Wednesday, March 23, 2016

I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Memoir

Did you know? Memoirs are selling like warm blueberry muffins. The reading public snaps them up as quickly as authors can tap-dance their fingertips across the keys of their laptops. While the memoir phenomenon began as a subset of the non-fiction craze that is also going strong, of late, memoir has become an extremely popular market all its own.

The memoir craze was kicked off by none other than Mary Karr herself when she published her first memoir, Liar's Club in 1995. The book spent more than a year on the New York Times Best-Seller List. She then followed that up with two more memoir bestsellers, Cherry and Lit which, also rocked the literary world.

[This is my review of The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, Harper Collins Publishers, 2015, 229 pps.]

While Karr denies that she is the owner of the memoir form, ("No one elected me the boss of memoir…") in fact, due to her starring role in the current craze, there's probably no name more closely associated with this literary form.

For the last thirty years Mary Karr has taught the art of memoir and other creative writing courses at Syracuse University. As a result, there's no author who is better known for memoir and better connected to other authors practicing the craft of memoir, nor any author more influential or knowledgeable of the literary form than Karr herself.

There is certainly no one more qualified to write this book.

By way of criticism, it never occurs to Karr to define the basic difference between autobiography and memoir as two literary forms. No doubt this is because she is so deep into the subject of memoir; however, I think it's worth mentioning.

The difference between an autobiography and a memoir is the time-line covered by a book's narrative. When Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin wrote their autobiographies, they rightly covered their lives, from their births until the years they wrote their autobiographies.

By contrast, memoirs relate the story of a brief interlude or period of time in someone's life. As a result, memoirs are more thematically and stylistically unified than autobiographies. For example, when Bob Dylan wrote Chronicles, Volume One, he only covered his starting-out years when he was living in the West Village and visiting Woody Guthrie who was then living in a nursing home in New Jersey, a very crucial, formative period for him.

After I began reading Karr's book some months ago, I was complaining about it to Rita Juster, a friend, who read the book. I said, "I don't like it so much. It spends too much time on defining the elements of a great memoir, or describing what it's like to be a popular memoirist, or describing why writing memoirs is a noble profession; it doesn't make enough effort to give young writers who wish to begin writing their own memoirs what they need to know to get started."

She answered, "I know exactly what you mean. It gets better at the end."

Rita is correct. If you're a writer who would like to try writing a memoir, I suggest you begin reading The Art of the Memoir with Chapter 10, which is entitled, On Finding the Nature of Your Talent. In this relatively short chapter, Karr opens with the fact that many of her students, in their practice memoirs, reveal themselves to be exactly the opposite of how they actually are in real life. She goes on to list three questions she often asks her students as they diagnose their blind spots:

"1. What do people usually like and dislike about you? …

"2. How you want to be perceived? …

"3. Is there any verbal signpost you can look for that suggests your posturing? … "Any reader could answer these questions…

Karr sums up this chapter by writing, "In short: How are you trying to appear? The author of a lasting memoir manages to power past the initial defenses, digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the more complicate story."

Other chapters that will appeal to novice and intermediate memoir authors include:

Chapter 12. Dealing with Beloveds (By this title she means relatives who will no doubt read your memoirs.)

Chapter 13. On Information, Facts and Data (Memoirs are, after all, nonfiction; thus, information should be checked and facts, as much as possible, verified.)

Chapter 14. Personal Run-ins with Fake Voices (Karr often writes that effective memoirs are about perfecting the voice one writes in, so fake voices are a very real concern for her.)

Chapter 15. On Book Structure and the Order of Information (As I'm sure you can imagine, the information in this chapter is very valuable.)

Chapter 16. The Road to Hell is Paved with Exaggeration. (An analysis of what goes wrong in some memoirs.)

Chapter 17. Blind Spots and False Selves (We all have blind spots that keep us from seeing ourselves objectively. The point is to be able to recognize them.)

Chapter 19. Old-School Technologies for the Stalled Novice (Pen and paper solutions; on changing your writing practices.)

Chapter 21. Why Memoirs Fail (Very helpful.)

Chapter 22. An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread (Make sure you can check off each of these items that can save your memoir from oblivion.)

Chapter 24. Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision (Very helpful.)

In amongst those chapters are some that I believe have limited appeal to a beginning or intermediate memoirist:

Chapter 11 praised Maxine Hong Kingston for her visionary feminist memoir. Chapter 18 described the sad treatment Kathryn Harrison received after her memoir about voluntary incest with her father was published.

Chapter 20 described major reversals Karr herself made while writing Cherry and Lit.

Chapter 23 described and praised Michael Herr's Vietnam memoir.

It's not that these four "personal" chapters are without value; only that they are organized around an author rather than around a topic, so they're different.

As for the books first nine chapters: It's not that they are without value; only that they would be most useful to advanced memoir writers.

Karr's prose throughout is unflaggingly wise and bright, and, at times, unflinching in the face of, at times, very difficult memoir material.

The weakest element in The Art of Memoir: The book's structure, or lack thereof. A tremendous number of subjects are covered, but I don't get the impression any thought was put to creating a singular, unified thematic thrust for the entire work. At points it feels as though one is taking a college course, which I assume is where some of this material had its origin.

The strongest element in The Art of Memoir: Karr's enthusiasm for the literary memoir. You will come away with a long list of wonderful memoirs to read, as well as insights into them that may help you to appreciate this literary form in ways you never have before.