voice: diary-like, reflective, intimately close and trusting, at times uncomfortably so. An instance of the latter is Lucy Grealy’s Auto-biography of a Face (1994). Despite the title’s playfulness, Grealy details how her interior self was changed by an operation for cancer that surgically took away one-third of her jaw when she was nine. “This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it” (7). Engagement with “this singularity of meaning” is emblematic of a new approach to personal narration. As my writing teachers trumpeted, a good topic is a narrowed topic. One emotional or thematic focus is plenty for a book. Indeed, only those parts of Grealy’s life that were germane to the shadow and substance of her disfigurement got in.
How simple this is! For two decades, writers have gravitated to this simplicity, whether they were writing about buying a house in Mexico, living with AIDS, or losing a child. Memoir situates the one story as equal to or greater than—even against—the epic chronology of the Life. Autobiography’s central tenet—wisdom gained through many years—is much too grandiose for the memoirist. In fact, memoir writers are so bent on activating the particular in their books that many are writing of the immediate past, even the still-corruptible present, not waiting for time to ripen or change what they know.
As the memoir has evolved, the canvas and the frame have gotten a lot smaller. And, to see the new form properly, we have to look more closely and the canvas has to contain more detail—detail that is revealing and reflective, textured and telling, exclusive and sharp. For example, note how this memoir’s subtitle announces its severe singularity: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (2006). Buford, of course, is writing autobiographically. But he’s hardly writing an autobiography. He’s writing memoir. He’s focused not on a life but on a portion thereof, a portion small enough to allow him the nitty-gritty he and his readers crave. It’s true that critics have conflated autobiography and memoir throughout our literary history. But what we need to do is to sharpen their growing distinction: the memoir is supplanting its uncle, in part by telescoping the form, in part by accruing stylistic innovation. In the last ten years, writers have been distinguishing the form faster than we can analyze their attempts.
Once authors pared down the autobiography and it was no longer recognizable as such, the new form needed a name. It was christened “memoir,” and the designation has often been attached as or in a subtitle: Fried Butter: A Food Memoir. Twenty years later, the form is recognizable on its own. In the memoir, writers use a modicum of summary and great swaths of narrative, scenic and historical, to sustain their single theme or emotional arc. Thus, Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary (1998) concentrates only on a ten-year period which has just ended, when the drug has removed her debilitating depression and she isn’t crazy anymore. As the story grows, she discloses to herself, often in surprising ways, the truth about her years of suffering. Slater is guided as much by these revelations as by her memory. She seems to have trusted that in the wake of her disease she could be the most honest with herself, and this honesty would best express the disease. One key is courage: she went at the topic immediately, not waiting for the autobiographer’s prerogatives, age and wisdom.
For such emotionally intense memoirs we need emotionally revealing memoirists, authors who are willing to put themselves on the couch, under the lamp, into the darkness, sometimes as they are living or soon after they have lived the emotional mire they are working with and, perhaps, waking up in. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes the old plural form, “memoirs,” as that which emphasizes “what is remembered rather than who is remembering.” If we invert this, we can call a book that emphasizes the who over the what—the shown over the summed, the found over the known, the recent over the historical, the emotional over the reasoned—a memoir.
Memoir and Memoirist
A word or two about this relationship. Both memoir and memoirist draw attention to the writer now—product and producer. Still, there’s something tentative, not quite out of the womb, about the pair. The ist in memoirist doesn’t have the bona fides that novelist and scientist do. The job description needs codifying: memoir practitioners have no field yet (memoirship) for which, like psychologists, they can hang a shingle. (The field of books analyzing autobiography and memoir as a form is small but growing.3) A memoir sounds like a dalliance; there’s something purely personal and time-bound about it, like a fall fashion or passing clouds. With autobiography, we think there is only one life—the person lives it, then writes it. Boom, done. But the memoir feels prey to (or is it desirous of?) immediate emotional memory, almost as if the point is to preserve the evanescent.
There’s a practical reason for memoir’s provisionary status. Once we locate its engine and the emotion with which to make it go, we will find that far more of our lives will be left out than can ever be put in. Leaving so much out adds to the mystery of selection. The memoirist has to limit the project severely, be a master trimmer. Most of us find that through writing memoir we behold the great vistas of our lives, even among our circumscribed phases. We quickly discover, however, that no matter how telescoped our thematic and emotional emphasis is, the story is still a story: it is subjective and distinct, a melody with the barest orchestration. It cannot be the record of the past as autobiography tries to be. Memoir is a record, a chamber-sized scoring of one part of the past. Despite its rightness, it’s a version of, perhaps a variation on, what happened. We don’t really read Jeannette Walls’s “childhood” of poverty and neglect in The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005); we read her version of it—which, because it’s so well written, we think is her childhood. And yet it’s something else, too: one path down a set of precisely chosen days of desperation she took in this one book.
Imagine ten siblings, born at one-year intervals, each of whom, on his or her thirtieth birthday, writes a memoir about growing up. Reading those ten memoirs, we would find agreement, in general, only on the barest facts. Everything else—pecking-order differences, stronger and weaker egos, parental favoritism—would be subject to individual perspective, in part because each kid had fought hard to be heard or had wilted in the competition. Which book is true? All are true and none is truer, though each of the ten writers would defend his or her truth forever. Who can say what that family’s story is? I’ve never heard of a single-family bevy of memoirs. Rather, there’s usually only one author in the clan. He or she is situationally selected as the most observant one in the group—I’m afraid that’s been my lot—who, though she is crowned, can never really be the family spokesperson. Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993) may seem like the story of what happened to her because of her family. But, in the absence of competing views that might refute or refashion or deepen the tale of how she was interrupted at eighteen and why, her memoir is only her truth—only her adolescent truth, only her late adolescent emotional truth, only her late adolescent emotional breakdown truth—and no one else’s, a conclusion I’d wager her parents (who seem selectively absent in the book) would have easily agreed with.
The memoirist, then, is one who while and after she writes realizes the existential limitation of memoir. Private, mythic scoresettling, at times given to ax-grinding or ax-wielding terror—and yet true to one rigid but gossamer particularity. I hope the challenge to traditional autobiography and its absolutist view of the self is met. But the construction of a relative self in the memoir is no less difficult: the person writing now is inseparable from the person the writer is remembering then. The goal is to disclose what the author is discovering about these persons. But such a goal can arise only in the writing of the memoir, a discovery which then becomes the story.
2
Discovering a New Literary Form
