Memoir: An Introduction

MEMOIR

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MEMOIR An Introduction

G. Thomas Couser

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3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2012 by G. Thomas Couser Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir : an introduction / G. Thomas Couser. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-982690-2 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-982692-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Autobiography—Authorship. I. Title. CT25.C695 2011 808′.06692—DC22 2011010846 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction 1. What Memoir Is, and What It Is Not 2. Memoir and Genre 3. Memoir’s Forms 4. Memoir’s Ethics 5. Memoir’s American Roots 6. Contemporary American Memoir 7. The Work of Memoir

Works Cited Index

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3 15 33 54 79 108 140 169

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because I intend this book not for fellow scholars but for general readers and undergraduate students, I did not base it on new research. And as a result, I cite few secondary sources. It was a pleasure and a luxury to work in this uncharacteristic way. Naturally, I drew on my accumulated knowledge of the field, as expressed in my previous books and articles. But that work in turn relies on the work of numerous colleagues in the field. Thus, I owe much to my fellow practitioners. One source stands out because it is so recent and so pertinent: Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History, which offers a useful and timely overview of the development of memoir. I am deeply indebted to two colleagues who graciously read and commented on the book in draft: Paul John Eakin and Susannah Mintz. I also benefited from the response of Margaretta Jolly, a reader for Oxford University Press. Julie Rak generously shared work in progress. An opportunity to speak at the University of Virginia, at the invitation of Alison Booth, helped me clarify and refine my argument. Brendan O’Neill has been a writer’s dream of an editor. And I owe a special debt to Chris Morehouse for advice and assistance with my proposal. Finally, I owe thanks to Barbara Zabel, who enriches my life in all ways, always.

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MEMOIR

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INTRODUCTION

Memoir, memoir, memoir! Doesn’t anyone write autobiography anymore? So it seems. “Memoir” has eclipsed “autobiography” as the term of choice for a certain kind of life narrative. Moreover, and more significantly, memoir now rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency. According to various cultural commentators—critics, scholars, and reviewers—this is an age—if not the age—of memoir. As evidence, consider this statistic, gleaned by Ben Yagoda from Nielsen BookScan: “Total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008” (7). That’s phenomenal growth. Other evidence is less empirical but still significant. • As I write this preface in November of 2010, George W. Bush’s just published memoir, Decision Points, is the subject of reviews and multiple news stories. • Among its fifteen hardcover nonfiction best sellers, the current issue of The New York Times Book Review (November 21, 2010) lists seven memoirs. In order, they are Life, by Keith Richards; Unbearable Lightness, by Portia de Rossi; Me, by Ricky Martin; They Call Me Baba Booey, by Gary Dell’Abate; The Autobiography of Mark Twain, volume 1; Assholes Finish First, by Tucker Max; and Shit My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern. A number of these represent new niche subgenres: de Rossi’s and Martin’s have to do with coming out as gay, de Rossi’s has to do with anorexia, and

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Halpern’s is a memoir of a father. Remarkably, Mark Twain’s is the latest, but not the final, installment of material first published one hundred years ago. With it, he greatly extends the life-span of his life narrative. • Of the current twenty paperback nonfiction bestsellers, eleven can be classified as memoirs. In order, they are Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls; Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson; Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea and My Horizontal Life, both by Chelsea Handler; Dewey, the Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter; Just Kids, by Patti Smith; Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen; I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, by Tucker Max; and Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Some are memoirs of participation in historical events: Mortenson’s books have to do with institution building in Afghanistan. In contrast, Myron’s Dewey revolves around her relationship with the titular “library cat.” But memoirs of pets comprise a new niche narrative that flourishes alongside personal narratives of world-historical events. The memoir craze seems to offer something for everyone; narratives in a range of registers from the sublime to the ridiculous. Finally, of the nine nonfiction books reviewed, three were memoirs: Missing Lucile: Memoirs of the Grandmother I Never Knew, by Suzanne Berne; Why Not Say What Happened? by Ivana Lowell; and Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, by Antonia Fraser.

One difference between memoir and fiction is apparent already: many serious memoirs are one-offs by people who made their reputations in other areas (Richards, Mortenson, and Smith) rather than books by professional writers like Gilbert (the author of other memoirs and novels). Although best-selling memoirs are predominantly by celebrities, especially entertainers, there’s a surprising degree of overlap between best sellers and books reviewed. Of the best sellers listed earlier, those by Richards, Twain, Gilbert, Walls, Mortenson, Smith, and Janzen are taken seriously enough

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to get reviewed in selective media like The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s flagship review. Several of the rest are so-called nobody memoirs—memoirs by hitherto anonymous individuals. Ironically, the publication of such narratives helps to explain the ascendance of the genre: it appears to be open to anybody, i.e., “nobody.” Sometimes, the newcomers even carry off the prizes: though Patti Smith is hardly a nobody, she is not known primarily as a writer, yet her account of her intimate relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2010. In the marketplace for fiction, whether literary or mass-market, authors have always constituted brands: loyal fans can be counted on to buy and read the latest work by Philip Roth, Stephen King, Louise Erdrich, or Jodi Picoult. With memoir, the branding phenomenon is relatively new. Not long ago, memoirs were limited by the implicit rule: one to an author. But that has changed. In today’s market, if a memoir sells well, its author is likely to follow it up with another. Mary Karr and Lauren Slater have published multiple memoirs before reaching middle age. And among those writers listed before, Handler, Mortenson, and Max have more than one book listed at the same time! Meanwhile, other writers may seek to cash in on the success of a particular memoir. Memoir sometimes spreads within families, as if contagious. Frank McCourt’s memoir, Angela’s Ashes (1996), was followed by his brother Malachy’s A Monk Swimming (1998) and their younger brother Alphie’s A Long Stone’s Throw (2008)—as well as Frank’s sequels ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005). Close relationships can also spawn memoirs, as in the case of Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), a memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, who died of lung cancer not long after publishing her memoir of alcoholism, Drinking: A Love Story (1996); and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty (2004), an account of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face (1994). Similarly, memoirs of certain kinds of experience—like miserable childhoods, dysfunctional families, and recovery from substance abuse—constitute subgenres that attract habitual readers. The popularity of the so-called misery memoir seems to be behind a 2003 New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory. A young woman reclining in a dormitory window seat pens a letter to her parents: “Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for

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the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.” Somewhat subtler evidence of memoir’s currency is the way it has percolated into other areas of our culture. When it was revealed that James Frey’s narrative of his recovery from substance abuse, A Million Little Pieces (2008), contained considerable distortions of fact, he was roundly roasted in various media. After he was dressed down on TV by Oprah Winfrey, who had enthusiastically promoted his book, various other commentators, including journalists like Frank Rich and memoirists like Mary Karr, chimed in. Karr’s criticism reflects a significant dynamic of the memoir boom—resentment and resistance by writers who consider themselves literary artists—even, or perhaps especially, when they have made their fame in the same genre. Tellingly, too, literary novelists are beginning to work the upstart genre into their fictions—often to satiric effect. For example, one of the titular characters in Cathleen Schine’s 2010 novel The Weissmans of Westport is a literary agent whose career craters when several of her clients’ memoirs are exposed as hoaxes. Laura Lippman’s 2009 novel Life Sentences addresses memoir writing more fully and more thoughtfully. When her protagonist, Cassandra, approaches childhood friends and acquaintances as sources for her third memoir, she finds that some balk because they resent the way they were depicted in her first two books. Worse, one friend—not a reader—responds with incredulity and scorn to her new project: “I’m writing a book. About all of us.” “What kind of book?” “A memoir, something like my other books—” Cassandra could tell from Fatima’s expression that, unlike Tisha, she had no idea that Cassandra was a writer. “About how we were then and how we are now.” “Who would want to read such a thing?”

To this point, the joke is on Fatima. Unbeknownst to her, Cassandra’s previous memoirs have sold well—better than her novel. But at this point the scene takes an interesting turn:

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Cassandra could see no polite way to point out that thousands of people would like to read what she wrote. As long as it was a memoir, not a novel. (184)

Here we detect the contemporary novelist’s awareness that many publishers and readers favor the novel’s sibling genre, the memoir. Despite her apprehension about the rival genre, Lippman offers quite a sympathetic view of the memoirist’s predicament. Here Cassandra encounters a skeptical reader at a signing of her novel: “Why do you get to write the story?” Cassandra was at a loss for words. “I’m not sure I understand,” she began. “You mean, how do I write a novel about people who aren’t me? Or are you asking how one gets published?” “No, with the other books. Did you get permission to write them?” “Permission to write about my own life?” “But it’s not just your life. It’s your parents, your stepmother, friends. Did you let them read it first?” “No. They knew what I was doing, though. And I fact-checked as much as I could, admitted the fallibility of my memory throughout. In fact that’s a recurring theme in my work.” The woman was clearly unsatisfied with the answer . . . Cassandra would have liked to dismiss her as a philistine . . . But she carried an armful of impressive-looking books . . . The woman was like the bad fairy at a christening. Why do I get to write the story? Because I’m a writer. (4)

On the one hand, Cassandra recognizes that the genre tests the limits of her memory, the faculty that gives the genre its name, and she realizes that her writing does involve others. On the other (trumping) hand, she insists on her right as a writer to tell what is inevitably others’ stories as well as her own. That right, she claims, inheres in her talent and her profession. As it turns out, however, her research leads her to knowledge that is not only potentially harmful to some of the subjects, if published, but that also undermines the premise of her first memoir. She aborts the project

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and returns her advance, renouncing her right to write her story. But she uses her new knowledge to issue an updated edition of the flawed memoir, with an explanatory, revisionist epilogue. Even if the new book is a success, however, it will not be the blockbuster the proposed book might have been. Cassandra has been made to pay a monetary price for her hubris as a memoirist. Feeling somewhat penitential, she resolves to “try fiction again. Why not? She had been writing fiction all along” (335). Lippman steers her protagonist back to the safer, implicitly higher, ground of the novel. Memoir has permeated contemporary culture—other genres and media—to the point of saturation. In Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda said it well: “Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged” (7). And yet, pervasive as memoir has become, it is not well understood by the general public. Unlike fiction, which is taught early and often in American classrooms right through university, memoir is still treated with relative neglect, leaving the impression that it needs no explanation. Hence this book, which is meant to fill a gap by providing readers of memoir (and writers, too) with a comprehensive approach to memoir, illuminating its key aspects. I’ve already hinted at some of the questions raised by the rise of the memoir. Exactly what is memoir? What, if anything, distinguishes it from autobiography and other forms of what we now call life writing? What distinguishes it from the novel, which it resembles in many ways? (The two genres can be thought of as siblings who grew up together, often borrowing each others’ clothes.) What are the precursors and sources of contemporary memoir? What’s new about contemporary memoir and how does it reflect and illuminate the culture at large? What particular ethical issues does it raise? I hope to provide answers to all of these questions and more to enable readers to approach memoir in a more sophisticated way—at once more appreciatively and more critically. The book’s central premise is that memoir, though related closely to the novel, is fundamentally different from it. The chapters explore and draw out the ramifications of this idea. Here’s the plan.

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Chapter 1, “What Memoir Is, And What Memoir Is Not,” sorts out what the slippery term “memoir” means and why it has come to be the preferred term for literary life writing. In addition, it locates memoir within the context of a media constellation that represents the lives of actual human beings: portraiture, both painted and photographic; documentary films and biopics; oral anecdotes and family lore; blogs and electronic diaries; social media like Facebook; the obituary and death notice; the scrapbook, and so on. Unlike the novel, then, memoir is the literary face of a very common and fundamental human activity: the narration of our lives in our own terms. It is rooted in deep human needs, desires, and habitual practices. Nearly everyone engages in some form of this. So while it is not well understood as a literary enterprise, it is found all around us, all the time. While memoir is one among many life-writing genres, it comprises a number of distinct subgenres. So an understanding of what genre is and how it functions is necessary to an appreciation of memoir. Hence chapter 2, “Memoir and Genre.” Memoir may take the form of—among other things—conversion narrative, confession, apology, testimony, and coming-of-age narrative. The distinctions among these are primarily functions of the relation between the narrator and his or her early self. A convert or confessor defines him- or herself in opposition to some earlier self; an apologist (contrary to the intuitive sense of the term) defends an earlier self. (Most memoirs of politicians and public servants— like ex-presidents—are apologies, in the lit-crit sense.) And whether one casts one’s personal history as a conversion, confession, or an apology speaks volumes in and of itself. In any case, categorizing works is not the end of genre analysis but its starting point. The goal is not to classify works but to clarify them. We can’t fully understand what a particular author or story is doing without some sense of the operative conventions, which are a function of its genre. Especially in life writing, then, genre is not about mere literary form; it’s about force—what a narrative’s purpose is, what impact it seeks to have on the world. Memoir shares many narrative techniques and devices with the novel—so much so that sometimes the two are indistinguishable on the basis of internal evidence alone. This should not be surprising, since the

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modern novel emerged as an imitation of life writing. As fiction developed, however, it acquired a larger repertoire of techniques than that available to the memoirist. The imaginative range of fiction is also much greater, precisely because, unlike nonfiction, it can entertain counterfactual scenarios. It is the different relations that fictional and nonfictional narratives have to the world that create these distinctions between their formal repertoires. Chapter 3, “Memoir’s Forms” should help readers better appreciate the way that memoir represents human experience. For example, it explores the difference between “scene” and “summary” and suggests that scene may be more effective in fiction than in memoir. Pushed too far in the direction of “immediacy” of effect, scene may undermine the distinctive work that memoir does. For the novelist, ethical matters are relatively simple and straightforward; it is enough to avoid plagiarism and libel. And doing so is relatively easy. The novel, being entirely imagined, cannot lie, and novelists cannot be accused of deception or misrepresentation within their fictions. If they conceal the identities of any real individuals on whom characters are based, they are immune to charges of libel. Memoir is very different; in memoir, authors necessarily portray others, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceal their identities. This opens up a Pandora’s box. The ethical dangers of memoir stem from the fact that, unlike fiction, it is rooted in the real world and therefore makes certain kinds of truth claims. As a result, memoirists assume two distinct kinds of obligations—one to the historical or biographical record and another to the people they depict. While utter fidelity to factual truth in memoir is not possible— and may not even be desirable—we also need to insist on some degree of veracity. The controversy over Frey’s memoir of his substance abuse and recovery illustrates the risk of detectable inaccuracies. Chapter 4, “Memoir’s Ethics,” then, explains what kinds of scenarios involve the greatest temptations and risks of deception and imposture. The most objectionable kinds of hoaxes are those in which people of privilege pretend to be members of marginalized and oppressed populations—such as Holocaust survivors or indigenous people. Regardless of one’s motives (although they are pertinent), appropriating an ethnic, racial, or religious identity that is not one’s own violates the identity claim basic to memoir as

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a genre. On that ground alone it is unethical. But there is also the problem that false testimony can devalue or displace true testimony. The memoirist, then, has obligations to others. Memoirs that arise out of intimate relationships—between parents and children, between siblings, and between partners—can be particularly dicey. The most complicated relationships are those that involve inherently unequal structures: those between parents and children. Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History provides a comprehensive history of the memoir from its beginnings in antiquity to the present. But it is scant on the backstory of the modern memoir in North America, where the colonial era was characterized by writing in very utilitarian, instrumental genres. Hence chapter 5, “Memoir’s American Roots.” Significantly, much early American literature was what we would call life writing today: letters, diaries, chronicles, and occasional poetry. Even more important are the nonfictional genres that were integral to the colonial enterprise: narratives of exploration and settlement, narratives of Indian captivity, and conversion narrative. What we find in North America may not look like modern memoir, but it did provide the antecedents for various other modern life-writing genres. Similarly, the nineteenth century produced a number of precursors for modern memoirs. For example, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast is a forerunner of contemporary narratives in which a middle-class person deliberately samples working-class life (books like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.) Thoreau’s Walden is more ambitious: it models an exemplary alternative lifestyle. Thoreau is not “slumming,” like Dana and Ehrenreich; he is carrying out an experiment in sustaining life using minimal resources. In doing so, he adapted and updated various earlier genres of life writing, such as the conversion narrative, the Indian captivity narrative, and slave narrative. This chapter also explores monuments or masterpieces of American life writing by Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain (who experimented with pseudonymous autobiography), Henry Adams (who wrote his autobiography in the third person), Henry James (who pioneered the memoir of childhood), and Gertrude Stein (who had the nerve to write her autobiography as that of her partner Alice Toklas). This chapter establishes that literary memoir is not a recent upstart: well before the twentieth century, American literature was rich in

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precedents for much of what has been hailed as valuable in contemporary memoir. This chapter enables contemporary readers to understand where contemporary memoir came from—not only what may be new about it but how it may update prior examples. Chapter 6, “Contemporary American Memoir,” explores the diversity, richness, and innovation of contemporary memoir. One innovation is the nobody memoir. Such memoirs put on record many different kinds of experience—lives not previously narrated. As it happens, a good many nobody memoirs are accounts of what it’s like to live in, or as, some particular body. And that has often meant writing about odd bodies, those with anomalous somatic conditions of some sort—illnesses or disabilities. A few conditions—breast cancer, paralysis, HIV/AIDS, deafness, and autism—have produced very large bodies of literature. Numerous other conditions—some seemingly obscure or rare (Munchausen syndrome by proxy)—have been represented in small numbers of narratives. In the case of some conditions (like autism, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer’s), the production of personal memoir was hitherto thought to be impossible. So contemporary memoir has been a threshold genre in which some previously silent populations have been given voice for the first time. These are historically and culturally significant developments. Another significant cluster of memoirs are narratives of fathers and mothers (especially fathers) by their children. This is a function of the aging of the baby boom generation. As their parents grow old, ill, and die, significant numbers of baby boomers have reflected in print on their upbringing. Some are the children of celebrities ( Joan Crawford, Ronald Reagan), who capitalize on their parents’ fame; others are well-known writers (e.g., Philip Roth, Sue Miller) who take advantage of their fame to put the lives of their parents on record. Some, like Mary Gordon, investigate the lives of parents with deep, dark secrets. Most are attempting to complete unfinished business of one sort or another. The late twentieth century also witnessed the advent of an entirely new kind of life narrative: the graphic memoir. The best, and best known, examples of this are Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Graphic memoirs are drawn rather than (or in addition to) written. This makes them not only new, but postmodern, since they deploy a

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INTRODUCTION

medium considered “low” or popular to treat serious, sometimes tragic, materials (the Holocaust, parental suicide). This chapter also reckons with the “stunt memoir,” or “shtick lit”— the record of a temporary experiment in behavior or lifestyle. Examples are A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, in which she recounts posing as a man for a year. Some grow, opportunistically, out of blogs. But others, like No Impact Man, call into question the basis on which the authors and others conduct their lives; they have transformative potential. Finally, there is the postmodernist memoir, such as Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Oddly, but perhaps significantly, there are few such memoirs, probably because one feature of postmodernism—the open acknowledgment of the artifice of the text—is inconsistent with the nature of memoir. Chapter 7, “The Work of Memoir,” explores why we read memoir differently from fiction. Granted, fiction and memoir can look very much alike: one cannot always determine whether a given narrative is a novel or a memoir by examining the text itself. But we invest in them very differently. Rightly so. Once we have determined that a narrative is a memoir rather than a novel—usually on the basis of extra-textual cues—our response toggles to a different mode. So while memoirs, like novels, traffic in character, plot, conflict, and suspense, we tend not to respond to these elements in the same way. The reason is that novels and memoirs have different statuses. In one way, characters in memoir are of course authorial creations; we know them only as effects of words on the page. But at the same time, they are representations of real people, who are vulnerable to harm. With memoir, too, we become interested in how character is formed by real events—or at least how the narrator understands that process: how one I (the protagonist) becomes another (the narrator). Because the essence of memoir is to make identity claims, we rightly focus on the nature of the identities in question. So this chapter deals directly with the recognition that, while the memoir and the novel may mirror each other in form, in force they may be quite different. Memoirs take on the world more directly than novels,

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and this has consequences. Genres of life writing are sometimes defined by what they do—the work of memoir. This is truest of the utilitarian or instrumental genres, like slave narrative, which are also the least literary. But even in memoir proper, we distinguish some subgenres, such as confession and apologia, in terms of the stance they assume toward previous acts and their readers. Confession and apologia, in different ways, are exercises in self-rehabilitation. Such work is not only distinctive of memoir (as opposed to the novel), it requires the participation of the reader. So memoir is a particularly interactive medium. Among the things memoir can do that fiction cannot is to immortalize—or at least memorialize—actual people. Seeking to immortalize oneself is not necessarily a noble motive; hence the redundancy of the celebrity memoir. (And biography usually reinforces, rather than confers, immortality because its subjects are typically already famous.) But conferring a kind of immortality on a partner, parent, child, or friend in memoir can be an act of real generosity. Conversely, of course, in certain circumstances—like a history of child abuse—memoirs can accuse and condemn. This too is significant work. The chapter concludes with the idea that, at its best, life writing does not register preexisting selfhood, but rather somehow creates it. This inverts the intuitive idea that one lives one’s life, then simply writes it down. Instead, in writing one’s life one may bring a new self into being. If this is true, then in reading life narrative, we witness self-invention.

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[1] WHAT MEMOIR IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT

Saying what memoir is would seem to be the obvious place to begin this book, but that’s not as easy as it might seem. For one thing, the term is used in significantly different ways in different contexts. For another, it has an inherent ambiguity at its core. More about that later. It may be more helpful to begin by saying what memoir is not. Memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels. As a nonfiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not imagined, individuals. Granted, in the West, memoir developed in tandem with the novel; in English, at least, the two genres have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for some two hundred years. And they remain intertwined. Today, memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques. Indeed, they are themselves a form of literary art, and their artifactuality—the sometimes uneasy relation between their artfulness and their presumed factuality—sometimes gets their authors into trouble. Conversely, realistic novels often take the form of memoirs. In practice, it’s not always easy to tell whether a particular narrative is one or the other; there is no bright line between them. And of course, sometimes fiction masquerades as—pretends to be—nonfiction. Loosely speaking, both the novel and the memoir are “mimetic.” That is, they imitate life in the sense that art is said to imitate nature. Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: memoir presents itself, and is therefore read, as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike reality. And that makes all the difference. 15

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Memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content (what it can be about), it also limits its narrative techniques (how the content can be presented), as we’ll see in the next chapter. This special relation to the real affects what memoir can do, too, not just what it is. In short, this distinction is fundamental both for how memoir works (the craft of it) and for the work it does—its impact on the world. For all the publicity and readership that memoir has gained during the memoir boom, the fundamental difference between the memoir and the novel is not widely nor well understood. At least, that is the impression I get from many of my students. Increasingly, they arrive in my classes having some prior acquaintance with memoir. They may have read a best seller like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for pleasure, or they may have been assigned a book like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior in high school. Nevertheless, a surprising number of them will refer to such texts as novels. They do so with such persistence that I cannot be sure whether they misunderstand the term novel to refer to any long prose narrative, fictional or not, or whether they don’t grasp the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I think the former, but the uncertainty is troubling. It doesn’t help that graphic novel has come to be the accepted term for any narrative, fictional or not, that is drawn in the manner of a comic book. To my dismay, even the Modern Language Association has adopted this misleading usage for the title of a volume of essays on Teaching the Graphic Novel. Several of the narratives in question—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis—are better thought of as graphic memoirs, because they concern real people and historical events. Classes in creative nonfiction may also blur the distinction between memoir and novel: at some point the creative impulse may compromise, or even negate, a narrative’s nonfiction status. But, as was demonstrated by the great success, followed by the harsh exposure, in 2005, of James Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, this distinction is not an academic one. Ignoring it can have significant consequences in the real world. Frey’s book tells the story of his substance abuse and his recovery; the book’s sales took off after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it. But its meteoric success attracted scrutiny, and the online investigative journalism Web site The Smoking Gun uncovered some serious distortions of fact. Among

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Frey’s many “embellishments” of his story of life on and off drugs was his inflation of a few hours in the clink into a period of three months—hardly a rounding error! More egregious was his claim that a girl from his town who died in a tragic train accident was his only high school friend. In fact, she was three years older than he, and her parents deny they had a close relationship. Oprah stood by Frey initially, but many of her fans did not, and eventually she withdrew her endorsement. Not only that, she had Frey on her show and berated him and his editor (Nan Talese) for knowingly misleading the public. It was revealed that Frey had shopped his manuscript around as a novel without success, only to land a lucrative contract when he relabeled it a memoir. Furthermore, the manuscript was subjected to little, if any, fact-checking in press. No wonder a minor scandal erupted, with many journalists, pundits, and professional writers expressing outrage. In the immediate aftermath, Frey lost a literary agent and a contract for additional books. The Frey episode illustrates two important things about memoir today. First, the fact that Frey got a publishing contract only when he presented his story as memoir illustrates the genre’s current value as literary property. Publishers are much more willing to invest in certain kinds of stories if they are presented as fact rather than as fiction. At the same time, the outcry over Frey’s “embellishments” demonstrates that readers read memoirs differently than they read novels. Because the memoir is not supposed to require fiction’s willing suspension of disbelief, readers invest in it differently. First, they buy the book, then they buy into the story. (In fact, on the basis of promotional materials, they may buy into the story before buying the book.) And when they learn that an author has taken license with his supposedly nonfictional prose, they are likely to feel betrayed—as Frey and Winfrey learned to their consternation. Writers, agents, editors, and publishers ignore this elemental distinction between memoir and the novel at their peril. They risk their reputations. (I’ll have more to say about this in chapter 4 on ethics.) When we try to say what memoir is, rather than what it is not, we come up against the unfortunate fact that the term has distinct, seemingly inconsistent, senses. Sometimes it is used to refer to any account of the

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author’s life, as if it is synonymous and interchangeable with autobiography. Much of the time, that works fine. But autobiography and memoir can also be used to refer to subtly different kinds of self-life writing. In that case, memoir becomes in effect a subgenre of autobiography, a particular way of writing one’s life. And that’s not all. Memoir can also be used to refer to a narrative that is primarily about someone other than the author; used this way, the term refers to a subgenre of biography, as distinct from autobiography. The reasons for this ambiguity are complex. Julie Rak’s genealogy of the term in her article “Are Memoirs Autobiography?” highlights the radical instability of the term as used by writers and publishers, critics and scholars. She points out that it has been used to refer both to first- and to third-person narrative; to private and public, unofficial and official, life writing. Moreover, in English, the term can be both singular and plural, and in French it has been both masculine and feminine: memoir a transgendered genre that is indeterminate in number! But although the term has been used by writers and publishers to describe (and to title) very different kinds of life writing over the last couple of centuries, it has generally been used by critics to characterize a kind of life writing they consider inferior to what they call autobiography. (The basis for the attribution of inferiority has changed over time; hence the term’s inconstancy.) Until quite recently, then, “memoir” was minor and “autobiography” major; “memoir” subliterary and “autobiography” literary; “memoir” shallow and “autobiography” deep; “memoir” marginal and “autobiography” canonical. The distinction has been invidious—more a matter of value than of kind. But the terms have recently been revalued. The reasons for this are far from clear. What is clear is that writers and publishers have outflanked and co-opted critics on this matter. So today, ironically, memoir is the term of art, the prestige term. We have not experienced an autobiography boom, but a memoir boom. No one writes autobiography any more. At least, no one reads it. In practice, the term’s ambiguity is less troublesome than it might be because context often clarifies its reference. For example, when the term is plural, it generally refers to a work primarily about the author. And when the plural term is coupled with a possessive pronoun—“my memoirs”— the book in question is almost certain to focus on the author.

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Also, when it is used in subtitles, the title usually identifies the text as either about the author (e.g., James Michener’s The World Is My Home: A Memoir) or about someone else (e.g., Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir). Or the term may be linked via a preposition to a noun that classifies the narrative as about the author (e.g., Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness) or about someone else (e.g., Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father). When the linked noun refers to a thing (such as a job, a discrete period of the author’s life, or a disease or disability) the narrative is about the writer; when it refers to a second party, of course, it is about another person. It may help, too, to remember that the term derives from the French word for memory. This may serve as a mnemonic for understanding memoir as a variety of autobiography; calling a narrative about yourself a memoir usually signals that it is based primarily on memory, a notoriously unreliable and highly selective faculty. In turn, this creates the expectation that the narrative may be impressionistic and subjective rather than authoritatively fact based. At the same time, the root of the term may also help to delineate memoir as a subgenre of biography: whereas biography can be about anyone who has ever existed, memoir can only concern someone known to, and remembered by, the author. And being based on memory rather than research, a memoir will necessarily be very different from a formal biography. It will be, or resemble, a reminiscence, consisting of personal recollections. Some of the term’s ambiguity stems from the fact that practice precedes nomenclature. This is the case with most generic terms, which are typically invented after the fact to categorize existing (and evolving) modes of writing. Generic terminology always plays catch-up. And it is therefore always imprecise. Moreover, it should be used not to classify but to clarify individual narratives—not to determine definitively what they are (they may be more than one thing at a time!) but to come to terms with what they are trying to do, to understand how they work and how they seek to affect the world. Let me suggest two distinct, complementary ways of conceptualizing the range of written narratives that are referred to as memoir. The first is

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to think of them as situated on a continuum. At one end of the continuum are those that focus on their authors, at the other, those that focus on someone else. As indicated before, narratives at both extremes of the continuum may be called memoir, even though the former are variants of autobiography and the latter of biography. The point of thinking of them as arranged on a continuum is that, although there is an important conceptual distinction between writing about yourself and writing about another person, memoirs do not always do just one or the other. Indeed, in practice, it is difficult to do one without doing the other. Even a biography of someone the author never met has an autobiographical dimension—because the choice of a subject and the author’s attitude toward him or her always reveal something important about the biographer. So, too, autobiography is also always somewhat biographical because we are formed as individuals in and by relationships, and we exist within social networks. In life, and therefore in life writing, we are always characters in others’ narratives, and our own narratives always involve other people. Just as no person is an island, no autobiography is a oneperson show. The term relational is now used to refer to narrative that arises from, and is primarily concerned with, an intimate relationship. The most common such relationships are those between siblings, between partners, and between parents and children. Such writing may be hard to categorize according to the rubrics offered earlier precisely because it is located in the middle of the continuum. This should not surprise us, or dismay us; again, terminology follows practice. Furthermore, categorization is not an end in itself but a means to understanding what one is reading in the interest of responding appropriately. Because most early parenting is done by women, defining oneself in terms of relatedness to another may be more typical of females, who form their identities initially in relation to a parent of the same sex. Defining oneself in distinction to others may be more typical of males, who form their identities initially in relation to a parent of the opposite sex. Not surprisingly, then, it was feminist critics who first drew attention to relationality as a characteristic of life writing. They located it, or emphasized its presence, primarily in women’s life writing. Increasingly, however, relationality has been recognized in much life writing by men, as well.

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In any case, relational narratives are more common, popular, and esteemed today than previously. Narratives by parents of children facing special problems—such as disease, disability, or substance abuse—have proliferated. Thus, some of the first AIDS memoirs were by grieving parents of gay sons. And today, narratives by parents of children with autism make up a large body of literature. From the other end of the parent-child relation, narratives of parents by their grown children are increasingly common. A rapidly expanding subgenre comprises adult children’s stories of parents with Alzheimer’s. Narratives by romantic or sexual partners are less common, at least while the relationships are intact. Often, however, a breakup, particularly a public one, generates a memoir, as in the case of Dina Matos McGreevey’s Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (2007). Her husband, James McGreevey, the governor of New Jersey, resigned his office after acknowledging an affair with a male member of his administration. These examples demonstrate how memoir registers historical events like the AIDS epidemic and how it is shaped by demographic factors like the graying of the American population and the frequency of divorce. Rather than thinking about memoirs as being variants of either autobiography or biography—as if these were totally distinct—we may think of them as situated on a continuum from those focused on the author to those focused on an other. Texts found near the middle of this continuum may take as their subject neither the author nor some proximate other person but rather the relationship between them. Of course, narratives may also alternate their focus between the author and the other. Thus in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, part of the text concerns events in the present, when Art prompts his reluctant father to recount how he survived the Holocaust. Part of it presents his father’s life story, centering on his family’s predicament during the Holocaust, as passed on to his son. Here the term’s root meaning, memory, does double duty; it refers both to Art’s memories and to his father’s. Much of the book is about events that Art never witnessed and therefore cannot recall; that is what gives the book, and others like it, its urgency. If the events are not recounted, they may be forgotten; memoir serves to archive them for subsequent generations. Thus, memoir can be a repository for witnesses’ accounts of historical events in a way that fiction, for all of its range and power, cannot. The two genres do not compete; they function differently.

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A second way of conceptualizing self-life writing may also cut through some of the confusion attached to the term memoir. Think of it this way. In theory, one could attempt to represent one’s entire life in writing. But in practice, obviously, this can’t be done. Life is long (hopefully); life writing, short. Life is multidimensional and complex, sometimes chaotic; life writing must have focus and form. Life inevitably far exceeds the capacity of writing to contain it. Laurence Sterne’s comic eighteenth-century novel, Tristram Shandy, which purports to be its eponymous narrator’s autobiography, has endless fun with the notion that life always outruns narrative. As the narrative “proceeds,” it falls farther and farther behind in its attempt to render its narrator’s life. (The narrator’s birth is reached only in the third of nine “volumes.”) Getting all of one’s life into writing is not only impossible, the attempt to do so may be self-defeating. The more one devotes oneself to writing one’s life, the less one may live it; life writing might become one’s life. At some point, the narrator would be reduced to representing himself in the act of representing himself. And while life writing is an integral part of living—and as worthy of examination as any other part—the depiction of the process is generally not included in the narratives themselves. We can take advantage of this dilemma, however, to classify self-life writing in terms of how much of a life a narrative attempts to represent: the whole life or merely part of it. Traditionally, then, critics have distinguished between full-life narratives and single-experience narratives, based on their chronological scope. Some self-life writers, like Benjamin Franklin, attempt to narrate their entire lives from birth to the time of composition. But the actual composition of Franklin’s narrative reinforces Sterne’s lesson about the impossibility of completing an autobiography. Writing at four separate junctures over his life span—1771, 1784, 1788, and 1789–90— Franklin managed to bring his narrative only up to 1758, not even close to the major historical events with which he is associated. This is not surprising: his life was not only very long (1706–1790) but also very eventful, he was a man of myriad interests and talents, and he was too busy living his life to finish writing it. Franklin’s narrative also reflects the fact that terminology lags behind authorial practice. Most readers today know it as his Autobiography, but

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Franklin referred to it as his memoirs: the term autobiography wasn’t invented until around 1800, after his death. As it happened, the term was coined to refer to exactly the sort of narrative he produced: one that attempts to represent a life in its chronological entirety. And the term makes sense: we can think of autobiography as self-life writing that attempts to do for the author what a biographer would do: write the whole life. This was the case with Franklin. He acknowledged as much by including between the first two installments of his narrative a letter from his friend Benjamin Vaughan, who pointed out, “Your history is so remarkable, that if you do not give it, somebody else will certainly give it; and perhaps so as nearly to do as much harm, as your own management of the thing might do good.” Franklin may have written the first autobiography intended as preemptive self-biography. In contrast, much self-life writing focuses only on a discrete part of the life. Many historically significant life-writing genres fall into the singleexperience category—in the United States, narratives of conversion, of Indian captivity, of enslavement, for starters. Usually they are identified as subgenres by the specific names just given. When contemporary writers devote narratives to particular periods or events of their lives, it is better to think of them as memoirs than as autobiographies. So autobiography is more comprehensive, memoir more limited, in scope. This distinction in linear scope can be adapted to the narrative’s breadth of scope, as well. Our lives have many dimensions: personal, familial, social, and professional; spiritual or religious; physical and intellectual; romantic and sexual; and so on. Self-life writing may focus on a single dimension of one’s life, or it may offer a more rounded, multidimensional account. The rise of the term memoir has in part to do with the contemporary trend away from comprehensive scope toward narrower focus—either in time span or in “thickness.” Narratives of addiction and recovery, of illness and disability, and of erotic life—these are all single-dimension life writing and more properly called memoir than autobiography. I hope that the preceding will not only clarify the way in which the terms memoir and autobiography are used but also provide a sense of some basic distinctions among kinds of life narratives—which would exist regardless of what we call them. To review, memoirs are not novels. Rather, they are nonfictional life narratives. They may focus either on the author,

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on someone else, or on the relation between them. They may try to narrate an entire life course or merely one of its temporal chapters, and they may attempt to include more or fewer of the dimensions of the author’s life. Autobiographies are generally more comprehensive—in chronology and otherwise; memoirs are generally more focused and selective. To appreciate memoir today, however, we need to see it in a broader perspective: first, as one among a number of kinds of written accounts of actual people’s lives; second, as related to representation in media other than writing. We can understand memoir fully only if we see it as merely one of a large and ever expanding set of practices people employ to represent actual lives, their own and others’. Academics refer to these practices collectively as life writing. My experience suggests that this term is not well understood outside of scholarly circles. When I meet strangers and they ask what I do, I usually admit that I’m an English professor. If they then ask what my specialty is and I say “life writing,” I am usually met with blank stares. To be fair, however, the term is not always recognized even within the academic world. A colleague of mine once took me to task when I used it in conversation: “We already have a term for that, don’t we? It’s biography!” This reflected his training as a classicist: the English word was coined from the Greek roots for life and writing. But I had to inform him that life writing is not synonymous with biography. For better or for worse, life writing has become the umbrella term used to refer to all nonfictional representation of identity. Thus, all biography is life writing, but not all life writing is biography. As we’ll see, the new term has come into use because scholars who were once concerned mainly with literary life writing have greatly broadened their scope of interest. This has meant paying attention both to existing but overlooked genres and also to emerging ones. Like memoir, the term life writing can be confusing. One problem is that it is meant, counterintuitively, to refer to ways of representing lives that do not always take written form—at least not exclusively. Thus, the umbrella term is meant to cover graphic memoirs, which rely on drawing as well as on writing. For this reason, I prefer the term life narrative. But some of the forms of representation, like portraiture, are not even narrative, properly speaking; that is, they represent identity without the recourse to stories!

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The term also covers accounts that are oral, rather than written. The inclusion of the oral means that “life writing” may be produced in literate cultures by individuals who are not literate, or by literate people who choose to tell, rather than write, their stories. Similarly, it may be produced by members of oral cultures. So life writing is not just writing of a particular kind; rather, it is a fundamental human activity that does not depend on the invention and deployment of the technology of writing. The advent of writing, however, makes it possible to preserve and disseminate it. Of course, unless oral narratives are somehow preserved—passed down, written down by others, or recorded electronically—the extension of the term life writing to include them does not actually expand the database, so to speak. But it is important as a way of acknowledging that, even when it does not take written form, life narrative is essential to—built into—the formation of individual identity and human relationships. In one form or another, life narrative seems to be essential to human life. It isn’t merely a way of recording it after it “happens.” Rather, life narrative is an important, perhaps essential, part of the way we live our lives. Indeed, contemporary scholars see life narrative, broadly understood, as a means by which selves are constituted in the first place. That is, they see life writing not just as something that literate, mature, self-reflective individuals engage in retrospectively, but rather a means by which nearly all people develop their identities and personalities very early in life. This means that life narrative does not just issue from preexisting and integrated selves; rather, it helps to develop and define them. One prominent scholar, Paul John Eakin, has devoted much of his career to exploring this key aspect of life narrative: its role in the development of the self, and thus the rootedness of memoir in ordinary human endeavors. (See especially How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, 1999.) The encouragement to consider oneself a distinct individual with an ongoing, unique, meaningful life story may not be universal in human experience. (Few things are truly universal.) Presumably it emerged as communal life developed, but we should not assume that even today it is equally present in all cultures on the face of the planet. No doubt this phenomenon is culture-bound, varying with world views and factors like economic development, the presence of social and political hierarchy, and the place of the individual in any such structures.

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But in societies like those of Europe and North America, where—to choose a single illustrative cultural datum—individuals’ birthdays are recorded, remembered, and annually celebrated, we find abundant support for the cultivation of one’s self-story. Indeed, in addition to frequently producing oral mini-narratives—anecdotes and the like—individuals in such cultures maintain ongoing internal narratives of their lives. This activity is a good part of what it means to be a person, to have a life. Herein lies a key to the significance of memoir. Among genres or art forms, memoir is perhaps uniquely embedded in widely shared human practices and fundamental cultural assumptions. Even in the age of the memoir, relatively few people actually write their life stories, but in our culture nearly everyone is considered to have a story, and nearly everyone tells personal stories—lots of them. Think of all the anecdotes you have told and heard over the course of your life: you’ve been producing and consuming life narrative since well before you entered school! So unlike most literary or artistic genres, memoir is a particular, highly developed form of a very broad-based human activity: the narration of our real lives. This means that it is, or has the potential to be, by far the most inclusive and democratic of genres. It is so because, again, its roots are not literary. Memoir’s sources, then, are in the ways in which ordinary people represent their lives: in spontaneous, unique oral narratives; in anecdotes that are not only told but retold as signature stories; in personal stories that may be passed down as family or institutional lore, and so on. The point here is not to elevate memoir as a genre (above its sibling genre, the novel) nor to disparage it as non- or sub-literary, but merely to point out what seems a defining and significant distinction. Precisely because it does not have to take written form, life narrative is deeply rooted in daily life; therein lies a source of its vitality and significance when it does take written form, as in the contemporary memoir. To put it slightly differently, memoir has unique democratic potential because, being rooted in these everyday practices, it is more available to amateurs than other genres. Unlike the novel, in literate cultures memoir is a version of something many people produce as part of their daily lives. Few of us write fiction—I have not written a single imaginative story since I was in primary school—but nearly all of us “do” life writing regularly. In addition to the oral forms mentioned earlier, ordinary people

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write their lives in various utilitarian genres—the assigned personal essay (beginning with “what I did last summer”); the college application essay; the résumé and the job application letter; and the terse personal ad, for starters. Simultaneously, we have our lives written for us by others: by our peers, in school yearbooks; by our teachers, in narrative evaluations; by our physicians, in medical records; by our employers, in personnel records; last, but by no means least, by those who write our memorials, death notices, or obituaries. Like it or not, we are the subjects of dossiers not of our own making. Life narrative, then, comprehends all sorts of records of our lives. Most of these are utilitarian and instrumental; they serve practical, rather than expressive or aesthetic, purposes. Many of them are not in our control. (And this makes self-representation all the more appealing to many.) Memoir has lots of other relatives in the extended family of life writing, as well. The term has been retroactively applied to old modes of visual representation, like portraiture, whether painted, sculpted, or photographic. And it also comprehends modes of representation made possible by new technologies, like the Internet, which hosts YouTube, social media like Facebook, and the blog. (Not all blogs are life writing, some are amateur journalism. But most are online diaries, which, unlike written ones, are available to a very large public.) Among visual forms the earliest is the portrait, whose antiquity testifies to the enduring human impulse to create lasting images that capture distinctive personal qualities. In ancient times, of course, portraiture was limited to prominent people: in Greece, philosophers like Socrates; in Rome, emperors. During the Renaissance, it was used to immortalize patrons of the arts, the bourgeoisie, and, of course, artists themselves, such as Rembrandt. In the nineteenth century, the invention of photography helped make portraiture much more widely accessible, making painted or sculpted portraiture once again a sign of elite status. In the twentieth century, the development of ever more compact and inexpensive cameras led to the further proliferation of visual images of ordinary people and the generation of relatively spontaneous and informal images (snapshots), whose subjects may not always even be aware of the photographer. As photography became less expensive, photographs began to be used as illustrations in life narratives—whether autobiographical or biographical.

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(Indeed, the inclusion of photographic illustration is one indication that a narrative is nonfiction.) Today, the Internet encourages the wide dissemination of such images—a very mixed blessing. Similarly, audio and video recordings, first reserved for the newsworthy, are now available to virtually everyone. Introduced in the 1920s, home movies have become more and more common as their cost has diminished. Today we find ourselves immersed in new technologies for recording our lives and “publishing” the results; indeed, we are awash in the products of these new technologies. Camcorders have become so compact that it is possible to wear an ear-mounted device (a “Looxcie”) all day and narrowcast (tweet) selected moments of one’s life in real time. In any case, some people spend inordinate amounts of time producing, arranging, disseminating, and consuming images of their own lives and those of friends and family. (Facebook prompts members to update their sites to stay in circulation.) There is a social cost to this, of course; the more we produce images of our own lives, the more we expect others to consume and respond to them, and the more they expect us to reciprocate. Life narrative multiplies in frequency and popularity, but the time to consume it (also known as life) does not. When we consider the motion picture, still other genres emerge. At one end of a continuum is the home movie, made more or less spontaneously on a very low budget and with low production values, exclusively for private consumption—at least, initially. If preserved, such footage is later available for inclusion in documentary films intended for public consumption. Many such films combine vintage footage with new footage—ideally made with the subjects’ knowledge and informed consent (which may not be true of the original footage). And the production of such relatively inexpensive films has become a cottage industry today. An example is Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), which he constructed at virtually no cost out of hundreds of hours of Super 8 footage, VHS videotape, photos and recordings. Such documentary films also come under the umbrella of life narrative. Indeed, many documentaries today are in effect cinematic memoirs. At the other end of this continuum from the cheap and spontaneous we find biographical feature films—biopics, for short. These are expensive to make, not only because of high production values but because, rather than being filmed in person, the subject is usually impersonated by

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a professional actor—preferably one with box office appeal. Cinematic main attractions are still overwhelmingly fictional rather than nonfictional, but a good many feature films today are either documentaries or biopics—which is to say, they are forms of life writing. (The distinction between documentary and biopic is parallel to that between memoir and biography: documentary and memoir both require direct access to the subject, but biography and biopic do not.) These days a biopic is often available at a multiplex. At the time of this writing, for example, biopics had recently been devoted to subjects as various as Queen Elizabeth II (The Queen), Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose), and Edie Sedgwick (Factory Girl), Howard Hughes (The Aviator), Ray Charles (Ray), Johnny Cash (Walk the Line), Truman Capote (Capote and Infamous), Amelia Earhart (Amelia), Temple Grandin (Temple Grandin), and England’s King George VI (The King’s Speech). Moreover, such films are often nominated for awards, especially for the actors—as if impersonation is the acme of acting. Indeed, Colin Firth won several awards for his role as King George, including the Oscar for best actor in 2011. But biopics sometimes focus on people who did not achieve great fame. The 2010 film The Fighter focuses on a boxer, Mickey Ward, who would have remained relatively obscure had he and his half brother, Dicky Eklund, not been the subject of this highly successful movie, which starred Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale as the brothers. (In an interesting twist, within the biopic, documentary filmmakers are shown trailing Dicky around his hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts. He maintains that the film is about his making a comeback; in reality, it’s about his addiction to crack cocaine. And when he recognizes this upon seeing the film, in prison, he attempts to turn his life around.) Also noteworthy here is the Biography Channel, a cable television channel dedicated to life narrative. In addition, much of the Discovery Health Channel’s programming consists of documentaries that qualify as life narratives. Broadcast television also has programming—notably talk shows—that trades in personal narratives. One could also include much reality TV programming, with the significant caveat that although people play themselves, the scenarios are scripted and often highly artificial. Life writing can also take dramatic form on the stage. In recent years, one-person shows have been devoted to famous personalities

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like Thurgood Marshall (Thurgood), Golda Meir (Golda’s Balcony), and Truman Capote (Tru). Insofar as the characters are impersonated by professional actors, these are the dramatic equivalent of the biopic. We can call them bioplays. But the stage has also welcomed autobiographical monologists. Until his suicide in 2004, Spalding Gray made a career of performing personal narratives, such as Swimming to Cambodia and the inevitable Gray’s Anatomy. Anna Deveare Smith has done a number of shows in each of which she impersonates a large number of diverse people associated with a particular event or issue. Such productions are far less expensive than full-blown dramas, but generally play in smaller venues. It is probably not possible—and it may not be desirable—to give a complete catalog of the forms of representation comprising life narrative. But to round out the larger category in which memoir is situated, I should mention some of the more obvious ones. Certainly, the diary and the journal, private forms of life writing, are important. Because they are usually not intended for publication, and because they have been associated more with women than with men, diaries have not always been respected as literature. The obvious exceptions are diaries kept by men, especially by men with access to power and/or a vantage on important historical events, like Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), member of Parliament and eyewitness to the Great Fire of London of 1666. But even Pepys’s diary was not published until the nineteenth century. For my generation (baby boomers), Anne Frank almost singlehandedly (her father edited her text) vaulted the diary into prominence as a life-writing genre with literary and historical value. It helped, too, to establish the audience for later Holocaust testimony. Her diary also illustrates another important twentieth-century phenomenon: the adaptation of self-life writing into other genres, in this case, both drama and film. I’ve mentioned the obituary in passing already, but I want to refer to it again here because it illustrates the ubiquity of life writing. Most adults read large numbers of obituaries—in local and national newspapers, in alumni magazines—without thinking of the obit as a genre of life writing. A distinction between the obituary and the death notice is salient. Obituaries proper are news stories, written by professional journalists and published for the historical record. In contrast, the death notice—in

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the United States, at least—is a personal document, written by family or friends and published for a fee. The obituary is an early, brief biography; its subjects are public figures—whether famous or infamous—and the accounts are supposed to be objective and authoritative. In contrast, the death notice is a form of memoir: it makes no pretense of objectivity. And its subject need not be well known. Like these memorial testaments, other forms are occasional, created for a specific event. As my fortieth college class reunion approached, my classmates were all asked to produce brief autobiographical sketches for the reunion book, and a large number complied. This is another casual way in which we write our lives—here for a familiar audience at a milestone in our lives. Such books represent a rather unusual subgenre of life writing, the prosopography. Prosopography is the term for accounts of people who share important characteristics. A reunion book is not a classic example of it, in part because the entries are self-authored. A better example of prosopography is Jeffrey Zaslow’s The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-year Friendship (2009), which traces the lives of eleven childhood friends from Ames, Iowa. Initially a written genre, prosopography can also take visual form. And a good many documentaries are, in effect, just that: studies of a group of individuals coping with the same circumstance, such as a disease or disability, a natural catastrophe, or a historical crisis. A noteworthy contemporary example is Restrepo (2010), in which Sebastian Junger, an American journalist, and Tim Hetherington, a British photojournalist, recorded a U.S. Army platoon’s fourteen-month deployment in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. One of my favorite documentary films is a prosopography: the British series Seven Up. This project began in the early 1960s as a set of filmed interviews of a dozen seven-year-old British children, male and female, from quite different backgrounds (read: social classes). The filmmakers reinterviewed them every seven years. (The latest installment, 49 Up, released in 2005, takes them into middle age.) The film is unique in my experience in giving such a rich and sustained account of a particular set of individuals as they negotiate their way through a considerable span of their lives. One of the most humble of life-writing genres may be the scrapbook. It is so humble that I never thought of it as a genre—until one of my cousins showed up at a family reunion with a multivolume bound edition of a scrapbook documenting his life from early childhood to retirement age. It

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had been initiated by his doting mother, then carried on by him. It was not narrowly autobiographical; he titled it his “life and times,” and he included news clippings to put his life in context. What’s different and interesting about life-writing genres, as distinct from many literary and artistic genres, is how they emerge from personal and institutional practices that are initially private or instrumental. Confession is a devotional practice—indeed, a sacrament—in some branches of Christianity. (With quite different dynamics, confessions are also found, of course, in legal contexts.) Similarly, some churches require conversion narratives of candidates for membership. Both genres are still produced in their original contexts, where they begin and end. But both practices have also morphed into more secular forms; the contemporary tale of addiction and recovery, for example, partakes of both. To revert to my earlier comment about introducing myself to strangers, if I respond to questions about my specialty by saying “I teach memoir,” I am often understood to be a teacher of creative writing rather than a teacher of literature. Why? I think because the genre is so new that, while members of the general public may read memoir and realize that it has its creative aspects, they do not necessarily think of it as deserving of being taught as “literature.” They may think that it isn’t old enough, or literary enough, to warrant such academic attention. Hence this book, which is meant to do for memoir what a number of other books have recently done for fiction: explain it in a way that will enrich the public understanding and appreciation of it. In this chapter, then, I have tried to define and delineate memoir and offer some preliminary distinctions among its subgenres. I have also tried to situate memoir among related forms of life writing, to demonstrate how pervasive life writing is in our mass culture and our daily lives, and how deeply it is rooted in our history—as humans, as inhabitants of prosperous Western nations. Perhaps most important, I have tried to establish how memoir differs from the novel. In the chapters that follow, I will demonstrate important consequences of this distinction.

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[2] MEMOIR AND GENRE

Genre has long been a troublesome term even for professional literary critics, and it may be all the more so for nonacademics. But some understanding of genre in a broad context is necessary for a full appreciation of memoir. After all, the uproar over James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (about which more in chapter 4) was all about its genre. Genre does matter. The problems inherent in genre analysis are evident in handbook definitions of the term. For example, M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms declares, “the genres into which literary works have been grouped at different times are very numerous, and the criteria on which the classifications have been based are highly variable” (134). Translation: genre terms have proliferated over time, and they have often been inconsistently defined and applied. Not a promising beginning! It gets worse: the kinds of criteria for determining membership differ from genre to genre. Some genres are identified primarily according to formal features. For example, the sonnet is distinguished by a certain number of lines in a particular meter, with a certain rhyme scheme. Others genres are distinguished, however, by content as well as form. Thus the epic is associated with a serious tone and elevated style (aspects of form) but also a certain kind of hero and myths of national origin (matters of content). Still other genres are defined primarily in terms of their subject matter. Traditionally, tragedy had to do with disaster befalling members of the highest ranks of society; hence Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet and King Lear. Life-writing genres generally fall into this third category; their forms may be highly variable, but they are united in being concerned with the identities of actual people. 33

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The term genre is also confusing because it applies not only to narrow and discrete types of writing, like the sonnet and haiku, but also to very broad categories. For example, all literature is sometimes divided among these modes: lyric (expressive), narrative (storytelling), and dramatic (presentation through enactment). This leaves out—and so I would add—the expository, or explanatory, as in the essay. As a result, it is not always clear whether a particular form constitutes a “genre,” a “sub-genre,” or a “sub-sub-genre.” The prefix “sub” carries negative connotations that may be resented by devotees of particular forms: one person’s genre may be another’s subgenre. It would be much preferable, I think, to use size prefixes—like “macro” and “micro”—to make some of these distinctions. Even these could be taken as implying a hierarchy, of course, but the ranking would be more clearly a matter of size rather than of value. Moreover, and more important, definitions that once were clear have become blurred; boundaries that once seemed firm have become porous. This may be especially the case with life-writing genres. Thus, today it is widely recognized that one person’s autobiography is inevitably someone else’s biography. That is, it is generally admitted that one cannot write about oneself without representing others as well: hence the contemporary interest in relational narrative. Indeed, such writing is sometimes referred to as “auto/biography” to suggest its ambiguous nature and dual focus. Just as the prestige of particular literary forms has waxed and waned in the millennia since Aristotle, so has the critical estimation of the notion of genre itself. Issues of genre certainly get much less attention than they once did. And we no longer think of literary genres as pure, stable, discrete, and rule-bound entities. Instead, genres are seen as hybrid, dynamic, malleable, and culture-bound. Contemporary critics see literary forms as organic entities that emerge, evolve, and sometimes die out. We see genres as somewhat artificial categories, constructed retrospectively and more distinct in theory than in practice. We see genres not as matters of rule but as matters of convention, implicit agreements between producers and consumers of culture. (It is generally critics, rather than artists, who make them explicit.) These conventions may be violated, of course. But that does not mean that they don’t matter. On the contrary: the flouting of a convention can register only if the convention is recognized. So manipulating genre is one fundamental way

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of signifying. But there’s another sense in which the genre may be the message: genres “ask” to be read in certain ways. To mistake genre is in some sense to misread. Genre doesn’t matter just in those rare instances when it blows up in the face of careless writers (like James Frey) and publishers. It determines how we consume entertainment on a daily basis. As a result, most people know more about genre than they realize. Genre distinctions are mapped onto floor plans of bookstores, libraries, and increasingly rare video-rental outlets. And our television viewing often reflects generic preferences; we select some television channels (mostly cable channels) because they specialize in genres we enjoy. Consumers of mass entertainment learn at a very early age to distinguish among distinct kinds of cultural products, such as drama, adventure, romance, comedy, and horror. Generic conventions promise consumers a certain kind of experience. If you want to be thrilled, you gravitate toward “adventure” or “action”; frightened, toward “horror”; amused, toward “comedy”; moved, toward “drama” or “romance.” And so on. These types are generally literary genres that have been adapted into visual media. Comedy and tragedy originated in classical drama, then crossed over into fiction and later into film. Horror is the successor to the Gothic novel, and adventure is a modern form of epic. Granted, some divisions in book and video stores are not matters of genre alone. The distinctions between the “classics” of film or literature and the rest—romance, mystery, sci-fi, and so on—are not matters of genre. Rather, they are matters of aesthetic quality and significance, determined by critical reputation. Some works are valued for their own sakes, rather than as interchangeable examples of a genre. (Hence the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction.) Such works, however, may have earned their exalted status because they fulfill the expectations of a genre in a particularly skillful, clever, or effective way. Others have earned it by transcending the bounds of the merely generic by virtue of their originality. But while at some level of achievement genre may seem to fade in significance, it is always operative. Individual narratives aren’t always easily classifiable as members of a single genre—they may participate in more than one—but an understanding of genre is always useful in coming to terms with them.

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As is often pointed out, genre is gendered. It is no surprise that audiences at certain kinds of films may be predominantly male or female, nor that the typical heterosexual movie date may require some delicate negotiation. Many genres appeal primarily to one sex. We may speak of a woman’s film or novel (romance) or a male film or novel (adventure). Although the gender of the narrative often coincides with that of the author, it is by no means determined by it. Today, especially, lots of crossover work is being done. Consider the flourishing of hard-boiled crime novels (once a male preserve) featuring female detectives by writers like Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. And while most contemporary horror writers are men, like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, one of the first Gothic novels was written by a woman: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Granted, memoir and life narrative are not represented in this schema of mass entertainment. Generic distinctions may be less clear in nonfiction, and subgenres may seem less numerous. As we’ll see, however, they seem less numerous only because they are less well understood, and in fact a good deal of mass culture consists of various forms of life writing. Until recently, life writing got little critical respect and less public attention. Even today, some bookstores do not have sections dedicated to biography. Instead, they scatter biographies throughout the store according to what makes their subjects biography-worthy. Thus, biographies of the founding fathers will be shelved in American history; of CEOs, in business; of famous athletes, in sports, and so on. This makes a certain sense: many readers are drawn to biographies by interest in their individual subjects. But it ignores the fact that biography is a particular kind of writing, of interest as such to some readers independent of their interest in a particular subject or area. It reflects a lack of appreciation of biography (and memoir) as art. As a critic specializing in life writing, I rely on browsing to keep up with my field. So I lobbied for a dedicated biography section at my local chain bookstore. Eventually such a section was added, but I don’t think my suggestion made the difference; rather, bookstores seem to be responding to the growing popularity of memoir. Indeed, bookstores are not only adding biography sections but sometimes naming them biography/memoir. This label masks a difference between the two genres: although the two may be intermingled, there will always be entire shelves devoted to certain

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subjects (e.g., the Kennedys and the Roosevelts), whereas few memoirs remain current for long. The markets for the two genres have very different dynamics. In film, the parallel distinction is between the biopic and the documentary (or documemoir). Like biographies, biopics focus on high-profile subjects and are expensive to produce. Those two attributes are tightly connected: to justify the enormous expense of making feature films, the subjects (and ideally the lead actors) need to be box office draws. In contrast, documentaries are like memoirs; their subjects may be nobodies, and they are generally made by individuals already familiar with their relatively obscure subjects—or by the subjects themselves. An example of an amateur nobody documemoir would be the aforementioned Tarnation (2003), which uses home-movie footage to depict the dysfunctional household of a young gay man, Jonathan Caouette. But documemoirs may also be made by professional documentarians, like My Architect (2003), Nicholas Kahn’s documentary about his father, Louis Kahn. Most filmgoers understand that these are two entirely distinct kinds of cultural products (though they may not think of either as life narrative). Before I explore sibling relations within the life narrative family, so to speak, let me address a more fundamental concern. How do we know when we are reading a memoir? What distinguishes memoir is that it makes a certain identity claim. That claim is made, however, not so much in the text as by the entire product. One obvious indication that a text is a memoir or autobiography is that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist share the same name and vital statistics (such as date of birth). They are identical, in more than one sense: (1) they are all the same person, and (2) their congruence establishes the identity of the memoirist. This is in itself a sufficient signal that a narrative is a memoir. But notice that in order to discover this congruence we need to consult the title page, which is not part of the narrative proper. Additional markers, such as titles and subtitles, often reinforce this signal. But these are neither necessary nor sufficient to establish membership in the genre. It is entirely legitimate to title a novel The Autobiography of X, where X is an imaginary character. Consider The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), by Ernest J. Gaines; this is a novel in the form of the autobiography of an invented African-American woman, who is

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born a slave but lives to witness the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) is a heavily researched novel in the form of the translated reminiscences of an early twentieth-century Japanese woman. We can infer the fictionality of both from the fact that the authors and the narrator/protagonists do not share the same name or even the same sex. Other signals are usually provided by jacket copy. Descriptions of books’ contents usually indicate their genres, at least implicitly. Also, book jackets or covers usually provide generic labels to guide booksellers in shelving them. Library of Congress cataloging information, found on the copyright page, also typically indicates genre—though it does not distinguish memoir from biography. Publishers’ designations are not always accurate or reliable, of course, and in that case, ethical and legal problems can arise—for one, the possibility of the hoax. Aside from intentionally misleading designations, writers may wish, for various reasons, to blur or to cross the line between fiction and nonfiction. (See the discussion of Lauren Slater’s Lying in chapters 4 and 6.) But for the most part, memoirs are clearly and accurately identified as such. And in response to this designation, we “toggle” our reading stance to a different setting, so to speak. I will say more about why and how this matters in the final chapter, “ The Work of Memoir.” But the point is relevant throughout what follows here: at its most fundamental level, the importance of genre is that it indicates how a narrative is to be taken. It is not so important to classify a text properly as it is to respond appropriately. Let me illustrate what I mean by subgenre by briefly discussing some common forms that memoir can take: conversion narrative, apology, confession, bildungsroman (or coming of age narrative), and testimony. The differences among some of these are best understood as matters of the underlying relation in each between the I’s: the I-now (the narrator) and the I-then (the narrator’s earlier self). Seeing them this way may demonstrate the utility of generic analysis. As its name implies, conversion narrative tells the story of a radical (and usually sudden) reversal in the narrator’s perspective. Traditionally, this happens as a result of the infusion of grace (the Holy Spirit) at a distinct turning point. The subgenre is associated with Christianity, especially with Protestantism, where it refers to the sudden conversion

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of sinner to saint, or unbeliever to believer. The original “crisis” conversion is that of Saul on the road to Damascus in the New Testament, after which he changed his name to Paul and became an apostle. The classic autobiographical version is The Confessions of St. Augustine (circa 400 CE). The most familiar version may be found in the hymn “Amazing Grace.” (“I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind but now I see.”) But the conversion can also be a political or ideological transformation—from conservative to liberal, say, or vice versa: in the United States, neoconservatives like to refer to themselves as liberals who underwent an ideological reorientation after being “mugged by reality.” The result of the conversion is that the values of the narrator are directly opposed to those of his or her past self. Thus, the form lends itself well to stories of substance abuse and recovery and of coming out of the closet after passing as straight, say, or even as nondisabled. Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man is a good example of the former; Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind of the latter. A sharp divergence between the present and past selves is also characteristic of confession—a subgenre rooted in the Catholic sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation—but the transition is negotiated differently. Confession, whether spiritual or legal, is oriented and addressed to a higher authority, and the implication is that the act is integral to redemption. Like conversion narrative, confession has been adapted to secular contexts and aims. And today confession may be performed outside any formal religious or legal context—through mass media, for example— and the act may be considered tantamount to self-absolution. The best contemporary examples of confession are perhaps oral ones made by disgraced public officials, like Eliot Spitzer of New York and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, governors who had to resign their offices because of extramarital sex. As befits a democracy, the electorate is the audience from whom forgiveness is sought. In practice, few full-length memoirs take the form of confessions. What would seem to be the classic instance, The Confessions of St. Augustine is actually more of a conversion narrative. And today, confusingly, we use the adjective “confessional” for any memoir that is especially intimate in its revelations, even if it is devoid of remorse and the desire to expiate guilt. The classic version of confession in this sense is The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782), which divulges numerous shameful acts.

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Contrary to its everyday meaning, apology (or, to use the Latin term, apologia) does not involve admitting wrongdoing and asking forgiveness. (Apology in the vernacular sense is hard to distinguish from secular confession, except for its more targeted audience: one apologizes to the offended party, rather than to the general public. Not surprisingly, in the Internet age, one can use Web sites like iregret.net, imsorry.com, perfectapology.com, and thepublicapology.com, to post or send “e-pologies.”) Apology in the lit-crit sense undertakes to defend the self. So, in this subgenre, the narrator affirms and tries to justify his or her past actions; there is no divergence between the values of the past and present selves. Perhaps the best known apologia in English (though it is rarely called that) is Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849, also known as “Civil Disobedience”). In it, Thoreau embeds a brief narrative of a brief incarceration in explanation and justification of his refusal to pay a poll tax on the grounds that it supported the proslavery agenda of the Mexican War. Like confession, but with very different implications, this subgenre is often used by public figures who have come under attack. It has become conventional, almost compulsory, for ex-presidents to write their memoirs. (Given the high advances they can demand from publishers, they can hardly afford not to.) In practice, such memoirs are usually apologias— retrospective defenses of their actions as chief executives. In the case of Bill Clinton, whose dalliance with Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment, his memoir had an element of confession, as well. But in his presidential memoir, Decision Points, George W. Bush seems determined to defend all of his decisions, even if, like the invasion of Iraq, they were based on faulty premises. The same is true of his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, whose 2011 memoir Known and Unknown is remarkably devoid of any acknowledgment of mistakes on his part. He moved directly from the department of defense to that of self-defense. The key to apologia is that the narrator stands behind his previous conduct. In Decision Points, the ex-president acknowledged that he authorized water-boarding, which constitutes torture under international law. That he has done so is an indication of his confidence that his testimony will never be used against him in a court of law—in the United States, at least. This admission did, however, prompt a Facebook movement encouraging bookstore patrons to move the book to the true-crime section—political

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protest as genre reassignment—in this case from apologia to confession. The larger point is that, if genre constitutes a tacit compact between writer and reader, the reader need not always accept the author’s terms. Thus, genre is an interactive entity; it depends on the reader’s cooperation to do its work. Bildungsroman is a German term for a subgenre of fiction, the novel of growth, which recounts the protagonist’s life from childhood to some moment of stasis in early adulthood. The impulse to tell such stories in real life is so common that the term has been borrowed for its nonfictional equivalent, which we also call the coming-of-age story. Here we have yet another relation between the narrator and the earlier self: they are different, but not radically so. Bildungsroman tells how an identity was formed through steady growth, or growth in stages, rather than a sudden abrupt reversal or illumination. Testimony differs as a subgenre in that it is not distinguished so much by the relation between the narrating I and the narrated I as by the relation between the I and the world. In testimony, the emphasis is on the I as an eye, a witness, of some injustice that the narrative seeks to put on record, if not to redress. The narrative stance may be accusatory. When the injustice has been perpetrated on the narrator, of course, the subjectivity of the I is also an important concern; such narratives are often also stories of surviving trauma, which demands a resilient self. But much depends on the direction of the narrator’s gaze—whether inward toward the wounded psyche or outward toward the traumatizing events. One way to think about this set of subgenres is as a set of available templates that may fit a memoirist’s sense of his or her experience. But the act of writing a memoir is not a simple matter of finding the right match between content and form and then “pouring” the material into the proper container. Neither element predetermines the other; rather, they interact in the process of composition, each influencing the other. So a narrative’s actual shape may conflict with its author’s preconception. For example, it is possible that someone setting out to write a confession will wind up producing an apology—or vice versa. (Again, Bush’s Decision Points.) For reasons that should now be clear, contemporary critics tend to be interested less in categorizing individual narratives than in understanding how distinct subgenres arise and develop, whose interests they serve,

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whom they best represent, whom they exclude, and what work they may do—social, political, and/or cultural. In life-writing studies, these questions have been searchingly addressed in the last decade. In fact, traditionalists might argue that this has been true to a fault; that is, that critics’ attention has shifted from the “literary” (matters of technique and aesthetic value) to the political and ideological aims of life writing. In sum, then, the contemporary emphasis is on understanding genre as action: genre as function, rather than form (or form as function). The ascendancy of the umbrella terms life writing and life narrative may seem to suggest that contemporary critics see the nonfictional representation of identity as comprising a large, undifferentiated body of narratives—not necessarily even written. But the preference for the broader terms is not a function of indifference toward generic distinctions; rather, it reflects the increasing diversity of texts being studied by scholars and the reluctance to establish or acknowledge any hierarchy among them. In the past, genres associated with women—particularly the diary— garnered little respect from critics. The few diaries to have been published before the women’s liberation movement were almost all by men, such as Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) in America and Samuel Pepys in Britain (1633–1703). Their claim to significance lay in their author’s prominence in, or access to, public life. In contrast to men’s diaries, those of women often focused on domestic routines. They were rarely considered worthy of publication. The same was true of another private form of life writing: letters. Recently, however, the situation has changed dramatically. Diaries and correspondence are being reexamined, preserved, and published with new appreciation for their distinctive qualities and functions. Feminism has been one force behind this trend. In an age of electronic communication, the rise of the blog and e-mail has probably also helped to bestow significance on their analog forerunners. The terms life writing and life narrative, then, do not deny generic distinctions but rather reflect an impulse toward catholicity—an openness toward new forms of expression—and toward a dismantling of earlier hierarchies among genres. Critical attempts to reckon with new or once ignored forms of life narrative have led to a proliferation of new terms for subgenres. A useful appendix to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography, defines nearly a hundred genres of life writing. This is probably overkill,

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slicing and dicing too fine. But some terms are useful for identifying new tendencies or sets of narratives, even if many are not well-defined enough to count as true genres. That is, they are not very distinct as literary phenomena. Sometimes existing terminology just isn’t sufficient to characterize new and distinctive narratives. So, for example, the term autoethnography was coined in part to respond to the proliferation of narratives that highlight the authors’ ethnicity. The term appropriates the name of the branch of anthropology that analyzes cultural patterns—ethnography—and the prefix “auto” indicates that the narrative explores distinct customs that have shaped its author’s identity. The potentially ethnocentric implication is that the foreign, the ethnic, somehow calls for a special kind of scrutiny and analysis. But the auto suggests that the representation will be from an insider’s viewpoint—and possibly anti-ethnographic. The term has generally been applied to memoirs by members of ethnic minorities, of course—such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, much of which explores the effects of her Chinese heritage on her life and identity. Similarly, the term autothanatography was coined, by Susanna Egan, to designate narratives that focus on death, a good many of which have been generated by the AIDS epidemic. Some recent books in this subgenre have been prompted by the deaths of the spouses of famous female writers: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011). And scriptotherapy was invented by Suzette Henke to characterize the use of autobiographical writing for self-healing after a traumatic experience, such as sexual or physical abuse. Significantly, the term emphasizes the work of the narrative—its goal or aim—rather than its form. One of these neologisms is my own: autopathography, which I coined to refer to narratives of illness and disability. In the mid-1990s, I became interested in the emergence of life writing, much of it autobiographical, centered on medical conditions and impairments once considered stigmatic. Exploring this new development, I wanted to designate a particular set of narratives with a single-word term. To devise one, I merely substituted patho—the Greek root for suffering (as in pathology)—for bio (life) in autobiography. Or to explain it a different way, I added auto to the existing term pathography, which refers to clinical studies of illness in patients.

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The point was that in these new narratives, people with certain kinds of problematic conditions were writing about their own bodies, rather than leaving the job to medical professionals. (Hence the title of my book: Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing.) As I understand it, then, autopathography is typically, if not essentially, anti-pathography, in two senses. First, in the sense that by taking control of their own narratives patients are resisting medical authority. Second, in the sense that such patients are challenging the medical scripts and/or the cultural constructions attached to their conditions. The auto in autopathography was meant to highlight the impulse to define one’s condition in one’s own way—to recover one’s body, so to speak, from those who would determine its story. But various people have convinced me that the patho root carries gratuitously negative connotations and thus fails, ironically, to convey my sense of the subgenre’s aims. One source of this criticism was people with disabilities, who rightly reject the notion that they are ill or necessarily suffering. But it also came from people who were, or had been, ill—like cancer survivors—but who felt that the term places too much emphasis on the medical condition. As I’ve said earlier, genre terminology is always playing catch up: practice precedes analysis. Here we have an interesting example of practitioners—life writers—speaking back to a literary critic who had defined and labeled their writing. As a result, I’ve abandoned the term. Analyzing illness memoirs brought home to me another reason to take genre seriously. I came to see that one of the subgenre’s powerful conventions was the happy ending. This was followed so uniformly that I referred to “the tyranny of the comic plot.” (We associate the terms comic and comedy with being funny, but the defining element of the comic plot—whether in drama, fiction, or nonfiction—is that it ends well for the protagonist.) That illness narratives almost always have happy endings is an observation about their genre. But if it were only that—merely a matter of literary convention—it wouldn’t be important. From one angle, this convention is not surprising or disturbing. It’s understandable that people with various illnesses and impairments might want to put the best face on their situations—to represent themselves as better off in the end. And it’s understandable that readers would prefer to read such reassuring narratives. In

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fact, there is a very deep bias toward the comic plot in all first-person life writing, whether or not it has to do with illness. We all like to think we are better—or better off—than we once were. We dislike telling stories that turn out badly for us. It may be “human” to do so. But from another angle, this narrative bias is troubling. If a comic plot is a generic requirement of illness narratives, the genre is not readily available to those whose conditions are not cured, whose impairments are not repaired. This would exclude whole groups of individuals whose experience might be worth narrating. It would certainly grossly misrepresent the overall experience of illness and disability. As it happened, the implicit proscription of the tragic plot powerfully shaped the response to the AIDS epidemic. In the early years, AIDS was not effectively treatable or survivable; diagnosis was rightly considered a death sentence. That was bad enough, but the tyranny of the comic plot meant that very few people with AIDS felt empowered to narrate their experience. The conventions of illness memoirs, then, reinforced the already powerful stigma associated with AIDS, suppressing memoirs by people living with AIDS. Fortunately, this convention was challenged—and not just in the case of AIDS. But here we have an example of how a generic convention had unfortunate effects. Again, genre matters. Over the course of my thirty-year career the database of life writing has expanded dramatically, in two distinct ways. First, ignored or obscure texts have been recovered and reevaluated. This is a matter of rediscovery and rehabilitation, so to speak, of already existing work—like women’s diaries. Of course, this has been done with other genres as well, such as fiction and poetry by minorities. But the nature of life writing—its being more utilitarian than literary, often built into everyday life, as the diary is—means that there may be more of it to rediscover and reassess. Second, there has been an explosion of life writing in the last quarter-century or so, as with illness narratives. Part of this is a function of a literary marketplace that is newly receptive to life writing. So the proliferation of genre terms in life-writing studies reflects the appearance of new niche genres. A further illustration of the rehabilitation of the notion of genre in life-writing studies is the tendency to explore nonliterary phenomena as life narrative—and not just in new digital or electronic media. A compelling illustration of this trend was the publication in 1996 of Getting

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a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. The essays in this volume explore genres (or subgenres) as diverse and utilitarian as personal ads, résumés, genealogy, twelve-step narratives, and even DNA testing. Personal ads are not as new as one might think; in the United States they date back at least to mid-nineteenth century newspapers. But only if they are regarded as a distinct form of life writing are they likely to be fully appreciated. Their brevity and their lack of narrative may make them seem trivial as examples of life writing; perhaps they are. But even short, capsule self-depictions often imply a backstory—and thus provide an element of narrative. And the instrumentality of personals should not be used to discount them. One of the aspects of life writing that makes it particularly interesting is that it is sometimes produced to shape the creator’s future more than to depict the past. Personals are prospective rather than retrospective; their goal is typically to bring about a personal match for romance and possible matrimony, to advance the plot of one’s life toward a generic happy ending: “They lived happily ever after.” Such ads are intended to render themselves obsolete. They are dispensable, then, as well as instrumental. But life writing—even literary memoir—is often instrumental, at least more so than fiction. DNA testing may also seem not to belong under the large umbrella of life narrative, certainly not self-narrative. After all, it is undergone passively; the subject does not generate it. Moreover, it involves no act of recollection or self-representation. But DNA testing is not the only form of self-representation that requires analysis by someone else; that’s true of authorized or commissioned biography, as well. Furthermore, DNA can be revealing in two directions along the axis of time. One kind of DNA testing is intended to trace one’s ancestry. The results can illuminate one’s lineage—geographically, ethnically, and racially. And this can have a significant effect on one’s sense of identity. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of the African American Studies program at Harvard University, has made two documentary films that demonstrate this. The first, African American Lives, focused on celebrities of African-American ancestry. DNA analysis was supplemented with conventional biographical research to give these subjects new understandings of their pasts. In some cases, this involved the acknowledgment of biracial ancestry of which they had been unaware.

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The other obvious use of DNA analysis is to detect genes that may predispose the subject to disease or disability. Such analysis is usually undertaken when the subject has reason to suspect some heightened risk. The results can profoundly affect one’s sense of identity and probable future, and thus how one conducts one’s life. An extreme, but illustrative, case would be the test for the Huntington’s gene. People who inherit the gene have a 100 percent chance of developing the degenerative fatal condition if they live long enough. So in addition to writing one’s past, DNA analysis can predict or shape one’s future. All of this can be considered life narrative in the broad sense that critics understand it today: we see life narrative, again, not as a kind of literature but as a constellation of behaviors and processes through which we define ourselves and lead our lives. Genre distinctions help us to parse this large set of human actions, and they help us see memoir as part of a much larger domain. So the expansion of the lexicon of genre terms attests not only to the ingenuity of critics and their careful scrutiny of life narratives but also to the continual evolution of life writing in response to social, cultural, and historical change—indeed, to its pervasiveness in contemporary Western culture. To understand memoir today, then, it helps to see it as part of a broad set of practices or behaviors through which we live our lives. I think it’s fair to say that the memoir boom has involved a collective reevaluation of the relation of memoir to other genres, such that memoir is considered to be on a par with the novel, an imaginative genre. This reflects an acknowledgment of its inherent artfulness, its status as a literary genre. But the backlash against it may reflect an impulse to restore a pecking order among genres. At least, those distressed by the boom often portray memoir as a semi- or sub-literary genre, exploited primarily for opportunistic and narcissistic reasons, and thus not worthy of critical esteem. In any case, the classical notion that some kinds of writing are inherently superior seems to have contemporary adherents. One powerful impulse in the “memoir backlash” seems to have been to make the case for the superiority of fiction on the grounds that it is more literary and artistic than nonfiction. According to some cultural conservatives, all genres are not created equal. And according to some, memoir is at best glorified gossip, at worst, naked narcissism. A classic expression of this attitude was William Gass’s 1994 Harper’s essay, “The Art of Self: Autobiography [read: memoir]

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in an Age of Narcissism.” In that essay, Gass declared: “To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster.” I don’t mean to ridicule that response. In a culture seemingly obsessed with lifestyles of the rich and famous, trashy memoirs certainly proliferate and sell well. And I readily acknowledge that the novel has been, and continues to be, more inventive and experimental than the memoir—in part because memoir is more firmly rooted in the real world, life as we know it. So I accept that the novel is generally more writerly—more likely to call attention to its own art, more likely to be intertextual, to contain details chosen for their symbolic resonance. But to grant that it is more writerly is not to allow that it is altogether superior—or even inherently more literary. The novel and the memoir are better understood as complementary genres, rather than as conflicting or competing. They are, and do, very different things. But, the backlash against the success of the memoir does seem to involve resentment on the part of professional writers. There is a notion that writers write novels, while anyone can write a memoir (or, lacking the ability, have one written). Scorn for the memoir has been partly motivated by professional writers’ fear of competition from rank amateurs in the critical and economic marketplace. Hence the dismay at the success of the so-called nobody memoir, produced by a person, hitherto obscure, who has the audacity to depict a life that lacks the distinction that at one time might have justified that act—and the literary artistry to give luster to that life. As evidence of hostility toward the memoir among novelists consider Cathleen Schine’s amusing novel, The Three Weissmans of Westport (2010). One of the two Weissman sisters, Miranda, is a very successful literary agent specializing in—what else?—memoir. Here is Schine’s description of her clientele and merchandise: She specialized in the genre of what [her sister] Annie dubbed the Lite Victory memoir. Her clients, the Awful Authors, as even Miranda called them, had always overcome something ghastly and lurid, something so ghastly and so lurid they had to write a ghastly and lurid book recounting every detail of their mortification and misery. At the end of the book, there was a nice epiphany, and since

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no one could really object to an epiphany, not even Annie, the books were very popular and Miranda had built a thriving agency that required her constant attention. (10)

Not content with this novelistic put-down of the misery memoir, Schine mires Miranda in a scandal ripped from headlines about autobiographical hoaxes: It had been a bad year for the Miranda Weissman Literary Agency, a terrible year, a year of queenly annus horribilis proportions. The Scandal of the Scandals, the blogs called it. All involving Miranda’s highest-profile clients. First, Rudy Lake, whose best-selling, wrenching prison memoir had won him a parole for the murder of his first wife, turned out to have plagiarized the better part of his book from an obscure Hungarian novel of the 1950s; then the elusive Bong Ffrancis had turned out to be a middle-aged Midwestern housewife, not the seventeen-year-old Welsh heroin addict his memoir had described; and finally, the Midwestern housewife Sarah-Gail Laney, who wrote about her painful search for normality after being raised by sexually abusive missionaries who poisoned each other in Uganda, had actually been raised in Hoboken, where her parents, sharing in the profits of her book, still lived in the quiet two-bedroom apartment in which she’d grown up. (34)

Further evidence of the novelist’s resentment toward memoir may be found in Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), whose protagonist is a blocked novelist and creative writing professor at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. At lunch in Manhattan, his editor tries to jumpstart his creative process: “Have you considered a memoir? . . . You don’t need me to tell you that what’s selling these days has to have the juicy gleam, the bloody smell of the truth. And half the people writing them, well, nothing ever happened to them. Maybe Mom got drunk once or twice, smacked them around a little. But you, my friend, you watched your father incinerate himself on national TV.

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Writers with childhoods not half so dysfunctional as yours are turning them into goldmines.” “I already wrote the novel . . . You published it, remember?” “Why should that stop you? It’s not the same. Face it, Ted. Novels just don’t give the reader the same kind of hard-on. You know how many people read a novel? Ten thousand’s good for a novel . . . And of the ten thousand—well, let’s say the five thousand— people who read your novel, two thousand of them are probably dead and the other three have forgotten. You could start fresh, you’re lucky. It’s better to start over. Better a hot new memoirist than a middle-aged midlist novelist . . . The best thing—the really good thing—would be if there were something that had been going on since your father’s death, some ongoing problem, an update, dues you’ve paid later on.” “What kind of something?” “Bad behavior. Drinking, drugs, gambling, spousal abuse. Sex addiction. Compulsively fucking students. That would be great. Maybe you could make it up. Just because it’s a so-called memoir doesn’t mean . . . Anyway, something directly traceable to your dysfunctional childhood. And something, of course, you’ve recovered from.” (221–222 ) [emphasis mine]

I can understand the impulses toward satire and schadenfreude expressed here. But one irony of this response to the memoir boom is that it reflects nostalgia for a golden age of authentic and meritocratic autobiography that never existed. As we’ll see in chapter 3, there never was a time when memoir and autobiography were written only by those, like Benjamin Franklin, who were worthy of biography. From the beginning, memoir has been open to scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells. And hoaxes have been perpetrated as long as memoirs have been written. Another irony is that a good many successful recent memoirs have in fact been written by professional writers—as evidenced by their having MFAs (Lucy Grealy and Mary Karr, for example). At one time, the creative writer’s first book might have been an autobiographical novel. Now it is just as likely to be a memoir proper (often highly novelistic in technique). (In fact, I suspect that one reason that the term memoir has

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eclipsed autobiography is that writers think of memoir as more literary, more writerly. After all, the term has a continental ring to it.) At one time, the second-book challenge for a novelist was to write a non-autobiographical novel. Today the second book may be a second memoir; the challenge is to have enough more “life” to support a book-length sequel (or prequel). Lucy Grealy never solved this problem, perhaps because her first book, Autobiography of a Face, was in effect a full-life narrative that began with her birth and carried her story up to the time of its composition. But the trend away from full-life narrative and toward single-experience narrative facilitates the sequel. Mary Karr’s career is an illuminating counterpoint to Grealy’s. Karr first made a reputation as a poet, but it was her memoir of childhood in a dysfunctional family, The Liars’ Club (1995), that brought her fame and fortune. Having narrated only the first decade or so of her life in that book, Karr was able to follow it up with Cherry (2000), a memoir of her years as a preteen and teenager. A decade later, she produced a sequel to the sequel, Lit (2009), which tells the story of her marriage, her divorce, her alcoholism, and her achievement of sobriety, aided by a turn to religion. Thus, as a result of the success of the genre, it is now possible for professional writers to have careers as (serial) memoirists. The grandmother of such writers is Maya Angelou. In 2004 the Modern Library published what must be an unprecedented volume: The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, which reprinted six memoirs—not including that year’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes. And remarkably, Lauren Slater, who is a therapist, not a full-time writer, produced some four memoirs by the time she turned forty! Rather than making genre analysis obsolete, the tendency on the part of contemporary writers to fuse once distinct genres into hybrids requires an equivalent flexibility on the part of critics. Thus, although individual life narratives are increasingly seen as blending elements from various genres, comprehension of their hybridity depends on naming and identifying the various subgenres in play. So the erosion of the notion of pure genres does not entail the abandonment of sensitivity to generic distinctions. In fact, the notion of generic hybridity can help to illuminate classic as well as contemporary works.

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Consider Thoreau’s Walden. There is not, and there may never be, critical consensus on Walden’s genre; it has a powerful claim to being sui generis. This Latin term is usually translated as “one of a kind,” unique, but it literally means “of its own kind,” which is to say, of no genre. Yet I find it useful, even necessary, to think of Walden in terms of earlier, distinct genres. Thoreau’s narrative prose (as distinct from his journals, essays, and poetry) can be divided into two genres: the journey—an account of traveling through a particular landscape (The Maine Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod)—and the sojourn—an account of living temporarily in a particular place (Walden). To call Walden a sojourn, however, is obviously insufficient, for the complex volume includes some of Thoreau’s poems, draws on his extensive journals, and contains utterly nonnarrative chapters that read like essays. It is of many genres rather than of none—a good example of a hybrid. Still, thinking of the book as a sojourn helps us appreciate its connection to distinctive colonial genres, such as narratives of exploration, captivity, settlement, and conversion. Thoreau was a careful student of American colonial writing; he knew these genres well and updated and transformed them quite self-consciously. So it is best to think of Walden as partaking of a number of colonial and early nineteenth-century American genres. In other words, I think it’s best to think of Walden as some thing—as a narrative meant to be understood in terms of its intertextual relations with discrete American genres of life writing. This is not to deny, but rather to explore, and reckon with, its generic richness. The larger point is that a sense of the various genres that Thoreau was mixing, altering, and extending helps to illuminate how his masterwork attempts to intervene in history. His manipulation of preexisting genres is crucial to the work of his art. The even larger point is that genre matters not because it classifies but because it clarifies. The goal of genre analysis is not to find the “right” or even “best” pigeonhole into which to place a work. Many narratives, perhaps most, like Walden, don’t fit neatly into any single one. Thoreau was drawing upon forms various forerunners had used to shape their experience. Indeed, the point of generic analysis is less to determine what Walden is than what it does. The goal is to analyze form as a means of understanding function and force: how particular genres encode or reinforce particular values in ways that may shape culture and history.

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In this case, Walden’s connections with earlier genres helped Thoreau restage (on a microcosmic scale) crucial episodes in American history to suggest that they could turn out differently. So, whereas in colonial captivity narratives, a white settler is forced to live among and like Native Americans, in Walden Thoreau moves voluntarily into the woods to demonstrate the desirability of emulating indigenous people—for example, in the simplicity of their housing. To grapple with the genre of Walden is to begin to understand it as social, cultural, and political action, as well as critique. Indeed, I would argue that one cannot understand its ideological implications without some sense of its generic complexity. So notions of genre are still indispensable to life-writing studies, in at least two ways. First, genre terms are necessary if we wish to trace the history and development of life writing. Second, the boundaries between genres, though not marked by bright lines, still matter in a number of ways—not the least of which are legal and ethical. Admittedly, life writing is undeniably “fictive” (inventive) even when it is not “novelistic” (characterized by direct dialogue and highly detailed scenes). So the boundary between memoir and the novel can be difficult, even impossible, to determine. And much of the time, neither authors, nor publishers, nor readers wish to insist on this boundary. Yet the difference between life writing and pure fiction continues to matter. There are times when the line between the novel and life writing, however indistinct, cannot be crossed with impunity; the consequences can be severe. This is the case with the autobiographical hoax, which is typically perpetrated across racial or ethnic lines: someone falsely claims, in autobiography, an ethnic or racial identity—such as indigeneity— once stigmatized but now privileged in some quarters precisely because of its history of oppression. We will explore these matters more fully in chapter 4. At this point, I’ll confine myself to pointing out that the identity most frequently falsely assumed by memoirists is that of the Holocaust survivor. As a genre, Holocaust testimony performs a certain kind of valuable cultural work, and false testimony undermines that work. Genre matters because it entails moral and political force rather than, or as well as, literary form.

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[3] MEMOIR’S FORMS

The art of the novel has attracted far more attention than the art of memoir. In the last five years alone, several books been published that analyze fiction for general readers: Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel (2005), John Mullan’s How Novels Work (2006), James Wood’s How Fiction Works (2008), and Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008). While there have been a couple of recent books about the craft of memoir—like Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story (2002) and Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir (2007)—such books are usually written for writers by writers, especially by writers who are also teachers of writing. They are intended more for aspiring writers rather than for the growing audience for memoir. It’s as though readers need to be instructed in how to understand fiction, whereas they already know how to read memoir: what could be simpler? (One irony of this is that most readers will have been taught to read novels, but not memoirs, in school, at more than one level.) There is some justification for this: as I readily concede, especially in the last century, fiction has been more varied, inventive, and experimental in form than the literary memoir. This should not surprise us; the fact that the novel trades in the imaginary tends to encourage innovation, technical complexity, and creative license. For this and other reasons, it often calls for, or demands, a kind of self-conscious reading that most memoir does not. Also, much life writing takes utilitarian forms, which is not the case with fiction. So the novel deserves more attention to its formal aspects than the memoir. Still, memoir deserves more attention than it has received—not only because it is so closely related to the novel and so crucial to its development but because it is, increasingly, an art form in its own right. Too often 54

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overlooked has been the fact that most novels (at least until about 1900) took the form of life-writing genres. As a result, readers of contemporary memoir can benefit from knowledge of its relationship with the novel. And vice versa: understanding of fiction may be enhanced by a better grasp of the nature of life writing. So this chapter will explore both similarities and differences between the two sibling genres. As we’ll see, the two forms share a good deal in the way of technique. In fact, often they are indistinguishable in form. But where they diverge, their differences reflect their distinct natures, aims, and strengths. The ground bass of this book—its premise—is that fiction and memoir have different relations to reality. The novel is free to invent its own world, while the memoir must refer to an extra-textual reality. This difference is the basis of the appeal of each and of its ultimate strength as a form of literature. Much follows from this. For one thing, the two genres make different kinds of truth claims: it is possible for memoirs to lie in a way that makes no sense for novels. The uproar over James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces would never have occurred had he been able to publish it as a novel, which was, remember, his initial impulse. Had Frey presented his story as fiction, his distortions of his own experience would have been entirely permissible. More to the point, they would have gone undetected; it makes no sense to fact-check a novel. When impersonation occurs in memoir, the product is a hoax. But novels are often faux memoirs; first-person fiction requires, and licenses, impersonation. Unmoored to the way things are, fiction can entertain counterfactual scenarios: fanciful, fantastic, futuristic, Gothic, romantic, post-apocalyptic, utopian, dystopian, and so on. In novels, characters need not be human; they may be animals or extraterrestrials. But the nature of memoir puts constraints on its content, what it may depict; its contents must correspond more or less to some reality outside itself. Thus memoir does not accommodate the counterfactual; sci-fi and fantasy are inherently and exclusively fictional genres. Life writing, including memoir, operates, then, in a highly constricted range: its scenarios must correspond to that which is, or recently has been; its characters, to actual people known to the narrator. (In the rare, but increasingly frequent, instances of memoirs or biographies of animals, they must be real ones, whether wild or domesticated. An example of this type of memoir would be John Grogan’s

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blockbuster, Marley and Me, 2005; of biography, Lauren Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, 2001.) This is a significant limitation. Historically it has made life writing harder to publish and, once published, limited in its shelf life. Memoir “dates” more quickly than fiction. Contemporary memoir is by definition always topical, but its timeliness may conflict with its achieving the timelessness of art, of the classic. One reflection of this is that literature sections of bookstores overwhelmingly house creative writing (mainly fiction and poetry), rather than essays, diaries, biographies, or memoirs. The need to compete with fiction, however, may help to explain the appeal of the memoir of extremity—of the rare, if not unique, episode, such as a narrow escape from death. (Or even a return from it: while browsing an airport bookstore, I came across a memoir entitled Ninety Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life, by Don Piper, which purports to be his account of dying in a car crash and then miraculously coming back to life.) Less obviously, but also significantly, the nature of memoir limits its technical repertoire, its formal possibilities. To begin with, the novel has available to it some narrative perspectives unavailable to memoir. Approaches to novels’ points of view typically divide them initially into two large categories: first person and third person. The former term refers to narration by a character, who functions inside the story, and the latter to narration by an entity who is not a character and who thus stands outside the story. Consider, for example, two of Mark Twain’s best known novels. After using the third person to narrate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain had Tom’s sidekick Huck narrate the sequel, or spin-off. Of the two, only the latter has achieved masterpiece status. That is largely a function of Twain’s innovative use of a vernacular (uneducated) narrator and the consequent creation of an unprecedented narrative voice, which is widely recognized as one of the great achievements of American literature. It is probably what inspired Hemingway’s famous tribute: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may present itself as Huck Finn’s single-experience memoir, it may be worth noting here that it would not have been possible for an actual Huck Finn to have published any such

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narrative; his vernacular voice would not have been considered sufficiently literate. Fiction can go where memoir cannot, even when—perhaps especially when—it simulates memoir. The distinction of narrative techniques according to “person” has to do with the characteristic pronouns used by narrators to refer to characters. Inside narrators—narrators who are characters—inevitably refer to themselves in telling their stories; when they do so, of course, they deploy the first-person pronoun I. In contrast, not being characters themselves, outside narrators use only third-person pronouns to refer to characters in the fiction. These labels are misleading, however, because even outside narrators sometimes use the first-person pronoun—to refer to themselves as narrators, especially when they comment on the action. Hence my preference for the terms inside narrator (or character narrator) and outside narrator. What is usually overlooked when these techniques are presented, either in literature or in creative writing courses, is that they correspond to two distinct forms of life writing: autobiography and biography. This is not a matter of a mere parallel between fiction and nonfiction: rather, it is a matter of fiction imitating life writing. Thus, third-person novels resemble—or take the form of—biographies; first-person novels resemble autobiographies or memoirs. This is one reason that reading fiction is said to involve the willing suspension of disbelief: it often pretends to be something that it is not, a true narrative about real people rather than a made-up story about imaginary people. At the same time, this convention of fiction may camouflage frauds and hoaxes, in which the pretense is not acknowledged. Let me elaborate a bit on this important point. It is a basic tenet of aesthetics that art (including literature) imitates life. But it is equally true, and for our purposes more important, that the novel often imitates life writing. This phenomenon was crucial to the emergence of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Until the twentieth century at least, most novels presented themselves as if they were life writing. The vast majority of novels have single protagonists; so do memoir and biography. (This is one of the ways in which fiction and life writing both reflect and reinforce the cultural value attributed to the individual in the West.) When novels focus on a larger cast of characters, they may be said to imitate the saga (if, as in John

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Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, more than one generation is involved), the chronicle, or the prosopography (if, as in Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap, the characters are demographically similar). Part of what readers buy into, then, when they read novels is the pretense that someone—a character, in first-person novels; some outside party, in third-person novels—took the time and trouble (and had the skill) to actually write the narrative. The exceptions are novels in which the narrative is presented as oral rather than written; this is the case in some of Joseph Conrad’s classic works, such as Lord Jim. But this scenario is actually less plausible, since there is rarely any indication of how the spoken narrative was preserved. Thus, the willing suspension of disbelief seems to extend to the creation of most fictional narratives: readers are not usually encouraged to think much about how that narrative came to be produced. Even so, the fact that first-person stories are narrated by characters gives them a dimension absent in third-person narratives. We may usefully think of first-person narratives as being motivated in a sense that does not apply to third-person stories. By that, I mean that it makes sense to ask why, having experienced the action, the narrator then undertakes to recount it. What does he or she have to gain by this otherwise gratuitous act? What is her or her agenda? How does it shape the narrative as it unfolds? (For example, we might say that the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is seeking to rationalize his abandonment of his erstwhile employee.) It makes no sense to ask this question of thirdperson fictional narrators, who are usually just disembodied voices. (Here, however, fiction and life writing diverge: it does make sense to ask why a biographer chooses a particular subject. We can assume a personal investment here because a biographer is a person.) The traditional repertoire of fiction extends well beyond simulated autobiography and biography, to diary narration and letter narration, but these too are imitations of life writing genres. One of the first English novelists, Daniel Defoe, pioneered diary narration in his Journal of the Plague Year, Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London (1721), which is presented as a first-person account of living through the plague of 1665. Diary narration has been employed by some important writers in the

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twentieth century, as well—notably Andre Gide (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919) and Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944). Sue Kaufman’s 1967 novel Diary of a Mad Housewife encapsulated a kind of female angst just as women’s liberation gathered momentum, and the diary form has shown a resurgence in popular fiction: Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) was adapted into film (2001), as was Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s The Nanny Diaries (2002, 2007). The diary is a variant of first-person narration. What distinguishes it is its serial composition; the story is told in discrete, successive installments as it unfolds, rather than in one sustained burst after the action is completed. This gives it an enhanced sense of immediacy and may heighten its suspense: with a diary, even the narrator does not know how events will turn out. But, like a retrospective first-person novel, a novel in the form of a diary pretends to be, in effect, a found object created by an actual person. Once again, art imitates not life itself but life writing. The fact that a diary novel simulates a private genre that usually goes unpublished makes the reader’s experience seem all the more privileged and voyeuristic. Here, however, readers do know how the narrative was produced—the fictional diarist wrote it—and this element of transparency endows it with additional verisimilitude. Similarly, epistolary novels present themselves as actual documents, mostly letters, exchanged by real people. The epistolary novel was most prominent in the eighteenth century, as practiced in England by Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749); and in France by JeanJacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, (1761); and Pierre de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). The technique was also exploited to great effect at the turn of the twentieth century by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897). A century later, in response to the advent of e-mail, which gave a reprieve of sorts to the dying art of personal correspondence, Douglas Coupland composed a novel in that medium: Microserfs (1995). (No doubt someone will soon write a novel in the form of text messages or tweets, if it hasn’t already been done. Fiction will once again be imitating life writing as it evolves.) Like diary narration, letter narration justifies its existence and enhances its credibility by disclosing the circumstances of its production. Like diary entries, the units of epistolary narration are composed during, rather than after, the events narrated. As with diary narration,

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then, the reader may have the illusion of immediacy, of eavesdropping on events in progress. What is most distinctive about it as a narrative technique, however, are its use of multiple narrators and the reciprocal relations among them. But these are not distinctive of fiction; rather, they are found in the real correspondence that epistolary novels imitate. Here, again, the novel simulates life writing (though not the memoir). All of the preceding should serve to demonstrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between fiction and life writing. It suggests that the rise of the novel depended heavily on its readers’ acquaintance with, and taste for, actual life writing—that life writing to some degree created the readership of the novel. At the same time, fiction’s simulations of actual life writing indirectly promoted, and lent a literary aura to, the forms they mimicked. Novels may therefore have helped to whet readers’ appetite for actual life writing. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery not only among individual writers but among entire genres. Until about 1900, then, the formal repertoires of the novel and life writing were largely congruent. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the invention of a radically new fictional narrative technique— interior monologue—disrupted this close relationship. Although most literary fiction continued to trade in realism, and thus to mimic familiar life-writing genres, modernist fiction struck off in a different direction from its more earthbound relative. The novelty of interior monologue, also known as stream of consciousness, is that it produces a narrative (an account of a sequence of events) without a narrator: with this new technique, there is no agent to whom the narrative can be attributed, inside or outside the fiction (other than the author, of course). Thus, in the first chapter of William Faulkner’s tour de force of interior monologue, The Sound and the Fury, the central character, Benjy, is not narrating events as they happen. As a result of some mental impairment, which some scholars today believe to be autism avant la lettre (before the syndrome was named), he is apparently incapable of doing so: he is mute throughout the novel. Rather than telling the story, even to himself—the chapter is not a soliloquy—he is simply being, experiencing ongoing events and remembering past ones. Through the medium of interior monologue, Faulkner presents a verbal simulacrum of the flow of sensory, emotional, conceptual, and memory

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impressions through Benjy’s odd consciousness, leaving the reader to sort out them out. At this point in literary history, then—and for the first time—fiction developed a narrative technique that was not part of the repertoire of life writing. Interior monologue has remained exclusively a fictional narrative technique. It is not inherently unavailable to, or inconceivable in, life writing, however. There’s no logical reason why it couldn’t be used as an autobiographical technique; one might try to reconstruct one’s own experience as an inchoate stream of thoughts, feelings, and memories. But it would be labor intensive to write and probably tedious to read: the ratio of words to duration of experience is extremely high. As far as I know, it has never been used to compose a sustained autobiographical narrative. (The fact that it has not been so used suggests that readers expect a different kind of experience even from literary memoir than they do from the novel.) To return to the commonality of fiction and life writing, we may now take a closer look at the two most popular techniques of narrating both novels and memoirs: first- and third-person narration, or character and outside narration. It is common to divide character narration between that in which the narrator is the protagonist and that in which he or she is an observer of actions carried out by others. (These are sometimes referred to as first-person central and first-person secondary, respectively.) Thus, in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the narrator, Jake Barnes, is also the protagonist; in contrast, in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator is Nick Carraway, while the protagonist is the titular Gatsby. These two types of novel correspond to two different kinds of memoir, as delineated in chapter one—that which focuses on the author, a variant of autobiography, and that which focuses on someone else, a variant of biography. But, as I said there, it is better to think in terms of a continuum from exclusive focus on the self to exclusive focus on another, rather than of two distinct categories. In any case, one can read Hemingway’s novel as really about the relationship between Jake and Brett and Fitzgerald’s as about that between Nick and Gatsby. Rarely are these distinctions as sharp in practice as they seem in theory. When we turn to third-person or outsider narration, fictional and nonfictional techniques diverge. In the analysis of fiction, third-person

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narration is usually subdivided according to the degree of knowledge displayed by the narrator. By “knowledge” we do not mean factual or conceptual knowledge; it’s a matter of the narrator’s access to characters’ minds. Third-person narration is conventionally divided among three varieties: omniscient, in which the narrator has access to the minds of all characters; limited, in which the narrator offers access to the minds of a small number of characters (if only one, that character is usually the protagonist—in fact, this privileging is one index of that status); and objective, in which the narrator has no direct insight into what any character is thinking. In objective narration the outside narrator resembles a biographer, who has no direct access to people’s thoughts at a particular time in the past—unless they were expressed and documented. But in “omniscient” narration, as the adjective suggests, the outside narrator has a god-like relationship to the action—knowing all, seeing all. In real life, of course, we cannot read each others’ minds. Therefore, omniscience is not conventional in life writing. So when it comes to outside narrative, fiction has a considerably larger repertoire than life writing. Novelists, who have, after all, created the entire world of their fictions—and whose fictional worlds do not have to correspond to the real one—are allowed to use narrators who have greater than human powers. One technique novelists often use to give readers access to characters’ minds is called free indirect discourse. It is best understood by analogy with dialogue. Novelists may report dialogue directly—that is, verbatim: “John said, ‘I’ll go see Martha.’ ” Or they may do so indirectly: “John said that he was going to see Martha.” They may do the same with characters’ thoughts: “John thought, ‘I’ll go see Martha’ ” (direct discourse), or “John thought that he would go to see Martha” (indirect discourse). Free indirect discourse goes one step further, collapsing the distance between outside narrator and character by removing the explicit ascription of thought to the character: “John would go see Martha.” Thus, free indirect discourse is not character narration—i.e., by the character; rather, it is narrative from the character’s perspective. In any case, its use is almost always a sign that a narrative is fictional, not memoir—again, because memoir narrators do not conventionally have this power to know others’ minds. The great popularity of this technique means that, despite the great overlap in the techniques of the novel and the memoir, it is often very easy to

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determine—on the basis of textual evidence alone—that a given narrative is a novel. Access to characters’ minds is the tip-off. Of course, conventions are customs, not laws. And some believe they exist to be violated. As it happened, with the advent of post-structuralism in the late twentieth century, many conventions of life writing, as well as of fiction, were undermined and subverted. In his 1999 authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch: A Memoir, the distinguished biographer Edmund Morris inserted himself into the narrative as a character at various points antedating his own birth. Predictably, however, his gesture of making himself a fictional character in a biography created some consternation; many thought Morris had overstepped the boundary between life writing and fiction. And to my knowledge, his experiment has not been repeated, even by him. But the implicit proscription of omniscience in life writing is sometimes violated. A mild form of this involves the ascription of thoughts to individuals when there seems to be sufficient grounding in interviews to make it plausible. Thus, if a writer has been told what someone was thinking at a particular time, it has become acceptable for that writer to attribute the thought to that individual in the manner of an omniscient narrator. This is another example of the reciprocal relationship between the novel and the memoir; here the life writer takes his cue from the novelist. And this is a trend that has become increasingly common: the appropriation of fictional techniques for nonfiction. But such use of omniscience remains rare, and it is found more often in journalism than what we usually consider life writing. The parallel between the forms of the novel and memoir extends to other distinctions pointed out in chapter 1. Novels, too, can trace a character’s entire life span, a large chunk of it, or merely a single episode; their temporal scope may be extensive or limited. The two twentieth-century novels referred to above, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, both focus on short, discrete periods of time: in this way, they resemble, and simulate, single-experience memoirs. In the nineteenth century, novels tended to have longer time spans and larger casts of characters. So for example, Dickens’s Great Expectations traces the narrator’s life from childhood to early adulthood. This is the typical span of the bildungsroman, or “growth novel.” This time span is also common in life writing. And, as

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we’ve seen, the term bildungsroman has been borrowed from the realm of fiction to refer to such memoirs. The same applies to the notion of narrative breadth: novels (whether auto- or biographical) may attempt to render the whole of characters’ lives or single dimensions of them. Aside from interior monologue, then, which has not been used in life writing, and omniscience, which is rare in life writing because it violates our sense of the limits on human narrators, there is little that distinguishes life writing from fiction in narrative technique. (Granted, the novel can be far more capacious than life writing tends to be. It was the scope of the nineteenth-century novels that caused Henry James to disparage them as “baggy monsters.”) One fundamental aspect of any narrative is the ordering principle behind the sequence of events. Chronology is the dominant ordering principle in memoir, probably because it seems intuitively apt, even inevitable: after all, we live our lives in chronological order. But we do not, and need not, remember them that way; in fact, we usually do not. As a work of memory, then, memoir need not proceed in chronological lockstep. It can be organized in different ways according to principles other than strict temporality. One common technique is in fact to begin not at the beginning but rather at some intermediate or penultimate point, then circle back to some point of origin and tell the story chronologically up to and beyond the opening vignette. This scheme, of course, did not originate with fiction or memoir: it derives from classical epic, from which it takes its name—beginning in medias res (Latin for “in the middle of things”). Similarly, as in novels, flashbacks and flashforwards may interrupt the chronological sequence. But memoir may also be structured entirely without reference to the passage of time. (I am speaking here of the overall scheme of the narrative: typically, even within non-chronological organizations, individual episodes are narrated chronologically. At some point, chronology seems inescapable as a way of telling a story.) This is the case with Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Each chapter focuses on a different person important to her. The very first chapter, “No Name Woman,” concerns an aunt who died in China before the author was born. We learn most about Kingston’s life as a young adult in the second chapter, “White Tigers.” The third, “Shaman,” concerns her

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mother’s medical career in China, before she emigrated and had children. Kingston treats her own childhood most specifically and sustainedly in the last chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” (She takes greater liberties, highly novelistic, with narrative form than these. I confine myself here to the issue of chronology.) Thus, while the individual chapters are chronologically told, chronology is not the overall structural principle. Obviously, Woman Warrior is not a single-experience narrative, but neither is it a classic full-life narrative. Although the narrative addresses her childhood, her adolescence, and her adulthood, long stretches of her life are omitted. And parts of her narrative are about others’ lives. In any case, the book does not track her life as it transpired in time. There is little or no suspense, little or no sense of narrative resolution or closure at the end. It is also hard to categorize in terms of breadth. It does not limit itself to one dimension of her life, although her relationship with her mother is prominent. Nor does it attend equally to all of her life’s many dimensions: her love life and marriage go without mention, as does her life as a writer. Rather, her structure characterizes her life as involving discrete formative relationships that pull her in different directions and make conflicting demands on her. A single multidimensional, consistently chronological narrative simply would not have been able to convey this vision of her life. Woman Warrior was, and remains, sui generis among memoirs. But it suggests that the formal possibilities of memoir have not yet been fully explored. Similarly, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is divided into chapters that are not devoted to discrete periods of her life, much less chronological in sequence. Rather, each is organized around some central issue or concern announced by its title and an initial visual image: e.g., her father’s penchant for artifice, his suicide, or her parents’ doomed marriage. Within each, the narrative may shift suddenly ahead or back in time; overall, the narrative is highly recursive, circling back to experiences already narrated or alluded to so as to reveal further dimensions of them. If it follows a chronological process, it is her deepening understanding of the complex dynamics of her nuclear family, particularly of her relation with her troubled father. In addition, for a memoir, and especially perhaps for a graphic one, it relies heavily on a complex set of literary allusions to represent her experience.

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(This is partly homage to her father, an avid reader who was also her high school English teacher.) Even a single-experience narrative can eschew chronology. One of the most formally inventive of recent memoirs is Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s account of an eighteen-month period in the late 1960s during which she was sequestered at McLean Hospital, one of the nation’s premier mental hospitals. What is inevitably lost in the otherwise impressive film adaptation is the sense of a radically, but purposefully, fragmented narrative. Granted, the book does have a chronological spine, provided by actual hospital records Kaysen interspersed through the book. The first ones document her admission; the last, her discharge. Aside from that, however, the order of the vignette-like chapters has no discernible relation to the passage of time. None of this is accidental. Like Kingston’s, this is a narrative in which form is crucial to its meaning, to the work that the memoir does. First, the fact that the memoir is a single-experience narrative, rather than a bildungsroman, much less a full-life narrative, is significant. Kaysen could have embedded the episode of her hospitalization within the larger narrative of her life—including the two decades or so that elapsed between her discharge and the book’s composition. Had she done so, readers might have scoured her pre-McLean life for signs of the emotional distress that landed her in McLean. But her actual structure defies that impulse. Similarly, narrating her post-McLean life would have gratified readers’ desire for resolution in the form of recovery, presumably as a result of her treatment. But Kaysen goes out of her way to elide both the run-up and the follow-up to her hospitalization. By doing so, she resists the usual formula of illness narratives, which conventionally culminate with, and celebrate, individual recovery. To use that model with mental illness, of course, would mean both to acknowledge her madness and to validate her treatment. But Kaysen declines to do either. The closest she comes to acknowledging that she needed hospitalization is in her admission of her attempted suicide and self-harm. She qualifies this, however, by deflecting attention from herself to portray a number of other inmates who demonstrate much more serious pathology. Further, presenting so many brief vignettes out of chronological order undermines any sense of progressive improvement or full recovery.

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So does her inclusion of chapters that are not narrative but expository. In these she expounds skeptical ideas about the incidence of mental illness in her generation of young women and about the diagnoses imposed on them. One chapter simply quotes the official description of her diagnosis, borderline personality disorder, from the bible of the psychiatry profession, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The next chapter deconstructs it. The innovative form of this memoir makes her point. It not only purposefully disrupts readerly expectations of illness narratives, it also resists her conscription into the role of a compliant mental patient, grateful for her restored sanity. Implicitly through her form, and explicitly in some expository chapters, Kaysen undermines and subverts the validity of her diagnosis and the authority of the medical discourse to which she was subjected as a patient. Here, as narrator, she assumes control of her story, which was denied her as a patient, when her chart was composed by others. Hence the inclusion of some of her medical records, embedded here in a larger narrative that she writes herself. Subtly, but forcefully, she exposes some of the inadequate therapeutic approaches brought to bear on her and other vulnerable young women in the 1960s. Again, her memoir is not just, or primarily, a memoir of a difficult time in her life but rather an indictment of assumptions about what constitutes mental illness and mental health. All of this is the work of her memoir—which, to that extent, takes on the function of testimony. My point here is that this indictment is not, and probably could not be, expressed through a seamless sequential narrative; rather, it required a radically ruptured and non- or even antichronological account. As we can see with this example, the question of closure also takes on a different dimension in memoir. In traditional biography, the conventional end point of the narrative is the death of the subject; in realist fiction, it is the resolution of some central plot conflict or point of suspense: Will Elizabeth Bennett marry Darcy? Will Ahab kill Moby-Dick, or vice versa? Will Daisy run off with Gatsby? With first-person narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional, the death of the narrator is not a possible conclusion (at least in realistic fiction). So while Ahab’s survival is in doubt, Ishmael’s is not. And memoir is less plot driven than fiction. So closure needs to

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be achieved in some other way. With the bildungsroman—in memoir as well as in fiction—the conventional resolution is the arrival of the individual at some sort of equilibrium, initiation into society as a young adult. With more distinct subgenres the kind of closure is predetermined by the generic formula: in a conversion narrative, by salvation; in captivity narrative, by rescue; in slave narrative, by escape to the free North, and so on. Part of what is meant by “how memoir works” is the way it is composed, the nuts and bolts of narrative nonfiction. This involves questions of how lived experience is represented. In theory, the components—the devices and techniques—of the novel and memoir are often indistinguishable. And much of the time, lived experience is depicted using methods that may also be used to depict events that are only imagined. This is because, whether fictional or nonfictional, written narrative has pursued verisimilitude (perhaps increasingly so through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). But as I hope to show, in the case of nonfiction, especially the memoir, the embrace of verisimilitude may be counterproductive. One fundamental distinction often overlooked in analyzing fiction— perhaps because it seems so obvious—is that between “scene” and “summary.” (This distinction originated with the ancients, Plato and Aristotle. As a result, the fancy lit-crit terms for these two elements are the Greek words mimesis and diegesis.) In concept the distinction is quite simple. As the term suggests, in “scene” experience is presented through a verbal transcription of events as they unfold. Scene typically employs a great deal of description, but the surest sign of “scene” is dialogue, especially verbatim quotation of characters, as in this excerpt from Philip Roth’s Patrimony: When I got to the hospital the next morning, I said to my father, “How did you sleep?” “No good. The Chinaman kept everybody up.” In a chair beside his bed the old [Chinese] man, sitting now, was struggling with the tube, and his daughter was already ministering to him. (162)

The presence of direct dialogue is the clincher, but the very first clause identifies this passage as scene because it specifies a unique time and place. Scene trades in the direct (re)presentation of particular events.

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In contrast, as the other term implies, summary involves the retrospective summation of experience. Instead of relating unique events, as above, a narrative may describe typical actions or activities in order to characterize a period of time. If scene is cinematic or dramatic in form, summary is more expository. It is less detailed, more general or abstract. It also views the past from a more remote perspective. The emphasis is on sifting through experience for its residual gist. Summary doesn’t necessarily narrate, strictly speaking; it may present the product of reflection on experience, as in this excerpt from Patrimony: My father’s retirement pension from Metropolitan Life provided him with more than enough to live on in the modest no-frills style that seemed to him natural and sufficient for someone who grew up in near-poverty, worked slavishly for some forty years to give his family a secure, if simple, home life, and lacked the slightest interest in conspicuous consumption, ostentation, or luxury. (23–24)

Here Roth concisely characterizes not only his father’s financial circumstances at retirement but important elements of his character and his experience over a large span of time. In summary the narrator is not recalling and re-presenting an experience the way it happened but rather trying to convey the essence, the significance, of a past episode. Thus, summary foregrounds retrospection and narratorial perspective. It is more attentive to the understanding of the I-now than to the impressions of the I-then. The difference between scene and summary, then, is a difference in kind, rather than in degree. Moreover, they are not just different forms of textuality; they involve distinct types of actions on the part of the author. Scene puts a premium on certain writing skills—the ability to describe and to imitate speech; summary requires higher-order thinking, powers of reflection, insight, and distillation. As a model, I offer this passage from Tim Page’s Parallel Play, an account by a distinguished music critic of growing up with Asperger’s syndrome: One of the things that I now dislike most about Manhattan—the need to don some sort of psychological armor to make it through

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the day—was liberating to me then . . . New York was an onslaught of dissociated stimuli jarring and exhilarating. I quickly learned that I couldn’t give to every panhandler, no matter how sad the story; I couldn’t keep track of all the dramas on the street, and I had to laugh off rudeness and aggression. As such, by necessity I managed to close off most of my receptors. This emotional shield, which becomes habitual and which I have since tried very hard to purge from my system, permitted and even encouraged me to ignore whatever was going on around me, and for a time I grew purely selfish, as though nothing else existed but a few chosen people and my goals. (170)

As a whole, Page’s memoir is a model of compression. Without sacrificing vividness but with a minimum of scene, he recounts his whole life in a way that is remarkably candid and impressively self-knowing. One senses, in fact, that the self-knowledge is in part a product of the writing. There may be nothing inherent in either mode that makes it more or less appropriate for nonfiction or fiction. But scene isn’t called scene for nothing: the technique is associated with drama for good reason. Indeed, the distinctive textual characteristic of drama is precisely that it is composed entirely of scene. Conventionally, drama has no narrator. (There are, of course, well-known exceptions in twentieth-century drama, The Glass Menagerie and Our Town, in which key characters step “out of character” to narrate. As I’ve said, conventions are ingrained aesthetic habits, not laws.) And so narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional, that relies heavily on scene approaches drama in its mode of presentation. It minimizes or jettisons narratorial perspective. Sometimes the distinction between summary and scene is expressed as the distinction between telling and showing. Again, this is illustrative of two authorial stances toward the experience in question. Showing tends to present experience more immediately. Literally, “immediate” means without mediation, and with scene, the reader may have the illusion of observing experience quite directly, as it unfolds—the way the audience in a theater observes events as they are performed by actors. Indeed, in contemporary narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional, this impression is often heightened by the use of the present tense for narration: “I enter the room . . . ” rather than “I entered the room.”

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In contrast, narrative that tells maintains the presence of a narrator between the reader and the events being portrayed. Nonfictional narrative that relies primarily on telling approaches the expository, the explanatory. Thus, we may imagine narrative as situated between drama at one end of a continuum and the expository essay at the other. (In drama and cinema, summary has to be smuggled into the text as dialogue, and if it’s too obviously there for the benefit of the audience, rather than the other characters, we say it sounds “stagey.”) In fiction and nonfiction, it is rare to find narrative that is exclusively scene or summary; the two modes are often used in alternation. Even when narrative is mostly scene—as Patrimony is—summary is often used to introduce, or set, the scene. When used thus, it functions as exposition. Thus it often appears at the beginnings of whole narratives or chapters. (The summary from Patrimony opens the second chapter.) But the general trend in fiction and nonfiction over the last two centuries has been toward scene and away from summary, toward showing and away from telling. Under the influence of Hemingway and other early modernists, twentieth-century fiction often consciously minimized summary. Indeed, the deliberate withholding of exposition and commentary is one of the distinctive features of modernist fiction. In How Fiction Works, James Wood observed that the novel became more painterly during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century realism, from Balzac on, creates such an abundance of detail that the modern reader has come to expect of narrative that it will always contain a certain superfluity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other works, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail. (81)

One distinguishing feature of literary realism, then—still the dominant mode of literary fiction, even after postmodernism—is the use of abundant, even gratuitous, detail to create its trademark sense of verisimilitude (the appearance of truth). But this degree of detail makes much more sense in third-person, than in first-person, fiction because third-person narrators are less bound to human powers and the ability to retain so much detail is not common among mortals.

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As fiction grew more painterly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nonfiction has emulated it. In contemporary life writing, this sometimes produces what I refer to as “hi-def memoir” or HDAB (for “high-definition autobiography,” by analogy with HDTV). Ironically, though, the pursuit of verisimilitude and immediacy can backfire: when examined closely, such narratives reveal themselves to be highly suspect. When life writing imitates fiction too closely, reading it, too, can require the suspension of disbelief, which is at odds with the notion that memoir can be trusted more or less at face value. Admittedly, vivid scene makes for good reads, so-called page-turners. And this formal feature may help to account for memoir’s current popularity: memoir may have drawn readership from fiction in part by emulating the novel’s textual qualities. I am not claiming that HDAB is an entirely new or unfortunate development. Conventions change over time, and the memoir and the novel have developed in tandem over the last several centuries, imitating each other. Indeed, to explain and justify his (sparing) use of dialogue in his memoir, Benjamin Franklin cited John Bunyan’s narrative method in Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s influence on Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson: Honest John was the first that I know of who mixes narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader, who in the most interesting parts finds himself, as it were, admitted into the company and present at the conversation. (244)

No slouch as a writer, and pragmatic in all things, Franklin saw how dialogue could engage the reader and offer the illusion of immediacy. Thus, Franklin helps to establish the genealogy of this technique in nonfiction. In doing so, he makes my point, though, because he seems to have felt the need to defend his use of a fictive technique in a nonfictional genre. In any case, memoir became progressively more novelistic over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, while fiction has obviously imitated life-writing genres, the influence of technique has been mainly in the other direction: memoirs have become increasingly novelistic in method. In the case of recent memoirs by novelists (like Philip Roth), the congruence of technique comes as no surprise. Still, I think it

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bears thinking about, because of the fundamental differences between the two genres. Pertinent here is the fact that contemporary memory research suggests that long-term memory does not favor discrete episodes—in two ways. First, even vivid memories of momentous life events (“flashbulb memories”) have proved to be quite unreliable. Second, when it comes to recalling everyday existence, memory does not privilege discrete events over typical ones (Yagoda 108–109). Thus, summary is apparently truer to the way memory actually works, which is to distill (and distort), rather than simply record, our pasts. I am aware that some people may have much more vivid and retentive memories than mine (and one source of my gratification in reading others’ memoirs may be that they compensate for the relative poverty of my own memory). Still, the tendency toward a certain kind of verisimilitude seems to have been taken to a new level in contemporary life narrative, such that there seems to be a whole school of memoirists with photographic memories. Or not: few of these writers can have memories as accurate as their texts suggest. And therein lies the rub. I have nothing against period detail as such. It can be highly evocative. So I appreciate the use of detail to evoke a time period or a place—the “scene of childhood,” say, as background and context for particular incidents. What troubles me are the embrace of verisimilitude to the exclusion of other modes of representation and the provision of details as constituents of particular incidents in a way that defies plausibility. Hence this paradox: the pursuit of verisimilitude by accretion of detail can ultimately erode credibility. I could offer sample passages from any number of narratives, but let this excerpt from Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black, by Gregory Howard Williams, illustrate what I mean: Five men crouched on their hands and knees in a circle, dollar bills tightly clutched in their fists. Dimes, quarters, and nickels lay on the dirty brown linoleum floor in front of them. The money changed hands and a bottle of cheap wine made its way around the room. When it reached Dad, all eyes turned toward him expectantly . . . When I saw Dad lift the bottle to his lips, I knew I had to work fast.

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“Come on, Dad, let’s go home,” I said . . . He looked up from the dice he had just rolled across the floor. The point was nine. (78)

As here, the provision of minute details of appearance, clothing, and setting is often accompanied by verbatim dialogue; indeed, the two formal features are aesthetic corollaries. In my experience, the advent of HDAB has gone unremarked on in reviews and criticism of life writing—with the exception of biography. When the subjects are world-historical figures, detail may be taken seriously, and inaccuracies or invented details and dialogue may be faulted. Yet HDAB raises some issues rooted in the distinction between fiction and memoir. While we should not deny that all memoir is in some sense, and to some degree, fictive, because (among other reasons) memory is actively constructive rather than passively mimetic, we should not forget that memoir makes different truth claims from the novel. Or, more precisely, memoir makes truth claims; the novel does not. At the risk of sounding literal-minded, let me say that in memoir high density and specificity of detail are more problematic than in fiction. For one thing, they implicitly characterize the narrator as being in possession of a highly retentive memory, when this may not be the case (or even the intention). That is, the provision of highly specific detail makes a tacit claim about the author’s self and his or her access to the past that may not be true, or even supportable. But the corrosive effect of HDAB goes beyond the issue of misleading self-characterization. The provision of specific details and direct dialogue goes hand in hand with a preference for showing over telling, or scene over summary, in life writing as well as in fiction. But when the reader of a memoir is “shown” what no narrator could possibly remember, then the narrative requires the same suspension of disbelief as the novel. And that seems counterproductive. In any case, perhaps unfairly, I find myself doubting the general truth of memoirs that trade in implausibly specific details. They reveal themselves as more art than fact. As suggested above, a third feature that often accompanies dense detail and direct dialogue is the use of the present tense for narrative of past events. Again, I could cite numerous texts as examples. Here is the

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opening of The Next Better Place: A Father and Son on the Road, published in 2003 by Michael C. Keith, who was born in 1945: It is 1959. My mother and father talk while I pilot my scooter along the cement paths that surround the New York State Capitol. Rising from the cracks in the pavement are puff y white dandelion balls, atomic bomb mushroom clouds, which I run over as part of my search-and-destroy mission to save the planet. It is late spring and the flowers and trees are in full dress. I am about to be transferred to the care of my father, and my mother is justifiably reluctant to consummate the exchange. This is the second try, and as before she makes my father promise that I will be properly fed and sheltered. “I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t so hard to make ends meet, you know. On my waitress pay I can hardly feed the girls and the apartment is so small. Besides, he wants to be with you,” she says, and pain and guilt are mingled in her defeated expression. (4)

The connection among these three features is clear enough, I think; the use of the present tense is apt, though not necessary, in a mode of autobiography (HDAB) that purports, presumes, or pretends to put the reader in the scene. But it is clearly impossible that a fifty-year-old writer could remember verbatim dialogue or such specific details about this key event in his life. And the risk of providing such detail is that it may counterproductively remind us that verisimilitude is after all and at bottom a writerly illusion. Understanding and accepting this in fiction is one thing: everything about a novel is invented. In a memoir such verisimilitude may be harder to swallow. Writing of this sort makes me wonder at times just what it is (generically) that am I reading. What is the truth status of this narrative? How much can I trust this narrator? Writing like this may erode a distinction between fiction and nonfiction that must be maintained to preserve the integrity of memoir. When James Frey was revealed to have grossly exaggerated, among other things, the length of his incarceration—inflating a few hours into several weeks—the celebrated memoirist Mary Karr took him to task in a New York Times op-ed essay. Of course, what he did was blatant, shameless,

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and blameworthy—opportunistic, at the very least. But writers like Karr had been trading in hi-def memoir for a long time. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the very first page of Karr’s The Liars’ Club: My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark. I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest . . . He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown—a pattern of Texas bluebonnets bunched into nosegays tied with ribbon against a field of nappy white cotton. I had tucked my knees under it to make a tent . . . He had watery blue eyes behind thick glasses, and a mustache that looked like a caterpillar . . . He held a piece of hem between thumb and forefinger. (3)

Examples like this, in which much of the detail seems implausible, may have emboldened less skilled and sophisticated writers to be more inventive than is wise. As we’ll see in the next chapter, the ethical stakes are very different in Frey’s and Karr’s narratives, but matters of credibility are not entirely separable from aesthetic ones. In any case, I find overly detailed narratives meretricious; their appeal lies on their surface and it may mask a lack of substance. As a result, such narrative sometimes strikes me as aesthetically dishonest. In addition to Tim Page’s Parallel Play, mentioned earlier, I would offer another model of effective technique: Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992). A prequel to Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988), in which he recounted his life with Roger Horwitz, Becoming a Man traces Monette’s experience as a closeted gay male up to the transformative moment when he met Rog. Monette manages to narrate nearly three decades of his life vividly and compellingly with a minimum of scene. When a scene is presented, it has real impact, for two reasons. First, because they are few and far between, each scene stands out against the background of summary; second, each recounts an event sufficiently significant to warrant treatment in this mode. Each seems memorable enough to have been remembered in detail. Moreover, Monette’s primary reliance on summary is appropriate to the coming-out narrative, a variant of the

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conversion narrative. Throughout the memoir, the narrative emphasizes the vision of the liberated narrating I at the expense of that of his closeted younger self. Collapsing the difference between the I-now and the I-then in the interests of verisimilitude would have been counterproductive— antithetical to the politics and ethics of the mature Paul Monette. My final example may seem unlikely: Bechdel’s aforementioned Fun Home. One might think that, like daily comic strips, graphic memoirs would consist mainly, or even exclusively, of scene. Not so. In Fun Home, scene is the exception. (And as with Becoming a Man, the sparing use of scene gives it greater impact.) A typical sequence in Fun Home has what I call “voice over”: narrative prose across the top of panels. Taken separately from the images, this reads essayistically. Consider the following, which spans the first three panels: Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a game of “airplane.” / As he launched me my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. / It was a discomfort well worth the rare physical contact and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him. (3)

With these panels, which depict the action described (the only “dialogue” is an “oof ” issuing from the small girl held aloft), Bechdel introduces one of her central allusions, the story of Daedalus and Icarus, which she refers to intermittently throughout and uses to bring her narrative to its surprising resolution, with an image of her father catching her as she jumps off a swimming pool diving board. Bechdel uses the split between the image and the voice over to juxtapose the conflicting perspectives of the mature narrator and her younger self, but the narrator’s reflections are generally favored. To reiterate my premise: memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels. And there is some danger in the tendency of contemporary memoir to be written, and to encourage being read, like fiction. At some point, readers who expect something different from memoir in the way of truth value may begin to question what they are reading. My own reaction to memoirs like these hi-def narratives is that, as much as I may enjoy spending the night with them, I don’t always respect them the next morning.

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More seriously, I have come to value good summary over good scene. As I’ve said previously, it makes different demands on the writer, and it offers different rewards to the reader. By nature it requires a degree of reflection and self-awareness on the part of the writer. Scene requires technical skills, such as pacing, that I certainly appreciate. And in memoir as in the novel, scene can come across as perceptive and smart in its observations of character and behavior. Description can be gratifying for its own sake. But by acknowledging the mediation of the writer, which HDAB pretty much elides or denies, summary may require writers to be more responsible—to their readers, to those they write about, and to the larger world that they are supposed to be faithfully representing. And we may appreciate in summary things we don’t associate with scene: wisdom and self-knowledge. So the cross-fertilization between memoir and the novel, though it enriches both, may ultimately be counterproductive: that is the case if it threatens to obscure the boundary or distinctness between the two. I am not referring here just to the existence of a gray area in which we find narratives that are difficult to locate in one category or the other. This is inevitable and quite wholesome; writers are not obliged to produce purebred narratives. But when the memoir seeks to provide verisimilitude in the manner of the novel, it may undermine its own credibility—which is not a consideration with fiction. Ben Yagoda has shrewdly observed this paradoxical fact about memoir: narrative demands a degree of specificity that memory cannot supply (110). Paradoxically, when narrative provides such specificity, such verisimilitude, narrative may actually loosen its grip on reality. The effect may be to erode its power—its ability to do a certain kind of work—which depends on its having traction in the actual world.

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[4] MEMOIR’S ETHICS

While the distinction between the novel and the memoir may have relatively minor implications for its formal repertoire, it has major consequences in the realm of ethics.As creators and masters of their own textual worlds, novelists are relatively free from legal and ethical constraints. For them, the only obvious wrongs are plagiarism and libel. Plagiarism—the theft or improper appropriationof someone else’s work--is not just an ethical lapse: it is a betrayal of the novelist’s obligation to make something genuinely new. By revealing the novelist as not such a creative writer after all, it amounts to aesthetic bankruptcy. At the same time, in fiction a certain degree of intertextuality is allowed, and even encouraged. Literary critics use this term to refer to the recycling of earlier work in the form of allusion, adaptation, update, spin-off, and parody. Intertextuality is not merely legitimate; it is essential to the creation of literary traditions. For example, Moby-Dick would have been literally inconceivable without Shakespeare and Milton. So, within limits, intertextuality in fiction is immune from charges of plagiarism and copyright violation. Similarly, because of the novel’s status as fiction, charges of libel are also rare and difficult to sustain. Fictional characters are often based on people the novelist knows, but writers rarely depict them directly and transparently; as long as the novelist doesn’t use real names, he or she can maintain plausible deniability. This practice is common enough that it has its own name: a roman à clef (French for “novel with key”) is a novel in which characters are understood to be stand-ins for real people. For example, Robert Harris’s The Ghost (2007) is obviously about his (former) friend British Prime Minister Tony Blair. 79

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In contrast, because of its rootedness in the real world, memoir is fraught with ethical dangers. Memoirists assume two distinct kinds of responsibilities: first, to the biographical and historical record; second, to people they collaborate with or represent in their memoirs. The former obligation has received far more recent media attention than the latter. The Frey affair is only one example of a much larger phenomenon. It is not always—or perhaps ever—easy to say exactly how the obligation to the truth needs to be fulfilled. The memoirist’s dilemma is as follows. On the one hand, the memoirist is obliged to tell the truth, or at least not to lie—because the genre resides in the realm of nonfiction. On the other, as its name suggests, memoir relies primarily on an inherently fallible faculty, human memory. And as Ben Yagoda has noted, narrative calls for more in the way of detail than memory can provide (109). Furthermore, as a literary genre, memoir involves a degree of creativity. So there is a paradox at the heart of memoir: the genre demands a fidelity to truth that may overtax its source and conflict with its aspirations as art. We need to grant memoirists some leeway with the facts, then, and it is generally conceded that some latitude comes with the generic territory. Clearly, to require too much in the way of factual accuracy is to cramp memoirists’ style and unduly limit the genre as art. At the same time, not to insist on some adherence to fact in serious memoir is to undermine the genre’s power and interfere with its work. We need to strike a medium between legalistic insistence on “just the facts” and indifference to veracity. The critical concept of the “autobiographical pact” may be useful here. The notion was articulated in 1975 by a prominent French critic, Philippe Lejeune. According to Lejeune, when the narrator, protagonist, and author of a work all bear the same name, that narrative declares itself to be autobiography (or memoir). This does not mean merely that the narrative is autobiographical. Plays and novels may be autobiographical. But autobiographical plays—like Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night—do not generally use the author’s name for the protagonist, and autobiographical novels—like Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—do not necessarily use first-person narrators. When we say that novels or plays are autobiographical, we are saying only that their contents have a basis in, or may parallel, events in their authors’ lives. We are not reclassifying them as nonfiction.

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In contrast, according to Lejeune, if a work announces itself as autobiography, we take it to be the story of a real person—its author—not of a fictional character. Two caveats are important. First, although the terms in which this notion is expressed may sound legalistic, the pact is a matter of literary convention, not of law. It’s a tacit understanding between reader and writer. This is not to say that memoir writers may not run afoul of laws; they certainly may. What it means is that the pact does not constitute a legal contract between author and reader (although the author and the publisher may have one). Nor is the writer swearing to tell the truth, all of the truth, and nothing but the truth. The pact does not promise, much less guarantee, factual truth on every level; rather, it affirms the author’s identity with the work’s narrator and protagonist. Thus the genre has an identity claim at its core: by definition, a memoir or autobiography purports to represent its author and the extra-textual world more or less directly, in a way that fiction, no matter how historical or autobiographical, does not claim to do. In practice, tolerance for invention in memoir varies from reader to reader. And, as I’ve suggested, the genre cannot function without some wiggle room regarding facts. Readers need to acknowledge that memoir’s reliance on memory renders it fallible; likewise, they need to accept that memoir is inevitably, to a degree, fictive (not fictional). The representation of the past necessarily requires some creativity on the part of the writer; few people have photographic memories, and even the most faithful memory does not provide a verbal transcription of events. Furthermore, as we’ve seen, memoir cannot comprise the whole of a life; narrative must always be highly selective. Any memoir is therefore necessarily at best a partial account of a life, in more ways than one. At the same time, there must be limits on invention. What was so troublesome in the case of James Frey was the extremity of his “embellishments” of his story. When one extends a very short stay in jail (a matter of hours) to a matter of months, one has exceeded most readers’ tolerance, including my own. Frey clearly misled his readers. But factors other than readers’ idiosyncrasies affect the latitude memoirists may take with the facts, their “prose license.” Observers generally concede that the rules (which again are really conventions) are not applied evenly and impartially: the truth police are much tougher in certain neighborhoods and with certain kinds of perpetrators.

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The tenor and circumstances of a memoir are crucial factors. When memoir aims at humor, readers are inclined to tolerate, even welcome, what Mark Twain called “stretchers,” his stock in trade. Thus, efforts to factcheck the essays of David Sedaris would seem to miss the point. According to Jack Shafer, when Alex Heard did just that in an article titled “This American Lie” in the New Republic, other journalists responded mostly with disbelief and ridicule. Similarly, readers may not care much about the number of conquests claimed by some celebrity Lothario (unless, of course, he names names). But readers do care a great deal about the truth claims of memoirs on certain subjects. As it happens, in contemporary America, recovery from substance abuse is one of those subjects. People who seek out narratives of rehabilitation—and I am not among them—invest in them heavily, and may take them quite literally. The backlash against Frey’s overstatements probably reflects in part the ethics of recovery, in which the candid acknowledgment of one’s failings is considered a crucial step. Ironically, exaggerating one’s faults in a rehab story may be deemed an ethical lapse. Too many readers have suffered too much torment as a result of substance abuse to tolerate those, like Frey, who hype their stories for dramatic effect—and, of course, for profit. The rehab narrative is, after all, a contemporary variant of the confession. While the confession originated as a formal expression of contrition to a divine, omniscient auditor (through a mortal intermediary), in literary form it functions very differently. When it involves public figures—politicians, celebrities—it enacts self-abasement before an anonymous community; the famous humble themselves—they “level” with us—in exchange, ideally, for our forgiveness, which implicitly entitles them to resume their former power and privilege. When it involves a writer like Frey, the stakes are lower, but the mutuality of the writer-reader relationship is important. In any case, this subgenre also seems to impose limits on invention. Another salient aspect of the Frey affair deserves noting: the acclaim and publicity his book received. Had Frey not been so vigorously promoted by Oprah Winfrey in the first place, the exposure of his distortions would not have been literally broadcast live when she invited him back on the show. The fact that his book was published by a prestigious press also contributed. Ironically, too, his transgression was in part a function

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of the memoir boom. The commodity value of certain kinds of narratives discourages publishers from challenging, much less checking, their veracity. At the same time, the disproportionate publicity devoted to successful memoirs makes them appealing targets for amateur sleuths, as well as for challenges from interested parties. An additional factor in this controversy may have been the use of fraudulent claims regarding weapons of mass destruction to justify the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. “Truthiness”—an insistence on one’s intuitive sense of reality without need for verification—was already under assault by liberal commentators like Stephen Colbert and Frank Rich. Frey took his liberties with the facts at an unfortunate juncture. The result was a perfect media storm. Several alternatives to Frey’s deceptions suggest themselves. One would have been for him to tell, and sell, his story as fiction. Because fiction makes no truth claims, publishing his story as a novel would have mooted the ethical issue. Of course, Frey had tried that and—significantly—found no takers for his manuscript. In a literary marketplace that favors memoir, doing the right thing had an obvious downside: not getting published. Another alternative would have been to stick to the facts. For Frey, this would have been complicated, however, because he initially composed and marketed his story as fiction. In such circumstances, it might have been hard for him to walk his story back, to sort out the true from the false. At this point, the author may not have been sure what actually happened; self-deception and creative license may impede recovery of the truth. Moreover, the writer is likely to be invested in the seductive (and conveniently subjective) notion of “emotional truth.” A third alternative would be to acknowledge the embellishments. Disclaimers are often attached to memoirs. Typically they declare that details like names and places have been changed to protect people’s privacy; that single characters are composites of more than one real person; and so on. Deviations from the facts are usually attributed to concern for others. But disclaimers also protect writers—from charges of violation of privacy, libel, and fraud. In the Frey case, the backlash impelled his publisher to insert just such a disclaimer in copies of the book to be sold thereafter, a prefatory “note to the reader” from Frey. This document is itself a fascinating life-writing text because it partakes of two genres: confession and apologia (self-justification). The publisher also offered a refund to buyers who

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demanded one. But such retroactive admissions of deceit are too little too late. An initial good-faith caveat against literal reading—the more specific, the better—would have obviated the need for any of this. Of course, full disclosure by Frey might have undermined the commercial value of his narrative, by revealing it to be highly inventive. As should be clear by now, I believe that Frey and his publisher were seriously remiss in their presentation of his story. But I am neither surprised, nor very offended, when I learn of discrete deviations from fact like those perpetrated by Frey. Part of my response to the Frey imbroglio was a sense that the readers most upset by his exaggerations must have been rather naive consumers of memoir: caveat lector (reader, beware)! As suggested in my discussion of memoir’s forms, I am, for different reasons, equally disturbed by the pervasive use of obviously invented detail in hi-def memoirs, which I think has a corrosive effect on the genre as a whole. The prominent memoirist Patricia Hampl has quipped that memoir should be shelved in bookstores as “non-poetry,” rather than nonfiction. I would put it differently. Many of the books published as memoirs today should bear the legend sometimes used to promote major motion pictures: “based on a true story.” The beauty of this statement is that, although it is phrased as a claim (and thus used to induce credence), it also functions as a disclaimer: what you are about to see is only based on a true story, not the truth itself. From a publisher’s point of view, disclaimers provide a kind of cheap insurance: if readers are told up front not to expect utter veracity, they cannot later say they were deceived when they discover minor factual discrepancies. The obvious drawback to disclaimers—certainly to ones as broad as this—is that they devalue one’s manuscript in a marketplace that prizes true testimony. But the very gesture of making such a disclaimer—being open with readers about just how much of the narrative is fact, how much invention—helps to enhance a writer’s credibility. And a genuine, specific disclaimer can go a long way toward establishing trust. To that end I encourage methodological transparency: disclosing to readers just what a narrative is based on—personal memory, consultation with other parties, documents, diaries, tape recordings, e-mail, and so on. Readers deserve to know just what they are reading so that they can respond accordingly.

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There’s no harm in reminding readers that memoir is, after all, by its very nature, a fallible, subjective, and often deliberately artful representation of the past. Of course, the attempt to render detail accurately and to give the sense of immediacy that is apparently prized by publishers can lead memoirists into another kind of trouble. Within days of the publication of George W. Bush’s presidential memoir Decision Points, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post revealed that it included unattributed verbatim passages from accounts previously published by various journalists and advisers (among them, Bob Woodward, General Tommy Franks, and Secretary of State Colin Powell). His publisher’s defense was to claim that the close correspondence between Bush’s text and its predecessors was evidence of his memoir’s “inherent accuracy”! No one expects an ex-president—certainly not this one—to write his own memoir single-handedly from scratch. But Bush (read: his ghostwriter) obviously took liberties with others’ literary property. And the truth: in some cases the text implies that Bush was present at scenes he did not witness. It is unlikely that he will suffer any consequences of his plagiarism and distortions of fact. But it’s hard to imagine a disclaimer that would get him off the ethical hook here. Real transparency would have required citing his sources, but that would have exposed him as having substituted others’ memories for his own. Issues of distortion, rather than outright lies, had earlier arisen with an acclaimed narrative very different from Frey’s: I, Rigoberta: An Indian Woman of Guatemala, by the human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú. Published in 1983, her narrative extensively and graphically documented the oppression of her indigenous compatriots. It gave international publicity to her cause and no doubt contributed to her being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for human rights activism in 1992. The book began to be assigned in American universities. Its inclusion in Stanford’s core curriculum reading list, however, aroused controversy. In the early 1990s, conservative cultural critics, notably Dinesh D’Sousa, criticized its canonization as an example of politics trumping aesthetics—“affirmative action for authors”—in American higher education. Then, in 1999, David Stoll, an American anthropologist, published a book, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, that revealed discrepancies between her account and what he was able to determine to

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be fact. For example, among many atrocities committed against her people, Menchú claimed to have witnessed the torture and execution (burning alive) of one of her brothers by the Guatamalan military. Stoll verified that her brother had been killed but found that she could not have been present. Predictably, a new battle in the culture wars broke out, with conservatives attacking the book’s credibility and liberals defending it. Mostly overlooked in this debate were two significant considerations. One is the matter of the book’s being co-authored, which I’ll address later. The other is the matter of genre. I have been deliberately using the neutral term narrative, but the more precise generic term for the book is testimonio. By definition, testimonio is a mixed or hybrid form, distinct from memoir as it is known in North America. A key feature of testimonio is that, in contrast to modern Western memoir, which puts a premium on unique individual identity, testimonio has a collective, communal dimension. It is associated particularly with indigenous peoples of Latin America (hence the Spanish name) who have been victimized by the descendants of European intruders. It is understood to issue from an individual, who testifies to its truthfulness, but also to speak for a larger community to which its author belongs. One defense of Menchú, then, would involve pointing out that, just as the conventions of science fiction are not the same as those of literary realism, the conventions of testimonio are not the same as those of North American memoir. As most critics see it, the conventions of testimonio allow for the conflation of the experiences of different individuals from the same community into one first-person narrative: though grammatically singular, then, the narrative I is not as narrow and sharply bounded as that of North American memoir. I do not mean to adjudicate the Menchú dispute here, merely to point out that the public’s relative ignorance about—or indifference to—life-writing genres contributed to the controversy. The charges of falsification may have reflected in part a misunderstanding of the book’s genre: a tendency to subsume it into a category, memoir, to which it did not in fact belong. In discussing them successively here, I do not mean to suggest that Menchú’s and Frey’s distortions are equivalent, much less that their narratives are of equal importance. Nor that literal truth does not matter. Of course the truth matters. But some truths matter more than others. And

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compared to the Menchú controversy, the Frey affair really was a tempest in a TV show (Oprah) about a book of very little significance—one of many interchangeable rehab narratives. What links the two is that in both cases, because the underlying scenarios were so fraught (to be sure, for different publics), relatively minor distortions were subjected to intense scrutiny, which resulted in great controversy. The Nobel Prize and Stanford were for Menchú what Oprah and Doubleday were for Frey—the underwriters of the high profile that attracted skeptics. And continuing racial oppression in South America was for Menchú what substance abuse recovery was for Frey: the underlying phenomenon that generated outrage disproportionate to any actual factual discrepancies. Both controversies illustrate the uneven application of truth standards to contemporary life writing and the hazards for memoirists of deviating from the facts. At least, from what others can determine to be facts, because, after all, the vast majority of what memoirists report can never be checked— and thus never discredited. It is only when special attention is brought to bear—for some reason, such as a high public profile or the controversial nature of the narrative—that fact-checking occurs. Even then, skeptics gain traction only when they have incontrovertible evidence of distortion and the stakes matter to some particular interest group or constituency. Discussions of the matter of truth in memoir (or, as here, life writing more generally) typically assert that falsifications have consequences— when discovered. That’s true. As we’ll see, Clifford Irving went to jail for committing an autobiographical hoax. But that involved a very unusual scenario—the literary impersonation of a real person, Howard Hughes, rather than the assumption of an invented identity. And generally, the consequences are less severe than jail time. Moreover, as the cases of Frey and Menchú show, they may vary considerably. Granted, in January of 2006, Frey did suffer a public humiliation on Oprah at the hands of his erstwhile fan and enabler. Moreover, his agent dropped him, and a two-book contract was cancelled. So he did suffer loss of face and potential income. But A Million Little Pieces continued to sell as the controversy unfolded; indeed, for a time, its sales spiked! As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Frey could cry all the way to the bank. Moreover, his career rebounded quite nicely; in 2008, another reputable publisher, HarperCollins, published his novel, Bright

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Shiny Morning. Ironically, then, the discrediting of his “memoir” seems to have rebooted his career as a novelist. The consequences for Rigoberta Menchú were more severe. Her moral stature as a witness against oppression was devalued. Even though David Stoll found that the atrocities she testified to were real and that her book was no hoax, her credibility was undermined in the eyes of many. This did not deter her from carrying on her political work, but, being an activist—rather than, like Frey, a writer—she was not in a position to capitalize on her bad publicity. This is all the more unfortunate given the much greater import of her book. Life is not fair, and neither, evidently, is the reception of life writing. This lesson was powerfully reinforced when CBS News and Jon Krakauer challenged the veracity of crucial details of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, his narrative of establishing schools for children in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan after villagers helped him recover from an unsuccessful attempt to climb K2. (The number of schools established and his foundation’s handling of funds were also questioned.) Here again a high-profile memoir has been subjected to unusual scrutiny, and, as in the case of Menchú, a larger community is at risk. Because the credibility of Mortenson’s foundation is inevitably linked to his personal integrity (and the accuracy of his narrative), the greatest costs of his distortions will be borne by the Central Asians he sought to help. It was lack of fidelity to independently verifiable facts that got Frey, Menchú, and Mortenson in trouble, subjecting them to charges of unethical behavior. The principle here—that it is wrong for life writers to deceive purposefully—seems unarguable, an ethical no-brainer. But its application points up significant differences among them. Intentions matter, and Frey’s distortions were most egregious—because so obviously knowing and opportunistic, intended to punch up his narrative to make it more attractive to publishers and readers. Menchú’s intentions are not as clear. Because her book was produced through a cross-cultural collaboration in a language not her own, Menchú was less in control of her narrative. I would grant her some latitude on this basis as well as that of her genre. Her goals were clearly more altruistic than his, and there is no sense that her distortions were self-aggrandizing. A more problematic aspect of Menchú’s narrative than any discrepancies about what she herself witnessed is her apparent exaggeration of her

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economic and social disadvantages. According to Stoll, she portrays her origins and background as more humble than they were. Even this can be defended, however, as within the bounds of testimonio conventions: one could argue that she was entitled to depict herself as one of the campesinos whose cause she championed. Again, I do not want to adjudicate the issue. Rather, my point is that this aspect of the controversy involves a different ethical issue: distortions about events are different from distortions about identity. As we’ve seen, identity claims are at the core of memoir and autobiography; memoir and autobiography don’t just entail identity claims; they constitute and are co-extensive with such claims. If Menchú’s identity claims were demonstrably flat-out false, then the book would be a hoax. And that would be a much more serious ethical breach than the ones we have been discussing—a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, so to speak. As many have noted, the memoir boom coincided with a boom in hoaxes. This should not surprise us; a seller’s market for true stories will stimulate the production of false ones. In such a market, more can be gained by faking one’s identity than by merely fudging the facts. Thus, those who can’t produce marketable true memoirs may simulate them instead. There are ample precedents and models for novels that pretend to be memoirs. Greed is a strong motivator. And not just for writers: there’s little incentive for publishers to challenge memoirs’ truthfulness. On the contrary. But greed does not seem to be the only, or even the primary, motive of hoaxers. The sheer desire to be published seems to be a more primal urge. Therein lies a great irony, of course, because the more a hoax succeeds at first—the greater the sales and publicity, the better and more prominent the reviews—the more likely it is to fail in the end. The nature of memoir makes this especially likely, because false identity is difficult to sustain in the media spotlight. And it is increasingly risky when so much personal information is available on the Internet; today, identity frauds are relatively easy to expose. An interesting, but unusual, pre-Internet case was the fabrication in 1972 of a fake autobiography of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes by the journalist Clifford Irving and his collaborator, Dick Suskind. By definition, hoaxers claim identities and experiences that are not theirs,

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but they rarely claim those of actual living human beings. What made the Irving-Hughes hoax so daring was that it did just that. And not just anyone, of course, but one of the most famous living Americans, about whom there was a good deal of curiosity. Knowing what they were up against, they forged letters and even conducted and transcribed fake interviews, thus creating their own false documentary database. Irving succeeded in landing a lucrative contract (an advance of $765,000) with McGraw Hill, and he and Suskind crafted a plausible manuscript by drawing on public records (and, secretly, the manuscript of an unpublished memoir by Hughes’s right-hand man) and by creating a convincing narrative voice. Their chutzpah almost paid off. They had counted on Hughes’s aversion to publicity to prevent him from speaking up. And when, to their surprise, Hughes broke his silence to denounce the book as a fake, the hoaxers were able to persuade the publisher and the media, for a time, that Hughes was protesting too much: of course the notorious recluse would disown his sudden self-exposure. Eventually, however, the imposture collapsed, and the book’s publication was cancelled. Irving was convicted of fraud and went to jail for seventeen months; Suskind served a much shorter term. (I discuss this hoax at greater length in the prologue to Altered Egos.) Hughes died in 1976. But that hardly put an end to the episode. Not daunted by having been imprisoned, in 1981 Irving capitalized on his suppressed false memoir by publishing a true memoir of its creation: The Hoax. Moreover, the Hughes “autobiography” itself was made available on the Internet in the early 1990s, and in 2008 it was issued in print by a British outfit, John Blake Publishing, as Howard Hughes: The Autobiography, by Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. Ironically, then, the dead Hughes was named as co-author of his fake memoir. Hoaxes are not confined to memoirs. A number of novels have been published by writers under false pretenses. What links the two phenomena is that the identities favored by impersonators in both genres are often those of victims of oppression—members of racial or ethnic minorities. This reflects the ironic fact that these populations have been privileged in the contemporary literary marketplace. Among writers who do not benefit from it, such favoritism has generated resentment and cynical attempts to capitalize on it. When writers succeed in getting such manuscripts

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published under false identities, their books have sometimes achieved critical acclaim and been awarded prizes, only to be exposed by investigative journalists. The appropriation of the identity of a person of color by a non-minority writer is by no means confined to the Northern Hemisphere: in Australia there have been numerous cases of white writers impersonating aboriginals. But a classic American example is the case of “Danny Santiago,” who claimed to be a young Chicano but who was actually the seventy-something Caucasian novelist Danny James. His imposture was initially very successful: the novel in question, Famous All Over Town, got good reviews, and it was awarded a prestigious prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984. To be sure, this imposture reflects badly on Danny James, whatever his motives. But it also reveals something unfortunate about the business of book publishing: that the ethnic identity of a writer may count for more than it should, affecting judgments of literary worth. It can weigh too heavily both with the gatekeepers (editors and publishers) and the praise-givers (critics and contest judges). This truly is affirmative action for authors. Such impersonation is always wrong, of course, but the genre in which it is perpetrated—novel or memoir—matters. In both cases, the text is the same before and after exposure. But after its exposure, the novel is still a novel and may retain its power; in contrast, the memoir is no longer a memoir, and therefore cannot retain its force. Thus, in the case of a novel, the exposure need not diminish its aesthetic value. The revelation of the real identity of the author, while it will inevitably affect the novel’s reception, should not necessarily devalue it as fiction, which is all it ever pretended to be. In the case of memoir, however, aesthetic value may be less of a consideration to begin with. At least, this is often the case with the very sorts of memoirs that invite imposture—those of oppressed individuals—because the value of such memoirs often resides more in what they attest to than in how they are written. (These are generally not literary memoirs.) Far more than novels—and properly so—the value of memoirs is bound up with their authenticity. To put it differently, their force is a function of the identity of their authors in a way that is not true with novels. So had the author of I, Rigoberta been revealed to be, say, her French-Venezuelan

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collaborator Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, her book would have been completely discredited and emptied of value as a testimonio. Because the value of memoir and autobiography rely so heavily on the identity claims they make, the faux memoir constitutes an egregious ethical breach. Unlike factual discrepancies, whether minor or major, it completely violates the autobiographical pact. This is a not just some arbitrary implication of the conventions of the genre; it makes ethical sense. Imposture in memoir has two effects that a novelistic hoax does not. The first is that false testimony can undermine the credibility of actual testimony; by creating doubt in the public’s mind, it empowers those hostile to the cause in question. Testimony is a classic instance of speaking truth to power, and its force lies not just in its factual truth but also in its authenticity. Of course, false testimony is not always a hoax, nor is it always published in bad faith. In the United States, slave narrative may have been the main medium of anti-slavery testimony. But antislavery novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin also aimed to expose the inhumanity of the peculiar institution. In 1836, the journalist and historian Richard Hildreth published a book called The Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive. Originally attributed to an escaped slave named Archy Moore, the book was regarded as a real slave narrative until Hildreth revealed himself as its author. It is thus now known to be—and valued as—an early anti-slavery novel; Hildreth’s reputation does not seem to have suffered—presumably because his commitment to the cause, if not his testimony, was genuine. Today, the venues and the causes are different, and the standards are more rigorous. More than sixty years after the end of World War II, Holocaust testimony, both true and false, is still being produced. As long as Holocaust deniers still exist—and they show no signs of extinction—fake Holocaust testimony only strengthens their cause, if not their case. Consider this example. In the 1990s, a Swiss citizen published a book called Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, which purported to be the memoir of a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. But after the book had been translated into many languages, given numerous literary awards in Europe and the United States, and like I, Rigoberta, assigned in many American universities, the story unraveled. The author, “Binjamin Wilkomirski,” was

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revealed to be a man named Bruno Dössekker. Born out of wedlock in Switzerland to Christian parents (and initially named Bruno Grosjean), Dössekker was given up for adoption. After some time in foster care, he was adopted by middle-class parents and lived his entire life in Switzerland. Stung by these revelations, his Swiss publisher withdrew the book, and the literary agency that had placed it commissioned a historian, Stefan Mächler, to investigate. Mächler eventually published his findings in a volume unlike any other I have ever seen: it contains the entire original memoir but surrounds it with a narrative that totally discredits it. This is due diligence—after the fact. Amazingly, Dössekker continues to stand by his story. As far as I know, he has never returned any of his royalties; he has not apologized for, or renounced, his impersonation. While serious sanctions have been applied—the withdrawal of the book and the retraction of the prizes—it’s hard to assess the impact of these consequences on the perpetrator. Having attempted to trade the stigma of illegitimacy for the mystique of the survivor, he seems to have a huge psychic investment in his fictional biography. The hoax has been exposed, but it cannot entirely be undone. Nor has the wide publicity given to this case been sufficient to put a stop to this phenomenon. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a number of additional cases of false testimony being exposed—usually after publication, since it is only with publication that real scrutiny is applied. As many commentators have noted, this means that investigative journalists are doing the job that editors and publishers should be doing. The most spectacular recent case in this vein is Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with the Wolves (2005), a page-turner about a young Jewish refugee who traversed Europe in search of parents who had been taken from Belgium to a concentration camp. En route she was sheltered by wolves—a detail that ought to have aroused her publisher’s suspicion. After journalists investigated this unlikely story, the author, whose actual birth name is Monique de Wael, admitted that she is not Jewish and that she spent the war years safe in Brussels. In addition to generating suspicion of all Holocaust testimony, such hoaxes have another insidious effect: the impostor assumes a position properly reserved for an actual member of the population at risk. The appropriation of an identity forged in suffering by someone who has not

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suffered is a morally offensive act in and of itself. It is an existential fraud. But it may also have consequences for real victims. The market for Holocaust memoirs is good, but it’s not unlimited. The appropriation of the identity of a Holocaust survivor is especially egregious at a time when the last survivors are dying off. Moreover, in the wake of false testimony, subsequent memoirs, perhaps authentic but sometimes difficult to verify, may face greater obstacles to publication by wary publishers. Obviously, then, imposture is a far more serious violation than the faking of facts. It is one thing to falsely claim to have witnessed an atrocity that one knew to have happened, as Menchú did. It is another to pretend to be a Holocaust survivor, when one was not one. As far as I know, no false testimony has been produced in order to undermine true testimony. Impostors may claim, and may indeed have, good intentions—to generate sympathy for the oppressed, for example. Nor are they usually driven solely by greed. But their motives are typically self-aggrandizing—as we see in the case of Dössekker/Wilkomirski. Whatever impels them, their acts are despicable and deserve unequivocal condemnation. They sometimes even face legal consequences. But these cases are usually not ethically complex—not as complicated as those in the next set of ethical dangers we confront. Thus far, I have been proceeding as if memoirs were always produced singlehandedly. But this is not always the case. At this point I want to address ethical dangers that arise in collaboratively produced narratives— “as told to” memoirs. Here the writer is a different person from the narrator and protagonist. It might seem that the collaborators’ contributions are quite distinct: the subject provides the content, the life experience; the writer, the narrative, the text. But while the subject “had” the experience, he or she can only provide it as narrative. Thus, who the true author is depends on how one defines that term and the circumstances of the particular collaboration. (I discuss the ethical pitfalls of collaboration more fully in chapter 3 of Vulnerable Subjects.) These collaborative partnerships are intended to be, and often are, mutually beneficial. But they also have potential for exploitation, misrepresentation, and even betrayal. In considering the ethical dangers inherent in collaborative narrative, we may begin by distinguishing between two kinds of scenarios. The celebrity scenario takes its name from a set of

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individuals likely to employ collaborators to write their memoirs for them: politicians, athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs, movie and TV stars. They may lack the time, talent, or confidence to write their own books. Instead, their stories are “told to,” or written “with,” a professional writer. (Although all such scribes are sometimes referred to as ghostwriters, the term is more properly reserved for collaborators who are not formally acknowledged.) These relationships may be skewed by structural inequalities. By virtue of their celebrity status, the subjects usually have more “clout”—money, prestige, and power—than the writers, who are often not well known or well off. The relationship is essentially one between employer (the subject) and employee (the writer). Accordingly, the vulnerable partner is the writer. Celebrities do not always vet their own memoirs—they have been known to boast of that fact, and even to complain of being misquoted in them—but at least they generally have the opportunity and the ability to assess their memoirs before publication. So there is little danger of their being harmfully misrepresented by their collaborators. On the contrary, the danger is rather that they will not only misrepresent themselves but make their collaborators complicit in that deception. Despite—or perhaps because of—its sensationalism, the Robert Harris novel The Ghost (2007; adapted by Roman Polanski as the 2009 film The Ghost Writer) puts this scenario in high relief. A writer hired to ghostwrite the memoir of a retired British prime minister (based on Tony Blair) discovers dark secrets in his employer’s past, including possible involvement in war crimes. He is torn between his contractual obligation to his employer and his moral responsibility to the historical record. The celebrity scenario can place collaborators in a real ethical dilemma. Writers are also at risk of being left in the lurch if the subjects pull out of the project before completion. The input of the subjects is portable; they rarely sign away their rights to their own stories. And so they can always turn to other writers. In contrast, the writers’ input—their labor and its textual product—is not so fungible; they typically have no right to publish the material without the subjects’ permission. So, unless they insist on being compensated up front in full, they may be left unpaid or underpaid if the collaboration fails. And even if they receive advance payment, it is not likely to be commensurate with the royalties of a blockbuster

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memoir. Such collaborations are thus riskier for the less powerful parties, the writers. They are far more likely to be victims of unethical behavior than their subjects are. But these dangers pale in comparison with those inherent in the other common scenario of collaboration. The ethnographic scenario takes its name from the branch of anthropology devoted to the analysis of culture. Ethnography (“culture writing”) often takes the form of a life narrative of a presumably representative member of a culture (a “native informant”), as written by an outsider. Although ethnography can be practiced anywhere, historically most such narratives have concerned indigenous people in the Southern Hemisphere—people of color from oral cultures. In contrast, most ethnographers come from cosmopolitan cultures in the Northern Hemisphere; they are not only literate but highly educated and generally white. Thus, the relationship between the ethnographer and the subject involves a structural inequality that replicates that between European colonizers and colonized populations. In such partnerships, subjects rarely have the opportunity to review the manuscripts. Indeed, lacking the literacy or the language to read them, they may not even have the capacity to do so—at least, without assistance. Obviously, this puts them at a disadvantage and at risk of misrepresentation. Another issue is that of equitable compensation. Ethnographers are usually salaried academics, and publications may earn them royalties on top of that. Perhaps most important, such work advances their careers. In contrast, native informants typically do not receive payment for their stories. Nor is it always clear how, or whether, ethnographic narratives benefit the subjects in any nonmonetary way. After all, the aim of ethnography is not to benefit the particular communities or individuals studied but to advance understanding of human cultures in general. Truly ethnographic life stories rarely make fortunes for their authors, but there is a principle of equity involved. And it is not unheard of for collaborative life writers to reap enormous profits from cheaply purchased rights. An example—admittedly not “ethnographic”—in the United States is the highly successful musical (and film) A Chorus Line: the author, choreographer Michael Bennett, initially paid the dancers $1 apiece for their stories, which he transcribed and reshaped. Later, after the show became a hit and moved to Broadway, he granted the subjects

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a share of royalties, but the subjects obviously benefited far less than the writer. In the United States, Native American life stories have often been the product of ethnographic collaborations. Although it did not involve a professional ethnographer, the collaboration between Black Elk (circa 1863–1950), a Lakota holy man, and John Neihardt (1881–1973), a EuroAmerican poet, may serve as an instructive case. John Neihardt knew no Lakota, and Black Elk spoke little English and could not read. (Their collaboration involved a chain of other participants, including children of both principals.) As a result, Black Elk was unable to vet the manuscript of his life story, which was published in 1932. The book rebounded on him in an unfortunate way. As Neihardt knew, Black Elk had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1904 and served thereafter as a catechist on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, bringing the Gospel to his fellow Lakota. The degree to which his conversion was voluntary is difficult to determine. It came in the aftermath of federal laws prohibiting the practice of traditional Lakota rituals when, if Black Elk wished to continue to serve his people’s spiritual needs, he had little choice but to do it as a Christian. When the book was published, however, Black Elk was surprised to learn that his “life story” (as the subtitle has it) ended forty years earlier with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Apparently, Black Elk had wished and expected the story to include an account of his conversion. At least, he publicly testified to that effect. We cannot tell whether this claim was entirely his idea, or whether he was put up to it by the local Jesuits, who were dismayed by the narrative’s portrayal of their prize convert as an unreconstructed “longhair” (traditionalist). All of this should suggest how vulnerable ethnographic informants can be in this kind of collaborative partnership. Clearly, Neihardt did not write the book out of mercenary motives. In fact, it did not sell well in the first thirty years or so after its initial publication. But it caught on with the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, and it has sold well ever since. (For many years, I assigned it every term in a course in Native American literature.) Indeed, it has become a cash bison for its publisher, the University of Nebraska Press. Unwise in the ways of the publishing world, Black Elk accepted a minimal flat fee for his story.

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He complained about that, too, but at the time, he could have had no idea how much money the book would eventually make. The book’s copyright has regularly been extended by issuing new editions with additional material; only recently has some of this been commissioned from Black Elk’s descendants. So although Neihardt had no intent of exploiting, much less defrauding Black Elk, it seems that Neihardt and his heirs have profited disproportionately from the collaboration. The vulnerability of the ethnographic subject involves the possibility of misrepresentation (being characterized in a misleading way) as well as of economic exploitation (being deprived of proceeds). Although Black Elk was once the man Neihardt depicts (an unacculturated traditionalist), he had long ceased to be that man; in effect, then, the narrative arrests his development and gives a misleading picture of the overall arc of his life; by doing that, it understates his resourcefulness in the face of oppression. The freezing of his development is bound up with the failure of EuroAmericans to honor the way in which Native culture has evolved to survive subjugation. To historical injury is added biographical insult. In this example, we can distinguish between two kinds of ethical issues. The first is a matter of wronging. By that, we refer to the violation of someone’s rights or property. From our perspective, it seems wrong that Black Elk was paid so little for what eventually proved an immensely valuable literary property. The other concern we refer to as harming; here we refer to damaging someone’s interests, which are often intangible, but nonetheless real. (Note: merely hurting someone’s feelings, which memoirs inevitably do, does not rise to the level of harming their interests.) In this case, the misrepresentation of Black Elk was arguably damaging to his interests. As it happened, not long after the book was published, federal Indian policy changed, the proscription on traditional religion was lifted, and Black Elk was able to resume some of the once forbidden rituals. But he never renounced his Christian faith. And the book’s misrepresentation of him could have cost him his career as a catechist, or at least set it back. (I discuss this case at greater length in chapter 8 of Altered Egos.) The ethical dangers of collaboration—in both scenarios—can be reduced somewhat if readers are allowed to see behind the scenes. I was pleased to learn recently that Alexander Masters, who wrote a Stuart: A Life Backwards—a memoir of Stuart Shorter, a homeless addict, petty

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criminal, mental patient, and fascinating character—agreed ahead of time to turn over half of the proceeds of the book to Shorter. (Shorter died before it was published, so the money went to his heirs, instead.) But I was disappointed that this agreement was not announced in the book itself, where it might have preempted any suspicions about the exploitation of a very vulnerable subject. Prefatory notes can explain how the subject and author came together, what the division of labor was, how the narrative was produced, whether the subject had a chance to vet the manuscript, how the proceeds were allocated, and so on. Provision of such behind-the-scene details, which I call transactional transparency, has two positive effects. First, it prompts collaborators to confront ethical issues and thus encourages them to work out mutually satisfactory arrangements ahead of time. Second, the explanation of these matters in the text can satisfy readers that the narrative they are about to consume has been ethically produced. It’s like a “fair trade” pledge for collaborative memoirs. In the discussion of hoaxes, we moved from the memoirist’s obligation to the biographical and historical record to his or her obligation to other people, especially those depicted in the memoir. With hoaxes, the impersonator is not just telling a lie about his own history; he is often also damaging the interests of those who belong to the population whose identity he falsely assumes. Similarly, in the discussion of collaborative memoir, we have seen how the production of the narrative may entail wrong and/ or harm to one partner or the other. Now we will turn to the subtlest and trickiest of the ethical issues inherent in memoir: the question of a memoirist’s obligation to other individuals who appear in his or her narrative. As noted in an earlier chapter, all autobiography is also biography; it is virtually impossible to tell one’s own life story without representing others. Everyone has the right to tell his or her story, of course, but because that story is always already someone else’s, as well, the memoirist’s rights may impinge on others’ rights—say, their right to privacy. As a result, memoir has potential to perpetrate wrongs and harms in a way that the novel does not. Here it may be useful to contrast the role of the memoirist with that of the biographer. For the biographer, the obligation to the truth is primary; it trumps any obligation not to harm those represented. Although there is

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undeniably an element of subjectivity to biographical projects, biographers should be true to the facts, even if that means exposing flaws and failings in their subjects. Biography is not hagiography: biographers are not in the business of canonizing saints. Quite the contrary. Indeed, a recent biography of John Cardinal Newman by Yale historian Frank Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, was attacked by partisans of his imminent canonization for being insufficiently laudatory of his devotion to Catholicism. (See Turner and Ker.) But a biographer has little or no obligation to his subject’s desires or preferences—or to those of his fans and admirers. An exception is the authorized biography, which has a kinship with memoir. Authorized biographers have privileged relationships with their subjects, who are usually still alive when the biographies are produced. (If they are not, authorization may be granted by descendants or, in the case of writers, by their literary executors.) These subjects agree to cooperate in some fashion with a selected biographer: to be interviewed, to share private documents, and perhaps to encourage other potential sources to cooperate. In return for providing access, the subject may request or require the right to preview the manuscript. Obviously, this is an ethically fraught relationship. At best, it is a mutually beneficial arrangement between consenting adults. Because of its built-in bias, the subject is not likely to suffer harm. On the contrary, the truth is more likely to suffer: the danger here is that the biographer will overlook or minimize flaws out of personal loyalty—or fear of losing access and the imprimatur of the subject. An authorized biographer can find him- or herself in an excruciating bind, weighing affection toward and loyalty to his subject against an obligation to the historical record. Such a conflict arose between Nadine Gordimer, the eminent South African novelist, political activist, and Nobel laureate, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, whom she authorized to write her biography. One issue in their conflict arose when she acknowledged having invented two cousins and other details in an autobiographical essay published in the New Yorker in 1954. (So much for the magazine’s reputation for thorough fact-checking.) Other matters, concerning his representation of her love life and different stances on political issues, caused a permanent rift between them; the upshot was that she withdrew her authorization and her endorsement.

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Unable to publish the book with the original press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the author placed it with a much less prestigious press in South Africa. As this case illustrates, the price of authorization may be authorial autonomy. If autonomy is insisted on, authorization may be withdrawn. Authorized biographies should therefore be read somewhat skeptically. But their distortions can be corrected in more objective biographies; the damage to the truth is reversible. The harm to the biographer may not be. Another subgenre between biography and memoir proper that may raise ethical concern is the literary case study, as practiced most notably by the neurologist and prolific writer Oliver Sacks. Sacks made his name as a writer, and a small fortune, by adapting the clinical case study—a physician’s analysis of a rare or representative patient—for publication in mass media for a general audience. Many of his profiles of neurology patients were published in the New Yorker before being collected in volumes like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). One set of such profiles was even, implausibly, made into a major motion picture about the treatment of Parkinson’s disease— Awakenings (1990), starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. Sacks was also prominently featured in a four-part BBC documentary, The Mind Traveler. In writing these portraits, Sacks is not exactly a biographer: he works from face-to-face meetings and interviews with his subjects rather than from research. Nor is he exactly a memoirist: Sacks doesn’t know his subjects before he decides to profile them. Nor is he functioning as a physician. Even if they are his patients—and many are not—his writing up of their cases is not part of their treatment. It is not aimed at doing them good; indeed, it promises them little in the way of benefit, except the mixed blessing of publicity (when their real names are used). Nevertheless, as a physician he is still bound by medical ethics, which would not apply to a biographer or a memoirist: he must either disguise his subjects’ identities or get their permission to write and publish their stories. Generally speaking, Sacks is scrupulously ethical. But to my knowledge, he does not compensate his subjects for their time or their stories, nor does he donate any of the proceeds to medical research. For better or for worse, the subjects are not serving as poster people for their conditions. What troubles some readers, including me, is that he sometimes

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depicts them more as examples of intriguing syndromes than as complex individuals in their own right. Additionally, his writing tends to be quite monological; he rarely gives the subject a voice in the narrative. These flaws, however, are more pronounced in his early work: one can chart a progression in his written work from Man to Mars. The latter profiles are more extensive and offer more multidimensional and exploratory portraits. The medium makes a difference. In the documentaries, when his subjects are more immediately accessible to us and may be literally in the frame with him, we can see the dynamics of interaction for ourselves. Significantly, in the documentaries, his subjects sometimes assert themselves independently of his discourse. As a medium, the documentary seems inherently more transparent, more dialogical, more truly intersubjective— more conducive to fair representation, more equitable, more ethical. A more subtle issue is the complaint, made by some disability advocates, that his portraits tend, by nature, to occlude matters of rights, access, and accommodation. As a neurologist, Sacks is interested in the neurological conditions primarily as they affect the individual and his or her consciousness. For example, how does amnesia affect one’s sense of identity? Can one be a person, the same person, if one is not constantly laying down a memory trail, so to speak? How does a congenital lack of hearing affect one’s cognitive development? When the public’s image of certain syndromes comes primarily from one prolific source, his limitations may take on heightened significance. Sacks’s indifference to the social and cultural contexts of disability limits the value of his case studies; indeed, it may hurt—or at least not advance—the interests of those he represents. I do not wish here to adjudicate the ethics of his case studies; rather, I use them to suggest the subtle dangers and harms that can arise when the writer knows his subjects, especially if those subjects are made vulnerable by impairment. The interests of the subject and the interests of the life writer may not only not coincide; they may conflict. And in the ethnographic scenario, the power differential renders the subjects particularly vulnerable to harm or at least exploitation. (I discuss Sacks’s oeuvre at some length in chapter 5 of Vulnerable Subjects.) In chapter 6, I will suggest that the best antidote to misrepresentation of disabled people by medical professionals may be memoirs by those very

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same people. Granted, some impairments interfere with or prevent such self-representation, but increasingly, ways are being found around the obstacles placed in the way of disabled memoirists. Testimony is emerging from bodies and minds that would once have seemed unlikely sources— for example, people with Down syndrome. But readers should be wary of the representation of others by those with privileged access to them, especially if the subjects are not able to represent themselves. We come now to works that are memoir proper—as distinct from authorized biographies or case studies. We will focus on those that take as their primary subject someone other than the author, where the risk of harm to another is highest. By definition, such subjects must be well known to the author. Such memoirs thus arise from intimate relationships. And therein lies the ethical danger, for this close vantage entails the risk of violating the subject’s privacy. With memoirs, this privileged access is not granted in order to facilitate the writing of a narrative, as it is with authorized biography; rather, the writing of the memoir takes advantage of a preexisting intimacy, gained without benefit of formal agreement. The subject has not been put on notice, as it were. Obviously, such memoirs are fraught with potential for betrayal. Such relationships are built into the nuclear family—along different axes: parents and children have privileged access to each other, so do siblings, and so do partners. Relationships between partners are perhaps the least ethically risky because they are entered into consensually, and they need not entail structural inequality. Granted, our culture is still patriarchal in many ways. But in practice, memoir can compensate for this. The kiss-and-dish memoir is far more likely to issue from a spurned or betrayed wife than from a husband. Particularly if the husband is a public figure— like any number of politicians who have disgraced themselves in recent years—publishers will readily snap up a memoir by an ex-wife inclined to expose clay feet. A case in point is Jenny Sanford’s Staying True (2010), which she wrote in the aftermath of the revelation of an affair between her husband Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, and his Argentine “soul mate,” Maria Belen Chapur. In such cases, writing ill (of the ex-partner) can be the best revenge. I wouldn’t say that anything goes here, but I view these scenarios as unlikely to involve serious ethical wrongs. For one thing, punishment-by-memoir

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may be deserved: any harm caused by the memoir may be justified by the offenses documented. For another, these relationships generally involve parties whose status and access to the media are more or less equal. And again, the relationships were entered into consensually. But such narratives may cause collateral damage. In the case of the Sanfords, the danger is not of harm to Mark. After all, it was he who made his secret public. He damaged his own reputation by having the affair, then confessing to it on live TV (as his wife watched at home). And as a public official with access to public relations agents, he is certainly in a position to defend himself. But although the memoir is primarily about the Sanford parents, the Sanford children are also at risk. The issue regarding the children is not the way Jenny Sanford treats them in the memoir—apparently, very protectively—but rather what effect her portrayal of their straying father will have on their relationship with him as they mature. Here Jenny Sanford can do harm that is more difficult for her to justify and for him to repair. And although she is an accomplished woman in her own right, her memoir seems to have been entirely prompted by the affair, and it thus seems opportunistic. The relationships that should concern us most are those that involve structural inequality: those between parents and children. Interestingly, the inequality here can tilt in opposite directions over the course of the life span. When their children are young, parents are in a position to exploit them in memoirs. In 2009, such a case arose in England. The novelist Julie Myerson published a memoir entitled The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story, which documented, in harrowing detail, her teenaged son’s drug abuse a few years earlier. Myerson claimed that she had shown him an early version of the book, paid him for poetry she included in it, and in effect gotten his permission to publish. (In what seems a disingenuous effort to maintain his privacy, she did not name him in the manuscript.) After the book appeared in England, however, her son publicly denounced it and claimed he had considered trying to block its publication. Most of the public response was critical of the mother/writer. Rightly so, I think. The label of addict may prove very difficult for her son to shake, in part because it was bestowed by his mother on the basis of intimate acquaintance. And the publicity surrounding the book’s publication (to which he contributed) can only cement that association in the public

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mind. Even if he did consent to publication, which he denies, he was only in his late teens at the time and only a couple of years removed from the events in question. There is some question as to whether a child in his position could have granted informed consent. Later in life, the tables are turned: grown children can then exploit their privileged access to their parents. If the parents are famous, there is a ready market for tell-all memoirs. J. D. Salinger was famously averse to publicity; he went to great lengths to deter or stymie biographers. Yet he could not prevent his daughter Margaret from publishing her memoir Dream Catcher (2000). Like anyone else, she has a right to tell her story, and her memoir is primarily her story, rather than an exposé of life with the reclusive author. Yet in going public she inevitably capitalized on his fame and especially on his inaccessibility and distaste for publicity. Whether she abused that privilege is a matter of her depiction of her father—which readers may disagree about—but readers can be sure that whatever she divulged of life at the Salinger compound was against his will. My point is that parents, famous or not, are vulnerable to exploitation in memoir by their children, especially as they age and their competence may decline. So the inequality of the relationship between an adult and his or her aged parent is also a concern. Other relationships involving structural inequality are those between disabled and nondisabled family members. In some cases, this factor exacerbates the asymmetry of relationships already mentioned: parents often write memoirs about raising disabled children; increasingly, baby boomers are writing narratives of parents with dementia; and a number of memoirs have been written about living with disabled siblings. An example of the first would be Clara Claiborne Park’s The Siege (1982), one of the first parental narratives of raising a child with autism; of the second, Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father (2003), in which the novelist turns her talents to telling the story of her father’s decline into Alzheimer’s dementia; of the third, Rachel Simon’s Riding the Bus with My Sister (2003), in which a professional writer explores the life of a sister who is developmentally disabled. The subjects of these memoirs—disabled children, disabled parents, and disabled siblings—are doubly vulnerable. Their disability may mean that they lack the opportunity or the capability to represent themselves in

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their own words, on their own terms. Demented parents are certainly not capable of granting informed consent for their stories to be told, although there may be some comfort in the knowledge that they are also beyond being hurt by those stories. A larger issue, perhaps, is that depictions of particular disabilities may affect all those with such a condition. This is why memoirs of disability that are not written by people with the condition in question are especially likely to do harm. An unusual, but illuminating, example of this may be Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2000). In this narrative, Slater, the author of several previous memoirs, including Prozac Diary (1998), does everything possible to undermine her own credibility. She is at pains to write a postmodern, self-reflexive, writerly memoir. In the manner of René Magritte’s surrealist painting Ceci n’est pas un pipe (1926), whose title insists that the painting is just that, and not a real pipe, her memoir repeatedly reminds the reader of its inherent fallibility and artifice. Its very first chapter consists of two words: “I exaggerate.” This is only a book, her narrative declares, it’s not the real, whole me. Don’t believe it. So far, so good. As I said earlier, we need to be wary of memoir’s veracity, and it is healthy to be reminded of this by memoirists themselves. Slater goes well beyond this initial warning, however; she includes fake documents, claims to have consulted physicians she has in fact invented, and so on. Each of these gestures is at some point tipped to the reader; there is little danger of actual deception. Again, so far, so good. A different issue arises, however, with the central biographical fact of this memoir: the author’s claim that she has epilepsy. This is not a condition she had mentioned having in her earlier memoirs, and in this one, she sometimes hedges the claim, sometimes denies it. If she definitively claimed the identity of a person with epilepsy without actually having the condition, she would of course be perpetrating a hoax in the manner of false Holocaust testimony. But by continually undermining her claim, she protects herself against any such accusations. Instead, she uses epilepsy as a metaphor for her particular existential condition. Fair enough, perhaps; the reader is put on notice. But in my mind, another question arises. In order to use the condition as a metaphor for her life, she needs to essentialize it. She is using it as a familiarizing metaphor: a metaphor in which something known is

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used to characterize, by analogy, something unknown. Such metaphors are so common in everyday discourse that we use them unconsciously: for example, we typically discuss intangible or abstract things, like cognition, in metaphors of concrete tangible things. “I grasp your point.” For such metaphors to function, the nature of the familiar entity needs to be stable; certain qualities must be presumed to inhere in it. In this case, the problem lies not in a false claim that Slater has epilepsy but rather in false claims about epilepsy itself. For example, she ascribes her tendency to lie, to exaggerate, to fantasize, to her neurological condition. Such a characterization of epilepsy is not only outdated and inaccurate, it is irresponsible and potentially harmful to others. While it might seem that Slater has the right to choose the particular metaphor to convey what it’s like to be in her head, unfortunately she cannot use this one without characterizing epilepsy in general terms. For me, then, the ethical crux is not whether or not Slater has the condition: even if she does have itwhich I doubt—she should not characterize it in such a prejudicial way. In tropes lie responsibilities. In this case, she risks setting back the interests of those with epilepsy, a disease long misunderstood and still irrationally feared. With a critique of a metaphorical memoir, we’ve come a long way from the notion of adherence to literal truth. What we’ve seen is that memoir imposes ethical obligations on writers that are not incumbent on novelists. They lie in two distinct areas: fidelity to the truth and consideration for the rights and interests of others. But as we’ve seen, they often shade into one another. Memoir always impinges on the real world in a way that fiction does not, and therein lies both its power to do good and its ability to cause harm. Readers understand memoir best if they are aware of this distinctive ethical dimension of today’s most talked-about genre.

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[5] MEMOIR’S AMERICAN ROOTS

Modern life writing has various ancient antecedents. Some of these are so familiar that they are hidden in plain sight, not recognized as life writing. Consider the Bible: the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, is full of chronicles and biographies, and the Gospels purport to be the disciples’ memoirs of Jesus. But examples of life writing in antiquity are widely dispersed in time and space, exceptional rather than typical of their times. A number of factors need to come together for life writing to flourish. An often overlooked factor is technology, including the invention of writing. But other technologies are also pertinent: the invention and dissemination of the glass mirror are thought to have stimulated introspection—metaphorical reflection. But life writing does not flower until its technologies are widely available. Even private forms, such as diaries, require cheap paper. And printing is necessary for the publication and dissemination of life writing. Technology is necessary, but not sufficient, to generate life writing. What we now call memoir or autobiography develops only in cultures that attribute importance to the individual self—or soul. Among world religions, Christianity (which produced the paradigmatic conversion narrative in Paul of Tarsus) seems to have provided the most powerful impetus to self-life writing generally—including one of the earliest classic autobiographies, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (circa 400 CE). The Protestant Reformation prompted an enormous number of spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives, especially in England. The best of these is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), by John Bunyan. Bunyan is better known for The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), but that classic account of the journey of a typical Christian (read: Protestant) to salvation can be 108

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considered an allegorization of his spiritual autobiography—conversion narrative writ large. What we call modernity—however it is defined—involves social, political, and cultural developments that also encourage autobiography. Thus, Renaissance humanism supported life writing antithetical to conversion narrative and spiritual autobiography—for example, the unabashedly secular and self-celebratory Life of Benvenuto Cellini (sixteenth century). Democracy, egalitarianism, and the rise of the middle class also promote the valuation of individual lives and thus engender self-life writing. So the memoir as we know it in the West is a fairly recent invention—roughly two hundred years old. It dates, not coincidentally, from the time of the American and French Revolutions, and its production surged, predictably, in the age of Romanticism. Of course, these stimuli initially favored self-life writing by some people more than by others. Early on, life writing genres favored those prominent in public life: men over women, whites over people of color, and so on. The democratic potential of memoir has taken time to be realized. But that trend is one significant dynamic in the history of memoir. In Memoir: A History (2009), Ben Yagoda has ably surveyed the development of self-life writing from antiquity to the present in Europe and America. Rather than retrace that narrative, then, this chapter will focus on developments on this side of the Atlantic. My aim is not to offer a comprehensive survey of the history of memoir in America. Rather, I wish to identify and illuminate some precedents for the modern memoir in early genres and masterpieces of American literature. As we saw in chapter 3, two popular modern literary genres, the novel and the memoir, developed simultaneously in England during the eighteenth century. To say that they developed side by side, however, would be an understatement. Their relationship was more a matter of symbiosis: mutual influence so extensive that at times the two were indistinguishable. The pioneering works of Daniel Defoe, generally considered the first novelist in English, took the form of memoirs. Defoe did not present himself as the author of these narratives, much less announce them as fictions. They were presented as the first-person narratives of real people, such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. They were introduced by “editors” who accounted for their appearance in print. And some readers took them for nonfiction.

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Defoe’s precedent of writing novels in the form of memoirs was imitated by other major eighteenth-century British novelists: Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, John Cleland, and Tobias Smollett. The novel expanded its repertoire by imitating other life-writing genres, especially those more available to women, such as letters and diaries. Various novelists, in England and on the Continent, experimented with diary novels, and Samuel Richardson made a specialty of the epistolary novel, e.g., Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Thus, the English novel arrived on the literary scene as a stealth genre—fiction in the guise of nonfiction. Alongside these fictional memoirs, real memoirs were published by people of backgrounds and circumstances as varied as those of the novels’ protagonists—including outright criminals. Thus, the novel and the memoir were ushered into the world of British literature as virtually identical twins. On this side of the Atlantic, the picture is very different. For one thing, the novel was slower to develop here; there are no American equivalents of the great British novelists of the eighteenth century. One reason for that is the lack of international copyright protection. The works of established British writers could be reprinted and sold in the colonies without paying royalties; needless to say, this depressed the demand for original work by American novelists. A more fundamental reason was that during the colonial era, Americans were busy building a civilization from the ground up. (In fact, they had to clear the ground first.) Their writing was of necessity more utilitarian and instrumental; belles lettres was a luxury. In America, then, the antecedents of the modern memoir (aside from the British models, of course, which were available here) lie not in literary genres, but in non- or sub-literary ones: various humble modes of life writing that were integral to the exploration and colonization of the continent. When I teach the first half of the American literature survey, I like to frame the initial readings in terms of the following quasi-paradox: most of what we now call “early American literature” was not, when it was written, considered American. Early (pre-Revolutionary) American literature was not considered American because it was written under the aegis of some European imperial power: and not just England, so it was not always in English. Thus, what we now consider a distinctive national tradition necessarily incorporates, retroactively, what was at the time colonial writing serving various European powers.

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Most early American literature also doesn’t seem “literary” to modern readers. The main reason is that little of it was what we now call “imaginative” writing—that is, poetry, drama, or fiction. Most of it was nonfiction. Some of it, being correspondence, was never intended for publication; some of it, consisting of journals and diaries, was not even intended for interpersonal communication. Unlike the literary genres flourishing in England, however, life-writing genres were vital to American experience from the start. So although anthologies of colonial American literature rarely acknowledge it explicitly, they traffic heavily in life writing: not only the aforementioned letters, diaries, and journals, but also narratives of exploration, settlement, Indian captivity, conversion, and more. The reasons for the prominence of life writing in early American literature are not far to seek. For one thing, the European institutions—monarchy, aristocracy, the Church—that served as the patrons of the arts in the Old World did not function the same way in the New World. Here, their patronage applied to writing only insofar as the colonial enterprise required communication and documentation. As it happened, much of the writing that served the colonial project was what we now call life writing. Particular American historical conditions generated distinctive life-writing genres, like narratives of exploration, settlement, and Indian captivity. So although colonization may be a top-down and center-outward process, most of the American literary tradition was generated at the margins of empire and built from the bottom up. To repeat, life writing was often its stock in trade. And, in its first stages, the “tradition” (as retroactively constructed, of course) was remarkably diverse in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity. Consider the contents of the “Literature to 1700” section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (seventh edition) that would come under the umbrella of life writing as the term is understood today: narratives by British explorers and settlers, letters by explorers like Christopher Columbus, and so-called “relations” by Spanish colonizers. Among the latter, The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies, by the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, testifies in sickening detail to the cruel and unjust treatment of the natives. Despite the fact that it issues from a sympathetic European observer, rather than one of the native victims, it is a significant precursor of the modern testimonio. Even

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before American literature became primarily Anglophone, then, we could say it was largely constituted of life writing. This section of the anthology also contains chronicles like William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, and John Smith’s The General History of Virginia, as well as poetry by Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor. Although we usually do not include historical narratives under the umbrella of life writing, early chronicles certainly have a claim to that label, especially when they were written by central figures like Bradford, Morton, and Smith. These narratives may use the third-person pronoun, but they are undeniably first person in perspective—and, more to the point, self-interested. Similarly, many important poems by Bradstreet and Taylor are devotional (part of their daily spiritual practice), epistolary (such as poems in the form of letters from Bradstreet to her absent husband), or “occasional” (written to mark events like deaths in the family or the burning of Bradstreet’s home). They, too, then, are life writing. As is, of course, Samuel Sewall’s diary. Moving into the eighteenth century, we find the diaries of Sarah Kemble Knight and William Byrd. Letters are also represented here, notably those between John and Abigail Adams. So here too, life writing makes up a significant segment of the colonial canon. One could say—I’ve conceded this already—that such works have come to be canonical “American literature” by default: i.e., because there was little imaginative writing being produced in the colonies. But that would miss the point: a real, and distinct, literary tradition was being formed under conditions conducive to a very different kind of writing—nonfictional, utilitarian, instrumental. Perhaps because civilization on this continent was so much a work in progress, American writing, unlike its British counterpart, often attempts not so much to record history as to shape it. For example, Bradford’s account of the first decades of the Plimoth colony was meant to impress later generations with the sacrifices of the first generation. The narrative sought not merely to document, but to perpetuate, the colony’s original mission. That mission was eventually openly challenged by native resistance. And a key literary development in New England in the late seventeenth century was the emergence of the narrative of Indian captivity. The first of these, by Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife, was published in 1682, in the

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immediate aftermath of King Philip’s War. It begins very dramatically with an attack by natives on her village in the Connecticut River Valley: On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: their first coming was about sunrising; hearing the noise of some guns we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven. There were five persons taken in one house; the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive . . . Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them.

Rowlandson and other English villagers, including some of her children, are taken captive; they travel with the natives on the warpath for nearly three months. She suffers much worry, discomfort, deprivation, and the loss of a child, but little physical, and no sexual, abuse. Eventually ransomed—or, to use the Puritan term, “redeemed”—she returns to her family a chastened soul, a Puritan purified by her trials, which she sees as intended to punish her (and her fellow colonists) for spiritual complacency. The composition of her narrative was, among other things, a form of scriptotherapy, an attempt to come to terms with a traumatic event by representing, and interpreting, it in writing. In this case, of course, it is also scripture therapy; as a Puritan, Rowlandson combs the Bible for passages that would reveal God’s design in her ordeal. It proved a best seller. One of the most popular books of its time, it was reprinted numerous times well into the next century, and it was read in England as well as America. It is now considered an American classic. The captivity narrative is a truly distinctive indigenous American genre. But it is not entirely original. As its many quotations from the Old Testament—so tiresome to modern readers—reveal, the captivity narrative is really an update of the narratives of the captivities of the ancient Israelites, with whom the American Puritans identified. In the New World, the Puritans found themselves surrounded by heathen different from them in race and culture, and they read their own history as the working out of God’s providential plan for the triumph of the one true faith.

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What’s new about the American captivity narrative is that it focuses on a single, representative member of the colony, who narrates it. Moreover, the captive is usually a woman. Historically, this reflects the Indian practice of preferring female captives, with an eye to replacing tribe members killed in action; rhetorically, it heightens the pathos of the captivity. But while the genre is a product of a patriarchal culture, it allowed women to write their lives—at least, short, traumatic episodes of them. It literally authorized them. In the larger picture, major ironies need to be noted. The narrative’s opening is so sudden, so devoid of exposition, that when I first read this narrative in an anthology, I thought perhaps an introductory passage had been left out. Not so. Rather, the abrupt, violent beginning simulates the experience of the colonists: the reader is as surprised as the villagers. However, the sudden opening eclipses consideration of what might have prompted the assault, which appears all the more threatening for being portrayed as an unprovoked attack on innocent civilians. So, as the primary literary residue of the Indian wars, the captivity narrative perpetuates an image of vulnerable whites (especially women) in the hands of bloodthirsty Indians. This is highly ironic in view of the fact that the war was far more devastating to the natives, who were conclusively defeated and who left no written records to compete with those of the victors. The New England natives were not entirely without voice, however. The origins of Native American autobiography are found in a very different sort of narrative—Samson Occom’s “A Short Narrative of My Life.” Written in 1768, less than a century after Rowlandson’s, Occom’s narrative is the first known Native American autobiography. Unlike many later narratives, which were elicited and written down by white historians and anthropologists, it has the distinction of having been written by its subject unaided and unprompted by whites. This was possible because Occom, a Connecticut Mohegan, had converted to Christianity. Out of the conviction that individual Christians should read and interpret scripture themselves, Protestant missionaries, unlike their Catholic counterparts, required native converts to be literate. Occom subsequently became a missionary to tribes in southeastern Connecticut and eastern Long Island.

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His narrative begins with what may at first seem a complete and unfortunate renunciation of his native identity and culture: I was Born a Heathen and Brought up In Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age, at a Place Calld Mohegan, in New London, Connecticut, in New England. My Parents Livd a wandering life, [as] did all the Indians at Mohegan, they Chiefly Depended upon Hunting, Fishing, & Fowling for their Living and had no Connection with the English, excepting to Traffic with them in their small Trifles; and they Strictly maintained and followed their Heathenish Ways, Customs & Religion, though there was Some Preaching among them.

It is noteworthy here that heathenism is not just a matter of religion but also of native “Ways” and “Customs”—namely nomadism and hunting and gathering. Converts, known as Praying Indians, would be expected not just to pledge belief in Christ and testify to their own conversion but also to give up their native lifeways—to live like the English, though not with them. Whatever the initial impetus for his conversion, Occom sought to use his education and religion to better his people’s lives at a time when traditional ways were no longer viable. But when he figured out—he literally does the math for the reader—that he was being grossly underpaid compared to his white brethren, he became disillusioned with his patrons. He wrote his short narrative to document and indict this discriminatory treatment. So although it contains an account of his conversion, his short narrative is not a conversion narrative. Rather, it’s an apologia, a self-justification attesting to his value as a missionary and teacher among his people. Precisely because of this, of course, it could not be published at the time; access to the sole mass medium, print, was controlled by the very parties he accused of racism. As it happened, it was not published until 1982, so it cannot be credited with influencing Native American autobiography in the interim. Nevertheless, it stands as an early example of minority life writing speaking truth to power—testimony in the form of apologia. One of the forces powerfully shaping early American culture generally and life writing specifically was Protestantism, which became the dominant religious tradition in the colonies before the Revolution. With

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its iconoclasm and preference for the plain style, Protestantism privileged factual over fictive writing in principle; in practice, its desire to minimize institutional mediation between the individual Christian and God favored introspective or devotional life-writing genres, such as the diary and the meditation—rather than confession, which involved a clerical intercessor. As the meaning of “catholic” (comprehensive) suggests, the Roman Catholic Church sought to include everyone. The Puritans explicitly and ardently opposed this policy; they wished to limit church membership— and, crucially, access to the sacrament of Communion—to the saved. Of course, they realized that it was not ultimately up to them to determine who was saved and who wasn’t; still, they felt obliged to make a provisional distinction. And they believed the best evidence of salvation was neither a declaration of belief in Christ nor good behavior but rather a compelling narrative of the experience of conversion. As a result, unlike English Puritanism, seventeenth-century New England Puritanism formally required a “spiritual relation” of any aspiring saint. That is, anyone—male or female— who wished to become a full church member, with benefits, had to give an oral account of his or her conversion to a panel of church members who would assess its authenticity. This requirement gave an important stimulus to the autobiographical impulse in the New World and helps to account for the lasting influence of this subgenre in American literature. This institutional requirement, however, had its drawbacks. The conversion narrative of a prominent eighteenth-century Puritan minister, Jonathan Edwards, exposes the problematic nature of the genre—both as literature and as religious practice. American Puritans fetishized conversion, and seventeenth-century theologians parsed it in treatises that in effect provided a template for narratives. Predictably, then, the institutional requirement of a public relation of conversion fostered a consensus that conversion involved a particular sequence of distinct stages. Thus, over time, the genre became rigidly conventional; individual narratives became formulaic. A latter-day Puritan, and a major figure in the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards saw the folly—indeed, the fallacy—of this spiritual test: by inferring that conversion had to follow a certain pattern, American Puritans were overreaching. Their desire to maintain the purity of the congregation put them at risk of pre-scribing what constituted a genuine conversion narrative. In any case, when Edwards wrote his own

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conversion narrative, it deviated radically from the received view of the process. He opens his short Personal Narrative with several false conversions—moments he thought were the desired turning point, but which he later realized were not—followed by his true conversion, which had passed unremarked at the time. His narrative is always alert to the spiritual danger inherent in the genre, the encouragement of false assurance. Moreover, whereas conventional narratives concluded with conversion, Edwards extended his story well beyond what he retroactively determined was his moment of salvation. His narrative goes on to trace his post-conversion growth in grace; its implication is that conversion is always ongoing, never finished or definitive. Edwards’s narrative marks a milestone in the development of memoir because he had the vision to see the limits and limitations of an instrumental genre and the writerly talent to expose and transcend them. He saw how the genre, as it had calcified, was in danger of violating its own reason for being, to “test” one’s conversion. To adapt the contemporary cliché, he wrote outside the box pew. And while the contemporary American memoir is predominantly secular, Edwards’ narrative can be considered a precursor of popular modern accounts of spiritual growth, like Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993) and even Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2006). With regard to the early national period, two foundational texts may be said to favor life writing: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. As it happened, the Declaration was drafted by three autobiographers—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. More to the point, as Edwin Gittleman astutely observed decades ago, it is itself a variant of the captivity narrative, in which the American people, like the Israelites, collectively seek freedom from an arbitrary and tyrannical pharaoh in the person of King George III. In view of the fact that the final draft omitted any condemnation (or even mention) of slavery, the Declaration is a highly ironic appropriation of the captivity narrative. Nevertheless, one could plausibly claim that the text not only justifies slave revolt but underpins the ethos and rhetoric of much slave narrative. The Constitution encourages autobiography in a general way by instituting a nation where individuals (in theory) will be free, equal, and self-governing. If autobiography is, as William Dean Howells once wrote, “the most democratic province of the republic of letters,” then democracy

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should be the most autobiographical of political systems. Indeed, autobiography would seem to be its distinctive literary expression. As it happens, three of the founding fathers (two of them early U. S. presidents) wrote autobiographies: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and Adams initiated the tradition of ex-presidents writing memoirs. Adams never finished his, and the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson (1821) is relatively short and focuses on earlier events, such as the writing of the Declaration. The genre of the presidential memoir was really initiated by James Buchanan’s Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (1861). Of the founding memoirists, Benjamin Franklin most astutely realized the genre’s democratic potential. In 1771 when (already in his sixties) he began his narrative, he cast it as a letter to his son William (already forty and royal governor of New Jersey). Perhaps we should say he used the pretext of its being a letter to his son, because his narrative is pretty clearly not meant just for William’s consumption. When he resumed writing his narrative after the Revolution in 1784, Franklin dropped the epistolary framework (William had sided with the British, and father and son were estranged); instead of casting his story as a family chronicle, he explicitly linked it to the destiny of the “rising nation.” He did so by inserting between Parts One and Two a letter encouraging him, as the “author” of the Revolution, to produce a self-biography justifying it: The immense revolution of the present period, will necessarily turn our attention towards the author of it; and when virtuous principles have been pretended in it [in the Declaration of Independence] it will be highly important to show that such have really influenced; and, as your own character will be the principal one to receive a scrutiny, it is proper (even for its effects upon your vast and rising country, as well as upon England and upon Europe) that it should stand respectable and eternal.

