Hello Loreates!
There’s an article by Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic that caused a bit of a stir among memoir writers when it came out. Its provocative title is Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write a Memoir, and the core idea is that we all talk too much about ourselves, at our social peril:
What you think is riveting about your life might not seem so to others.
But the article’s title isn’t just misleading, it completely misrepresents what an actual memoir is.
Every successful memoirist knows that their core subject cannot be themself!
Brooks’s actual topic is “conversational narcissism” and the physiological reasons why some people love to talk about themselves:
Seeking a small dopamine hit, we can develop a habit of reflexively bringing every conversation around to our own life and experiences.
I’ll admit that I know people who do this, and they irritate the hell out of me. What irritates me more, though, is Brooks’ sweeping assertion that “we” are all subject to this “addiction” and that that has anything to do with memoir writing.
Personally, there’s nothing I like less than talking about myself. That’s one of the very reasons I write: so I can hide at my desk writing about something else and avoiding precisely those “self-referential” conversations I hate so much! I’ve written two memoirs not because I love to talk about myself but because I cannot bear to articulate and explore my story except on the page.
Autobiography is not without merit, but it’s not memoir.
More to the point, I wrote those memoirs to help readers navigate some specific problems that I’d experienced — eating disorders — which millions of people share. I didn’t write Solitaire because I wanted, much less loved, to tell my story but because no one had ever written a memoir about anorexia before I did. Every single person struggling with anorexia back in the 1970s felt that they were the only one on the planet with this highly specific set of feelings, terrors, obsessions, and compulsions. I needed to smash open that lie and let them all know they were not alone and that this lie was helping to keep them sick. Thirty years later, I wrote Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders to share the the latest science on eating disorders and the truly revelatory missing link (the DNA of personality) that explained why some people are vulnerable to these illnesses and others are not.
If a memoir were a movie, the memoirist’s role would be to produce, direct, and shoot the film, not to star onstage.
Why write these books as memoir? Since I’m neither a scientist nor a therapist, I couldn’t write them as scientific nonfiction. My only “credential” for writing on this topic was my personal experience and perspective: I knew that others could relate to my story and be helped by it.
Relationship is what memoir is really all about. We write memoirs to share a particular set of experiences, problems, passions, and/or nightmares that will matter to readers because they can relate to them. And that’s the core truth that Brooks’s vacuous assault completely misses. Every successful memoirist knows that their core subject cannot be themself! Their life is only the vehicle. Even celebrity memoirs have to be about some deeper subject that the reader can relate to.
All that said, it is true that fledgling memoirists often misunderstand this core principle. One reason is that they (with the help of a book industry that often labels autobiographies as memoir because memoirs sell better) confuse the genre of memoir with autobiography. “Life stories” belong to autobiography. They begin with birth and end with old age or retirement and cover all the noteworthy highlights in between. If you’re going to write an autobiography, you’d better be someone with a truly fascinating and meaningful life from start to finish (a la Barbra Streisand). Or else you’re documenting your life history for family and friends. Autobiography is not without merit, but it’s not memoir.
Another common misunderstanding is that the author’s past self is the star of the story. In their attempt to access their memories, nonfiction students often describe their own movements, thoughts, words, and image as if watching themselves on the page’s screen. And then I did this, and then I went there… This is the kind of conversational narcissism that Brooks objects to, and I agree that it’s deadly in a memoir or anywhere else. So I came up with one critical suggestion to help my students shift their focus to the memoir’s true subject, whatever that might be.
Turn the lens outward!
If a memoir were a movie, the memoirist’s role would be to produce, direct, and shoot the film, not to star onstage. When you write a memoir, you must return to the past to reinhabit your past self and relive your memories, but you don’t do this by watching yourself nonstop, any more than you could watch yourself from the outside when you were younger. Instead, you have to crawl back inside your past mind and body and look out through your younger eyes. Because that’s what infuses memoir with meaning: your point of view.
So turn the lens outward! Imagine you’re behind the camera of your perspective, not in front of it. How did the people around your past look? What were they doing, saying, showing you? What did you smell and hear? What did you deduce from all that you saw happening around you? What subjective clues did you pick up about what was really going on?
To be sure, you will also need to take an objective look at your past self from time to time, but do that through the clear eyes of your present self in a separate narrative layer— your current perspective. Imagine here that you’re the director rather than the cameraman. Your role is to step back and, with the benefit of distance, assess your past self as a character in context. What does the director make of this person? What do you notice that the cameraman was too close to notice? How can you join the subjective and objective pieces of this memoir to make meaning?
Relationship is what memoir is really all about. We write memoirs to share a particular set of experiences, problems, passions, and/or nightmares that will matter to readers because they can relate to them.
If you need a master class in turning the lens outward and then overtly shifting into the director’s view, read Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Here are two devastating examples:
