Truth or Dare (or both)…

Did I wince when I read Neil Genzlinger on memoir in The New York Times last January? You bet I did. Still, the review was smart, I thought, provocative and well-written. Not surprising, however, a whole lot of writers, also provoked, took exception: Who was this critic to skewer three out of four memoirs?–to judge three of four true stories not worth telling? But, it seemed to me, Genzlinger’s argument wasn’t so much that the content was or was not compelling, as that it was neither served (nor redeemed) by the prose or the point of view. If I wanted to quibble with the critic, and I guess I do, it’s with the title of his piece: “The Problem with Memoirs”: “…what makes a good memoir,” wrote Genzlinger, is not a “regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery.” Yes; right; good; but this is true of fiction and poetry, too, isn’t it?

And yet: Let’s say you read a lack-luster novel—let’s say you have the bad luck to read three in a row; are you going to turn around and knock the whole genre? No way, unless you’re David Shields, and (somewhat facetiously) you’ve already decided that fiction is dead.

So why is it when a critic pans a memoir, or even—as with Lorrie Moore in The New York Review of Books, when she praises one (two, actually, and this was some trick, stay tuned)—that memoir-the-genre takes the rap?

I’ll get to Lorrie Moore in a minute, but first let me posit a theory; let me insist that good writers abound (not-so-good writers, too) in every genre. But regardless of talent and skill, poets and novelists are generally interested in poems-and-stories-plural: They want to write for its own sake. This ought to be true of memoirists as well—I’d like to believe it is true, most of the time. But it can’t be denied that there are people who come to the genre not because they’re devoted to language and literature, but because, in life, they have triumphed or survived in a way that they think is worth waxing on about; they want to testify: they have a single story to tell.

However, this was not true of the authors Genzlinger reviewed at the beginning of this year, and regardless of the success or failure of their books, this is where the critic went wrong. It was as disrespectful to lump their individual efforts together as typical or endemic, as it was unfair to condemn memoirists everywhere, just because, in his estimation, three writers had failed. But at least Neil Genzlinger’s criticism was straightforward. At least it had something to do with the actual demands of the genre. Though I cringed as I read—and second-guessed my own work—I knew where he stood. Lorrie Moore, on the other hand, is more slippery in her essay;
she pretends to be solicitous, pretends to write with admiration about two new books—each penned by a poet (Jill Bialosky and Meghan O’Rourke), each an investigation of grief and loss—then undermines both writers with the assertion that their stories would have made better fiction than non: Each real-life (now dead) subject, she concludes, was shortchanged by the form. Her review, therefore, praise notwithstanding, turns out to be condescending, and, if you ask me, only indicates her misapprehension of the genre. These “engaging subjects,” she argues, are “deserving of the deep imagining, revealing design, and solid construction of heroines in good prose fiction, but real life is messy and sometimes gracelessly crowds out an enduring story…”

No. No, no, no. Or—that is, yes, I agree, “real life is messy” (that is the “enduring story”) and I’m certain, by the way, that fiction is obliged to get at how that’s so. As far as memoir goes, Lorrie Moore is simply off-track. Memoir is not biography or autobiography, real or imaginary. Moreover, memoir is, every time, at least as much about the narrator as it is about her subject. The writer is the subject, in fact—so it’s not her job to fully imagine, construct, or design, but rather to reveal (creatively, yes, this goes to the prose itself)  the mysterious (and messy) truth of her experience (in conjunction with fact-finding, sure) as it informs the way she thinks and feels. Whether or not the ostensible subjects of either of these books might inspire good fiction (absolutely, why not, another project for another day) is entirely beside the point. Furthermore, in the guise of equivocal appreciation, Lorrie Moore has disparaged not just the work of two writers but the form itself, apparently without understanding its singular constraints and rewards.

So it’s true then, coming full circle, that it’s easier to bash the memoirist than the novelist: She can’t hide behind a character; she’s obliged to own not just the story she’s telling, but the way she tells it. All the more reason (back to the Genzlinger piece), regardless of the content—and perhaps contrary to what we writers, readers, agents, publishers, and editors might have thought—for her to tell the story well. And if she does—if she takes care to get it right from the sentence level up—there’s every chance she will surprise herself and her reader, besides. This goes for fiction writers, too, of course. If the writing is strong, call it fiction, and the reader will applaud the writer’s insight and talent. Call it memoir, though, and no matter how skilled, the writer had better be telling the truth; if she isn’t, come to find out her insight isn’t worth a damn. That is, damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t… Hey, nonfiction is hard.

