contrary, innovative, undefined: memoir today has the energy of a literary movement, recalling past artistic revolutions that initiated new ways of seeing. The form has cleared most of the first hurdles, among them the rap that memoir must be tied to family dysfunction. Memoir’s diverse topics and authors of all ages squash that prejudice. Indeed, we may be living in the age of memoir. How might we know? Sheer numbers. If you follow Amazon.com’s list of the one hundred best-selling “biographies and memoirs,” you’ll find that on average fewer than 20 percent are biographies or autobiographies (maybe two are religious confessions). The rest are memoirs, by the hundreds, by the thousands. Many of these come from no-name authors who are turning to the form as a means of examining their most intimate relationships. I think of such moving works as Le Anne Schreiber’s Light Years (1996), a book that juxtaposes her withdrawal from a big-city newspaper and move to a small town with a meditation about the mortality of her father; of William Loizeaux’s Anna: A Daughter’s Life (1993), a tale of a child who didn’t reach her first birthday, though her parents and a team of doctors did everything they could to save her. These and hundreds of other emotionally venturesome memoirs share this individuality: Here is what it was like to be me, to face what I faced, to lose what I lost.
What is faced and lost is crucial. Only by lingering on something outside the self, with which he has had intimate experience, can the author disclose himself. Memoir is a relational form. Loizeaux does not just describe his torment as his daughter died of a host of congenital difficulties. He deals with the effect on his marriage, the doctors and hospital staffs with whom he and his wife became close, and the personality of Anna herself, who had four months at home with her parents before she succumbed. On the surface, the book is about her life and death. But, more importantly, it is a book that allows her life and death to bring out the emotions and changes that her father endured. Anna’s living and dying brought about a book in which Loizeaux could remember and mourn his daughter, be the person who lost her. As Khalil Gibran has said of the parent’s possessiveness toward his children, “they come through you but not from you.” It is remembering this child’s coming through Loizeaux that becomes the memoir.
Immersing himself in Anna’s passage, Loizeaux finds that it is bigger than any passage in the chronology of his life. Since he does not treat her life within the autobiographical overview of his, he can examine and linger on the multiple layers of its particular hell. (The autobiographer seldom has time to layer any phase; this is the main structural difference between it and the memoir.) A story with a limited temporal scope encompasses not less but more material. The author might explore his hopes and delusions; the cracks in his persona; his culture’s attitude toward loss before and after a death; his insecurity with how he remembers what did and didn’t happen; how trauma reconfigures his extended family—any of which may be germane to his telling. Linking experience to one’s persona, one’s culture, one’s ideas, the memoirist uses dramatic narrative and reflective analysis to bridge the details and the expanse of what he’s unleashed. Story alone won’t do it. The memoir’s prime stylistic distinction is a give-and-take between narration and analysis, one that directs the memoirist to both show and tell.
Let’s say you plan to write a memoir about the year you just spent rebuilding homes in New Orleans, post-Katrina. What’s relational? Beyond musing about the stultifying bureaucracy and the force of a natural disaster, you decide to focus on the displaced people you saw every day who want their homes fixed and their city back. You detail their initiative and frustration, their loss and vulnerability. But what of you is important in all this? Is it your homelessness—actual, emotional, symbolic—that has been stirred by their trauma? Put another way, perhaps helping others has led you to reflect on the meaning of displacement, or alienation, in your life, too. It must have something to do with your core self or else you wouldn’t have volunteered, you wouldn’t have felt your passion connected to theirs. Self and world, self and core; all this is relational.
In memoir, how we have lived with ourselves teeter-totters with how we have lived with others—not only people, but cultures, ideas, politics, religions, history, and more. This balancing act of the self in relation to the outer and the inner worlds, against the memoir’s thematic and temporal restrictions, fascinates me. What is it that makes a person become who she is, perhaps has always been? What is it that changes us? How much of the self is innate, how much of it learned? What role does self-delusion play in our identities? What is it that makes us seek the mythic entitlements of American life differently from our neighbors? Most Americans think that the better among us are self-driven like Franklin or self-actualized like Thoreau. Such idolatry props up the greatman fiction, the “I did it my way” myth, a stepwise deterministic view of life that autobiography has engendered and memoir is challenging.
And yet the “I” of the memoir can also be the subject of the work. How do I understand the person I was then in light of the person I am now? This I-then and I-now (the pairing comes from Virginia Woolf) rings in memoir’s paradox. Though much time and many realizations may separate these two I’s, it is nigh impossible to keep the voices of today’s narrator and of yesterday’s narrator apart. They are always in flux, an example of which I will describe shortly. The thinking goes, my story is also his story; the person I am, I was—or I was, I am. Here I am in high school, in 1967, and yet that person is not me now. He is another. Still, don’t I share his traits, whether or not they are readily expressed? The truth is two-sided: I am not exactly him nor am I free of him. It feels natural to see the remembered self as a character who has an independent life, chooses for himself, indulges free will. But memoirists avoid such self-casting. The memoir writer does not situate himself in a recreated world as though he were a literary character. What the memoirist does is connect the past self to—and within—the present writer as the means of getting at the truth of his identity.
Before writing The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr thought she should fictionalize herself: “When I tried to write about my life in a novel, I discovered that I behaved better in fiction than I did in real life. The truth is that I found it easier to lie in a novel, and what I wanted most of all was to tell the truth” (Karr, cited in “The Family Sideshow”). Truth is uppermost in the minds of memoir writers because veracity won’t let them be. So as not to embarrass the living, they may rename people and places; they usually re-create dialogue since there’s no word-for-word record; and they may dramatize an event that differs from the recollections of others who were there. Sometimes memoirists must make life-and-death choices. Azar Nafisi, still fighting the Muslim theocracy in Iran, prefaces her Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by stating that “I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.”
But, even in a post–James Frey world, memoir writers are not fashioning fictionalized autobiographies or autobiographical novels, as one or two critics contend. Most memoirists do not falsify their pasts so as to build a better story.1 The best honestly explore how they recall the past and what of themselves is and isn’t true. Before I go a step further, I want to be clear about memoir and fiction, a confluence I’ll return to often. Memoir is related to fiction because memoir, like fiction, is a narrative art: we narrate past events; always, as we write, memory tells us stories. We must guard against our own narrative gullibility. We must ask ourselves, Did it happen as I remember? Have I misremembered and, if so, how will I know? We may have some means at our disposal to verify the past: letters, journals, family records, others’ recollections. But we must understand that often our memories have erased and altered things before we search out their latest version or a version from someone else. The nature of memory, as any brain doctor will confirm, is to mix imagination and fact. But that is not the same as saying that as memoirists we can riddle our tales with fictional composites and Hollywood endings. Still, in the memoir, the truth and figuring out the truth abide. The best way to deal with the tension between fact and memory, as one uncovers the tension in the course of one’s writing, is to admit to the tension—not to cover it
