deals with the murder of Thernstrom’s friend Roberta Lee. A preface to the edition I read mentions that Lee’s family decided not to let Thernstrom use Lee’s correspondence in the the book. The book is a loving portrait of Lee, but I can see how some of it would be hurtful to her family. Actually, I can see a family feeling violated by such a thing, even if there was no negative mention of them. (Lucy Grealy’s sister’s comment about her grief being hijacked by Patchett’s book seemed very apt, to me.) Does that mean those memoirs should not be written?
My own angle on this is that my father wrote a memoir which he was not able to get published. This was a few years ago, but I can still sound completely insane on the topic if someone gets me going. I fear that had the memoir been published, I would have wound up being one of those family members writing angry letters to newspapers which had reviewed the book. Yet I believe he had every right to write and– had it worked out– publish the thing.
Anyway, I can’t wait to read LIFE SENTENCES.
Kate Atkinson’s WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS was my favorite new novel of 2008. There’s a scene in the opening chapters that I’ve probably reread fifteen times (something I never do), simply because it is so stunningly well written.
I do think there is a difference between the stories we tell and the stories we publish. I don’t want to have defend that belief just now, as I haven’t thought it through, but things do take on a greater authority when written down. Also, don’t we all grant a little artistic license to conversations? Gosh knows, I have polished my Election Day encounter with the maybe-naked Democrat to an oh-so-glossy shine.
Should memoirs not be written? (Or, as Suellen Grealy suggests, written but not published?) I think that presumes that we can create a harm-free environment by eschewing memoir. Without memoir, there would simply be a return to the autobiographical first novel, and even fiction can wound. All we can do is recognize that these accounts will be disputed. I remember a recent memoir where the parents went on Amazon to criticize their daughter’s book. And I believe the lawsuit against Augusten Burroughs had as much to do with hurt feeling as financial gain.
I think, in the end, it’s all control and it’s hard to be in someone else’s anecdote, no matter how affectionate. Recently, someone sent me a lovely note about a perfectly sweet anecdote shared by someone that I know is genuinely fond of me. Yet I cringed, just a little.
Then again, my beloved SO has a habit of saying of mutual stories: “You’re telling it wrong.” Ouch. And yet, I was the one who interrupted him at a party recently to set the record straight on a matter so mundane that it truly was worthless, being precise about it. Yet I couldn’t bear to hear the facts, as I knew them, mangled.
I think that’s a great point about control. Even in benign situations.
And then there are those memoirs (and autobiographical fictions) where there’s a clear intent to make someone look bad. I’ve just read an ARC of what looks to me like one of those. Often the self-betrayal in books of that kind ends up making the author look worst of all, but that is probably not much consolation to their target/s.
Autobiographical fiction can wound just as much as memoir–even fiction that doesn’t at first glance seem autobiographical can. Those we’re closest to recognize exactly where we found our inspirations…or at least think they do.
The memoir/biography that purports to be about someone else, but instead uses the supposed subject as a mirror (Paul Theroux on V.S. Naipaul, perhaps?) can often be the most destructive of all–to the author’s reputation.