But say, I recently read a gorgeous collection of personal essays coming soon from Coffee House Press: Half in Shade, by Judith Kitchen, who has written and published in all genres. As with many true stories (fiction and non), the book is funny, delightful, whimsical, mysterious, and also sad—and in the course of the narrative, the author asks, rhetorically, of writing nonfiction (of saying, as best she can, what it means to her personally to be human and mortal): “How dare I make something beautiful?” But to make something beautiful is not just our writerly privilege–it’s our responsibility, too. And the question for writers, no matter the genre, has to be, “How dare we not?”

Yours, Mine, and Ours

Here’s my question: Are Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, and David Shields, who wrote the controversially provocative Reality Hunger, actually on the same page? But I couldn’t get Hyde to weigh in about Shields in last week’s Q and A at the Los Angeles Public Library. He said he was ‘familiar’ with Reality Hunger but he didn’t want to talk about it. Hyde, who also wrote The Gift, was at the Central Library downtown for the ALOUD series, in conversation with director Peter Sellars, who described Hyde’s prose with words like deep, thoughtful, delicate, and graceful. Hyde himself was self-deprecating – articulate and funny, but sweetly embarrassed by the attention, it seemed. There was a genuine “aw shucks” aura wafting off the guy, and a bohemian affect I wouldn’t have predicted, dressed as he was in a drapey velvet jacket, whose long wing-like lapels he played with in his lap for most of the program. Sellars, meanwhile, is nothing if not persistent; not that Hyde was withholding exactly – but his ideas as revealed in the book are perhaps not easily encapsulated. So, for instance, Sellars would ask about a specific chapter, and Hyde would demur – “… but that chapter is 40 pages long” – then, Sellars, undeterred, would fine-tune question after question so as to get to the anecdotes he was after. In that way he managed to get Hyde to cover a lot of ground in an hour’s time, about the implications of intellectual copyright; about the importance of public access and discourse; about not just freedom of expression, but what Hyde called ‘freedom of listening’ – that is, our right to hear, absorb, and integrate the ideas of others with our own. In spite of the values on which our country was founded, he argued, we are now determined to sacrifice the greater good to individual gain, having not much to do with protecting integrity or originality of vision, but rather with insuring exclusive commercial reward. “What don’t we have to pay for?” asked Hyde, and he told a story about a Russian artist who’d used Mickey Mouse in one his paintings only to have the Disney corporation make him take it off the gallery wall; as if the artist were claiming he’d invented Mickey – as if he meant to deceive us or to cheat Walt.

Hyde reminded his audience that Bob Dylan wouldn’t be Bob Dylan, if he hadn’t freely borrowed the inflections of other artists in and out of the public domain. He quoted Benjamin Franklin, who said, “I’ve never taken ownership in my ideas; to do so would sour the temper.” Also Goethe, who wrote, “My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.”

And why did I ask about Shields? Because Reality Hunger, a ‘manifesto’ for nonfiction as the wave of the literary future, has created all kinds of tumult in the writing community; not just because it argues that fiction is dead (hogwash), but because it’s a purposeful hodge podge in which Shields uses the work of other writers without quotation marks or attributions; word is, he was forced by his publisher to list his citations, which he did, reluctantly – all the while insisting that he shouldn’t have to – in small-print footnotes at the very end of the book.

Look, it’s one thing to offer a mock-up of Armani for a fraction of the price (see Johanna Blakley’s good talk for TED, “Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture”).

Perfectly acceptable – even a good idea – to imitate and incorporate the stylings of Woody Guthrie, or Martha Graham, or Paul Cezanne – that is to pay homage to the masters by allowing their work to inform ours.

Fine to speak in famous aphorisms, if that’s your wont.

Even a hoot to enter “The Bad Hemingway Contest” if you’re so inclined.

But to pass off somebody else’s poetry – her actual voice – as your own? (Hey, remember Milli Vanilli?) That gets my back up. I’m thinking that’s not ok. And, I admit, I wanted to hear Hyde say so.

But, though he’d earlier remarked that he wasn’t advocating for plagiarism, he wouldn’t play. So what to do with my righteous outrage? Well – at some point in their conversation, Sellars asked Hyde to talk about “the place you write from.” Hyde considered, and then: “Where you get angry,” he said, “ is one of the places where you know who you are.” But he added that, “anger doesn’t have staying power.” Worth quoting, right? And worth keeping in mind.