Franklin’s Autobiography (which he called his Memoirs; see chapter 1) is typically characterized as a classic American success story, the story of a self-made man. It is undeniably a story of success —the first of (too) many. But Franklin did not rise from rags to riches, nor were material gain and

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upward mobility his ultimate goals. Taking up the hint provided by his friend Benjamin Vaughan’s letter, we may better understand his narrative as that of a self-governing individual. Born only three years after Jonathan Edwards, Franklin came from a long line of Puritans, and he pointedly traces this transatlantic lineage before getting to his own birth in Part One. But what he emphasizes in his heritage of religious dissent is the dissent rather than the religion: that is, he aligns himself with a legacy of antiauthoritarianism. He identifies as a protestant with a small “p.” Part One of his narrative is largely about his self-liberation—from a confining apprenticeship to his older brother, from conventional wisdom, and from the Puritan orthodoxy of his hometown, Boston. Hence his relocation to more Friendly (Quakerly) Philadelphia. He acknowledges, of course, that his personal liberty occasionally spilled over into license, but rather than turning to religion for guidance, he governed his impulses through the application of reason and willpower. Unlike his near contemporary, Edwards, Franklin’s mindset was not devotional but experimental. Reviewing his past behavior, he recognized his errors and, going forward, endeavored to avoid or correct them. He even reproduced in Part Two a chart he used to review his behavior and trace his progress. His metaphor for this self-discipline—that of errata—is taken from his trade as a printer. This is decidedly contrary to the Puritan sense of sin, which could be cancelled only by the unmerited grace of God. Franklin reduced sin from an innate condition to a matter of discrete mistakes, each of which he might correct. In writing his narrative, then, Franklin acts as the editor, if not the author, of his own life: Were it offer’d to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Fault of the first. So would I if I might, besides correcting the Faults, change some sinister Accidents and Events of it for others more favorable, but tho’ this were denied, I should still accept the Offer. However, since such a Repetition is not to be expected, the Thing most like living one’s Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life; and to make the Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing. (231)

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In other words, Franklin expresses satisfaction with the way he has lived his life. Were he granted the opportunity to relive it, he concedes he’d change some things, as an author would a book’s second edition. But, barring the opportunity to repeat his life literally, he’ll do so literarily—by writing it down. And in doing so, he’ll take the opportunity to correct his mistakes. So when he comes to an action he regrets, he marks it as an erratum. And that, in and of itself, constitutes a correction—a kind of retrospective amendment of the text of his life. It is in this trope of writing a life as equivalent to re-living a life—as creating the opportunity for “do-overs”—that we can see the originality of Franklin’s autobiography. His quantum leap as a self-life writer was to take complete control of his “life”—and to flaunt that control. One can’t be sure he isn’t making “silent” (unannounced) corrections all along. Or rather, one can be sure he is. Given his Puritan origins, Franklin’s reveling in the opportunity to write his own life as he sees fit and, in doing so, to assure his own immortality, is really quite breathtaking in its audacity. To a Puritan, the implication that he could ensure his own immortality and his characterization of himself as the author of his own life would be heretical. So while colonial genres provide an important legacy for American life writing, it is Franklin’s Autobiography that initiates modern American autobiography as we know it: a self-reflexive, secular mode of life writing. In the early nineteenth century, the existence of the “peculiar institution” generated another distinctive American life-writing genre—the slave narrative. As with the Puritan conversion narrative, there is some tendency here toward the formulaic. Nearly all slave narratives begin with the same five words: “I was born a slave.” The narrative arc—from slavery to freedom—is predetermined. And the climactic episode typically recounts the slave’s successful escape to the North. While this genre was uniquely available to African-Americans, the escaped slaves who used it were not always in complete control of their narratives. One reason was that, having been denied formal education, some were not literate enough to write their stories without assistance. So a good many slave narratives were produced in collaboration with white abolitionists, and these sponsoring groups had their own agenda and a sense of what constituted an effective narrative. Even when they were produced independently, narratives might be introduced by prefatory texts by whites who authenticated

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their authorship and vouched for their veracity. This need for buttressing by white authorities reflected not only the controversy over slavery (which many contemporaries defended as humane and biblically justified) but also the exposure of some slave narratives as (well-intentioned) fakes— fiction passing as nonfiction. Like captivity narrative, slave narrative is a form of life writing generated by distinctive American historical conditions. And both derive from the same biblical model. Drawing on Old Testament antecedents, the captivity narrative casts the white captive as the pious true believer and the Indian captor as the villainous infidel or heathen. But in the slave narrative, the role of the innocent protagonist is assumed by the black slave; that of the villain, by the white slave owner. Significantly, this reverses the color code of the captivity narrative, in which whiteness is aligned with Christianity and virtue. It also calls into question the spiritual status of the slave holders, who were often bible-quoting, church-going Christians. In effect, it charged them with hypocrisy or, worse, heresy: the implication was that owning slaves was inherently un-Christian. Most abolitionists were progressive Protestants. They no doubt encouraged the analogy between slavery and biblical captivity, but this had also already been intuited by converted slaves: it is evident in spirituals like “Go Down, Moses.” In any case, the anti-slavery agenda pushed the genre toward testimony and away from autobiography proper—or autoethnography. That is, the genre favored documentation of oppression over attention to individual self-development or to the formation of a distinctive African-American culture. As self-life writing, then, slave narrative is relatively, but understandably, impersonal. Slave narrative is an immensely significant American genre—on its own terms, as the first genre of African-American life writing, and as a model for classic American novels (not necessarily first-person narratives and not always by African-American writers, e.g., Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, and William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner). But, as a threshold genre for African-American life writers, it is limited in two additional ways. First, the convention that the narrative ends when the protagonist reaches freedom means, ironically, that just when the author begins to control his life, he must bring his story to an end. By definition, slave narratives recount the least free period of their

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authors’ lives. A second drawback is related to this: once the Civil War was over and slavery had been abolished, the genre became virtually obsolete. Ironically, once the genre’s work was accomplished, the market for it collapsed. Sadly, the advent of freedom for African-Americans did not stimulate, but suppressed, African-American life writing. Two slave narratives tower above the others—those of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass—in part because they transcend the genre’s constraints. Each demonstrates a different gender paradigm. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs depicts herself as deeply embedded in extended family relations. One of slavery’s dire threats to her, as a woman, involved her chastity. When her owner made sexual advances, she took refuge in a consensual nonmarital relationship with a sympathetic white attorney, with whom she had two children. When her infuriated master exiled her to a rural plantation, she fled. But rather than abandon her family, she returned to the town where her children, and her owner, lived. There she lived secretly for several years in an attic crawl space in the home of her emancipated maternal grandmother. Unbeknownst to her owner, she remained in close touch with her children until she, and they, could escape to the North. After a long period of gestation, her narrative was published pseudonymously in 1861, with the assistance of Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist, journalist, and novelist. Its initial reception was favorable, but the timing of its publication, during the Civil War, limited sales. More important, her use of a pseudonym (Linda Brent), the involvement of a well-known writer, the implausibility of her life in hiding, and the narrative’s novelistic mode caused many scholars to dismiss it as more fiction than fact, more Child than Jacobs. But in the 1980s, Jean Fagan Yellin validated it as essentially Jacobs’s own writing—and as nonfiction. Having had children out of wedlock, but not as a result of rape, Jacobs was in a delicate rhetorical and ethical position. She could not reflexively claim the high moral ground; rather, she needed to produce a kind of apologia. Ironically, then, although she was a slave, she felt obliged to defend her own actions, her assertion of control over her body and her reproductive freedom. Her solution was to cast her story in the mode of the sentimental fiction of the day, favored by women. By doing so, she capitalized on the sympathy readers would bring to any imperiled heroine and

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mother. Even today, the narrative is a gripping read—all the more so, of course, for having been authenticated. Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) was also published under the aegis of abolitionists. His narrative is preceded by introductory texts by two prominent white abolitionists—Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison—who attest to his literacy and the truth of his narrative. More interestingly, they link him, as a champion of liberty, to the pilgrim fathers and the founding fathers. What qualifies his narrative as a masterpiece of the genre, however, is his achievement alone; he was a supremely self-aware and skillful life writer. Indeed, he was to slave narrative what Jonathan Edwards was to conversion narrative: an astute rhetorician who sensed and transcended the limitations of his genre. Part of his achievement involved capitalizing on the similarities between the conversion narrative and the slave narrative. Douglass was in doubt as to his father’s identity and not in touch with family members; unlike Jacobs, then, he represents himself as an isolated figure. His meaningful bonds are not with blood relations but with fellow slaves by virtue of their condition. The climactic scene in his narrative is not his physical escape, as would be expected, but rather a moment of psychological selfliberation. He impulsively resists a beating by a Mr. Covey, who had been hired to break his spirit: This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood . . . I felt as I had never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom . . . I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact . . . The white man who expected to succeed in whipping must also succeed in killing me. [emphasis mine] (963)

The use of religious terms signals the appropriation of a paradigm of conversion that would be familiar to, and valued by, most of his readers. But here the turning point involves self-assertion and physical resistance, rather than submission to divine power. Douglass defines true

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Christianity not as meek obedience but rather as forceful, even violent, self-emancipation. His is a radical and masculinist version of Christianity. Douglass has already come to faith in abolitionism; now he is ready to take his fate into his own hands. Douglass’s mastery of his genre is perhaps most remarkable in his deliberate withholding of the details of his escape. He makes a point of depriving the readers of this expected payoff. He points out that the exposure of his method might endanger those who helped him; more important, it might cut off a route “whereby some dear brother bondman might escape his galling chains.” He then adds: I deeply regret the necessity that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience in slavery. It would afford me great pleasure indeed, as well as materially add to the interest of my narrative, were I at liberty to gratify a curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many, by an accurate statement of all the facts pertaining to my most fortunate escape. [emphasis mine] (975)

Douglass thereby reminds the reader that as an escaped slave, he is not only still vulnerable to being returned to slavery in the South; he is also not free to tell his whole story. So long as slavery exists, his freedom as a man and his liberty as a life writer are incomplete. Douglass defied generic limitations in another way: he continued his life story beyond his escape from slavery. He carried it far enough to express disillusionment about the treatment of free blacks in the North. And then in 1855, he published a fuller account of his life, My Bondage and My Freedom. This is not a sequel, picking up where his slave narrative left off ; rather, it is a full-life narrative that begins with his birth, recaps his life as a slave, and then tells the story of his career as an abolitionist. After the Civil War, Douglass had a very successful career in politics and diplomacy. And in 1881, he published yet another narrative, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he revised and reissued in 1892. As its title suggests, this is a proper self-biography. As far as I know, Douglass was the only slave narrator to publish one additional life narrative, let alone two; his life writing thus serves as a bridge from slave narrative to black autobiography as practiced by prominent

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intellectuals like W. E. B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. While slave narrative has received abundant attention from scholars, another book from this period gets overlooked today: Two Years before the Mast (1840), by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Yet it deserves mention as a nineteenth-century precedent for modern memoirs. Dana came from a privileged Yankee background; he was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet and the son and namesake of a prominent man of letters. After studying at a school overseen by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he went to Harvard College. But an illness affected his vision, and he took a restorative sea voyage in the mid 1830s. Rather than heading to Europe for the grand tour, however, he chose to serve as a merchant seaman on a ship bound for California, then still part of Mexico. After his return, he went to Harvard Law School and pursued a career in maritime law. He became an abolitionist, an advocate for merchant sailors, and, after the Civil War, a Massachusetts legislator. In the late 1830s, he drew on diaries of his voyage to produce a memoir of his two years in the merchant marine. It offered his contemporaries two distinct things: a first-hand account of life on the remote and little known West Coast and an inside narrative of the life of common seamen. Like his contemporary, Herman Melville, Dana was outspoken about the inequities and brutalities of life aboard ship. His book thus combines travel writing with testimony. But it also looks forward to the modern memoir of life in a social underworld. Dana did not undertake his voyage with the intention of writing it up later, but today a good many writers have gone “underground,” sometimes incognito, in order to document what life is like for the less fortunate. For example, in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled her attempt to live on the minimum wage, working as a cleaner or waitress. Such writing is sometimes called “undercover” or “immersion” journalism, but it is also a kind of single-experience memoir—of an alternative lifestyle. As we follow the table of contents of any standard anthology of American literature forward into the mid-nineteenth century, life writing seems to disappear from view. This is because for the anthologist, there is far more available for inclusion that looks like “literature”—that is, imaginative literature. Writing in some of the humble utilitarian genres so common in colonial literature continued to be produced, of course, and even

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published, but it gets crowded out of the canon by fiction, poetry, and even drama once those genres get established in the New World. The disappearance of utilitarian life writing from anthologies of nineteenth-century American literature is not a sign of its diminishing frequency, vitality, or cultural importance, then, so much as it is of the maturing of more conventionally “literary” genres in the new nation. But life writing doesn’t really disappear from the anthologies, after all. At least two of the masterpieces of the American Renaissance, Walden and “Song of Myself,” both apparently sui generis, are best understood as distinctively American experiments in life writing—what I have called autobiography in the prophetic mode. As I pointed out in chapter 2, Walden is so hard to classify generically in part because in writing it Thoreau was revisiting and updating some of the colonial genres discussed earlier. To wit, he casts his experience by the pond as a narrative of exploring and settling a “primitive” frontier; as an account of spiritual growth, if not of conventional conversion; even as a justification of his flight from what he audaciously claims is the harshest form of slavery, that which is self-imposed. This latter is the most radical gesture of his narrative, presenting it as a white slave narrative: I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.

This audacious claim, potentially offensive in its seeming dismissal of Negro slavery, comes just before his oft-quoted line: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is well to remember that Thoreau was in fact an ardent abolitionist. But he saw that the abolition of “Negro slavery” would leave in place a far more common form of slavery: that of everyman to his material possessions. And his experiment at Walden was meant to test ways of escaping that common institution, which of course persists to this day. It is here that his prophetic impulse is clearest: he models a way of

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life that he believes is truer to American ideals than the culture surrounding him in antebellum America. I’ve emphasized Thoreau’s adaptation of indigenous genres because this aspect of his masterpiece has not been widely understood and because it is the key to the work of Walden. But there are other aspects of Walden that anticipate the present. Most obvious is the prominence of nature writing in it, and nature writing is usually to some extent life writing. The work of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and a host of others indebted to Thoreau can be classified under the umbrella of life writing, if not always memoir. Perhaps more important, though, is the element of self-experimentation. Walden is the first book I can think of that involved the deliberate, temporary modification of the author’s life with the intention of writing up the experiment afterward. This involves yet another quantum leap in life writing. A new kind of life is imagined, then tried out, then recounted. There is creativity in the very conception of a life truly worth living. Around 2000—the turn of the millennium—there was a resurgence of life writing involving short-term living experiments. Much of it is devoted to carrying out rather odd and extreme experiments—reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in a year, for example. Its current manifestation—about which I’ll say more in chapter 6—is often arch and sometimes trivial, but at its best it can be transgressive and transformative. Whitman saw his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, which he expanded and revised over the course of his poetic career, as a kind of self-life writing. He described it as “an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being . . . freely, fully, and truly on record.” A disciple of the Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson—he of the visionary “transparent eyeball”— Whitman did not see Leaves as a conventional autobiography—prosaic, factual, and narrative—but rather as a new form of self-representation— poetic, mythic, and transcendent. That vision is best realized in its long central poem, “Song of Myself,” which presents itself as a kind of oxymoronic universal autobiography: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

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Autobiography in verse had already been pioneered in England by William Wordsworth in his Prelude, which he began early in his career and worked on for the rest of his life but never published. (It was first published after his death, in 1850.) Although The Prelude is a kind of Romantic spiritual and aesthetic autobiography tracing, as its subtitle suggests, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind, it is relatively conventional compared to “Song of Myself ” in being the narrative of a particular individual, in a particular time and place. Whitman’s impulse to write everyone’s autobiography may be self-defeating: the urge to merge may annihilate the very distinctions that define the self and the other. But one can admire the sentiment that all lives are worth writing: this is the acme of egalitarianism, the logical extension of the idea that autobiography is an inherently democratic genre. Late in life, plagued by ill health and anticipating death, Whitman also produced an autobiography in prose: Specimen Days (1882). After an opening section that recounts his early life up to the first publication of Leaves in 1855, the volume becomes a miscellany: memoranda of the war years (1860–1865), nature notes (1876–1878), and travel diaries and literary essays (1878–1882). Part of the impulse here seems to be to document the life represented so differently in “Song of Myself.” That is, this book is meant in part to corroborate the earlier one. But even here, he avoids a purely chronological—temporal and mundane—account of his existence. He often writes in the present tense, and he sometimes includes the reader in the scene, as if to dissolve the boundaries of time and space. Thus in his war notes, which document his work as a nurse and companion to the wounded, he writes: “In Ward H we approach the cot of a young lieutenant of one of the Wisconsin regiments. Tread the board lightly, here, for the pain and panting of death are in this cot.” Specimen Days thus functions as a companion volume to Leaves, and especially to “Song of Myself,” in testing the limits of autobiography, stretching the genre to the breaking point. To recap, if we look for life writing in the heart of the American literary tradition—namely, in the nineteenth century—it may seem to have been crowded out by “real” literature: fiction (by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe); poetry (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf

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Whittier, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson); essays (by Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller); and even oratory (by Abraham Lincoln). But I have been trying to show that, on the contrary, in the hands of a number of writers—Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman, at least—it becomes great literature. Thus I would argue that, by the time of the Civil War, life writing achieved what we might call parity with other literary genres. But again, it is usually not recognized as such—by which I mean that most who teach American literature do not acknowledge it as life writing. After the Civil War, the torch is passed to others: two of our greatest novelists—Mark Twain and Henry James—also composed important autobiographies. And Henry Adams’s most significant work is probably his odd autobiographical volume, The Education of Henry Adams. Mark Twain is best known, and rightly so, for his fiction, especially The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But he wrote a prodigious amount of nonfiction as well, and he did so throughout his career. In fact, his first great literary success (and his most popular book during his lifetime) was Innocents Abroad (1869), his account of traveling with a group of religious pilgrims to the Holy Land by way of Europe. This was by no means the first narrative of travels in the Old World by a nineteenth-century American writer, but it may be the best, and it is certainly the funniest. For Twain, the trip was a pleasure trip, not a pilgrimage, and his account is no spiritual autobiography—far from it. Indeed, he enjoys mocking the pieties, cultural as well as religious, of his fellow travelers. Venice reminded him of “an overflowed Arkansas town”; he kept wondering when the flood would recede and allow him to walk the streets. Innocents Abroad is the travel memoir of a skeptic, not of a believer. Though published later, in 1872, Roughing It recounts travels taken earlier: Twain’s progress, during and after the Civil War, through Nevada mining country, Mormon Utah, to San Francisco, and on to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i). Both books stand as precedents for innumerable late twentieth-century narratives of travels or sojourns. But not in the lyrical summer-in-Tuscany mode: Twain’s humorous mode serves as a precedent, rather, for contemporary antiheroic American travel writers like Bill Bryson. In any case, Twain’s example reminds us that travel writing is, at bottom, single-experience life writing; as such, it verges on memoir and can be extended into it.

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Twain’s real achievement as an autobiographer is, in my view, not his Autobiography, on which he labored for decades at the end of his life. (Parts of it have been published posthumously, in a number of forms, none satisfactory, but much of it could not be published, according to his mandate, until one hundred years after his death. In November 2010, the University of California Press issued the first of three volumes of yet another new edition of this autobiography.) I prefer “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which was first published as a series of sketches in the Atlantic in 1875 and later folded into Life on the Mississippi (1883). What distinguishes this work as autobiography is that it reckons with the crucial fact of his life: that, while a journalist in Nevada, he created the pseudonymous persona that became his literary identity, his brand. Pseudonymity is not problematic for a novelist, but it is for an autobiographer. For one thing, it violates the autobiographical pact: the author, narrator, and protagonist do not share the same name. A pseudonymous autobiography is, therefore, an oxymoron, if not a self-contradiction—the true story of an invented identity. Obviously, such writing is problematic: how does one write the past of a fictitious persona—not Samuel Clemens, who was born in 1835, but Mark Twain, whom Clemens conjured up in 1863? This pen name was a punning adaptation of a phrase used to announce a river’s depth—two fathoms, about twelve feet. It is therefore transparently false, unlike, say, “George Eliot,” the pen name of the British novelist Mary Ann Evans. Indeed, I have known academics who pedantically insist on using it only as a unit—he’s always “Mark Twain,” never “Twain”— because his is not, like real names, a compound of a given name and a surname. More important, however, its derivation from his first profession, river piloting, links him to the river at the heart of the American continent. It’s a playful name, and a metonym of a regional art or craft—the reading of an ever-changing fluid environment. Of course, as a false name, it also grants him a high degree of prose license, and he fully avails himself of it. “Old Times on the Mississippi” is an account of an apprenticeship—a failed one, as he tells it, since, although Samuel Clemens got his license, Mark Twain never quite measures up to the expectations of his instructor, Henry Bixby. It also plays with the inadequacy of memory: just as the apprentice can never fully

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reconstruct the river’s shape, so the memoirist can never fix his fluid past. The implication is that this is so for everyone, but it also serves to justify the mode of humor that distinguished Mark Twain, who once claimed, “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.” He thus makes a virtue—humor, license—of the necessary erosion of memory: he frees himself as a writer from a strict obligation to the truth. This is his little joke about the impossibility of factually accurate autobiography. And as we’ve seen, this has repercussions today. Aside from his own writing, Mark Twain has another important credential in the development of American memoir. He urged his friend U. S. Grant to write his memoirs after he left office, and when he eventually did so, Twain served as its publisher—though not, contrary to popular belief, as its ghostwriter. In fact, Grant wrote the book himself in a painful race with the throat cancer that killed him within days of its completion. The book is considered a great military memoir and a classic among memoirs by ex-presidents. Because the narrative focuses on his military, rather than his political, career, it is not strictly speaking a “presidential memoir.” Two early twentieth-century autobiographies stand head and shoulders above the rest: Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1918) and Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others (1913). Neither of the two Henrys’ autobiographies is much read today, and I would not attempt to teach either one at the undergraduate level; nevertheless, they are both monumental works by mature and self-conscious writers. They are masterworks of very different sorts, and they deserve notice here in part because of their experiments with point of view. Henry Adams’s innovation was to use the third-person rather than the first-person point of view: he refers to himself throughout as if he were his own biographer. This is fitting; he was by profession a historian, and in his Education he situates his life in a panoramic world-historical perspective. James’s technique is the opposite. He offers little in the way of “perspective”; instead, he foregrounds the uncertain and somewhat whimsical workings of his memory. The result is to put on record a kind of extreme subjectivity. Henry Adams (1838–1918) came from a distinguished Massachusetts family; he was the son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the grandson of John

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Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of John Adams. Politics was in his blood. But he never sought electoral office; rather, he became secretary to his father during his term as ambassador to the United Kingdom, then a reform journalist, then a professional historian, and also a novelist and the author of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). In the nineteenth century in Britain, it was common for intellectuals like John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, and Herbert Spencer to write their autobiographies. Often these were, as one would expect, narratives of the life of the mind, the furthest thing from confessional memoirs. As its title suggests, Adams’s Education is in this vein—but with a twist. He severed the pronomial connection between protagonist and narrator; Adams made his I-then a he-then. One can regard this as merely a candid acknowledgement of the fact that the narrator and the protagonist of memoir are never exactly the same; the illusion of their identity is a function of the first-person pronoun, which refers simultaneously, but differently, to both. In a letter to his friend Henry James, Adams compared biographers to murderers and recommended autobiography as a kind of preemptive taking of one’s own life as “a shield of protection in the grave.” There may therefore be an element of defensiveness in this gesture, as well—the autobiographer as protective self-biographer. In any case, this move is highly unconventional, and it gives an odd, disembodied, and clinical feel to the narrative. Here, for example, is its opening paragraph, which recounts his birth: Under the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.

The echo of the Nativity story—“a child was born”—is presumably both intentional and ironic.

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The other odd formal feature of Adams’s Education is its omission of fully twenty years of his life, from 1872 to 1892. What would ordinarily be the heart of an intellectual’s memoir—an account of the career—is entirely eclipsed. Adams was a very accomplished historian—he taught at Harvard, and he produced, among other works, a classic History of the United States, 1801to 1817 (1889–1891)—so the lacuna is especially striking. It is consistent with the theme of education, however, for during those twenty years, Adams was (supposedly) not being educated but rather educating. But the gap also conveniently brackets the date (1885) of the suicide of his wife Clover, in whose memory he commissioned a sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens for Rock Creek Park in Washington. The irony of his title is that Adams characterizes his education as largely worthless. He treats his privileged background as worse than useless—in fact, a disadvantage. Again and again, he concludes a chapter by saying that he had learned nothing; he falls further and further behind the accelerating forces of history. The irony of that is that Adams displays such intelligence and knowledge as a self-historian that it is hard to accept his dismissal of his education; the narrative cannot explain the refined and indeed visionary consciousness of its own narrator. But it is a monument of self-aware and accomplished American memoir. When Henry James, the novelist known as The Master, turned to memoir late in life, he employed a mode utterly different from Adams’s. If Adams’s Education extends the tradition of European and British intellectual autobiography, James’s A Small Boy extends that of the memoir of childhood. According to Richard Coe, the narrative of childhood originated with the Romantics, who idealized—even fetishized—childhood as a time of innocence. But it emerged first in fiction, like Rousseau’s Emile (1761); only later did it develop in nonfictional works, like Stendhal’s Vie de Henri Brulard (written in the 1830s but not published until 1890). It had few practitioners in English until the turn of the twentieth century. James (1843–1916) took up life writing in the aftermath of the death of the sibling to whom he was closest in age and affection, the philosopher William James (1842–1910). Approaching seventy, Henry was the sole survivor among his five siblings. In the last several years of his life, he produced an autobiographical sequence of two complete volumes, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and part of a third, The

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Middle Years (published posthumously in 1917). I’ll confine my comments to A Small Boy, which seems the most remarkable of the volumes and the most pertinent to the present state of the art of life writing. It is startling, and salutary, to read James’s Small Boy in the context of the advent of the hi-def childhood memoir. For one thing, A Small Boy is distinctive for being almost entirely devoid of scene: hardly a single unique incident gets narrated from beginning to end in the entire 400page volume. Interestingly, one of very few passages that may qualify as a scene culminates with a female cousin being reproached by her mother for making one: “Come now, my dear; don’t make a scene—I insist on your not making a scene!” (185). James muses: “Life at these intensities clearly became ‘scenes’; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose.” Thus, the scene about the danger of making a scene is quickly converted to summary in the form of a life lesson—one of particular interest to a novelist of manners. But to say that A Small Boy consists primarily of summary would be misleading, for James does not often explicitly reflect on the significance of his experience in this manner. If his narrative is neither mainly scene nor summary, what is it? It’s not easy to say, but the question holds the key to its uniqueness and to its genius. For I read A Small Boy as quite a radical experiment in self-life writing. James seems simply to release, or license, his memory to plumb his past and toss up shards of various distinctive experiences: living in hotels in New York, Paris, and London; rambling through various neighborhoods of antebellum New York; visiting the homes of relatives and others; going to the theater, to the Barnum museum, the Bois de Boulogne; suffering through school days with several Dickensian school masters, and so on. But the actual referents of the text—sites and personages—are not always clear to someone not already familiar with James’s biography. A Small Boy is at least proto-modernist in its refusal to orient readers in space or in time. In contemporary memoir, as we’ve seen, the present tense is often used to narrate past action. In contrast, when James uses the present tense, he does not collapse the distance between himself as narrator and his past self; rather, he highlights the process of present remembering by his mature self—and his inability to inhabit the past. James deploys the present mostly in resuming the thread at the beginning of a chapter—to page

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forward, as it were. Thus, chapter 12 begins, “I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old rickety bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as ever of the main source of its spell”; and chapter 13 begins, “Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from my glance at our small vague spasms of school.” It is as though his prose must hurry to catch up with his memory, which forges on ahead. He immerses us not in his past but in his helter-skelter pursuit of his rampant, undisciplined memory. As a corollary, James is refreshingly candid about his uncertainty. He repeatedly qualifies his verbs with “must have”; he “seems to see” the past, which “eludes” him or presents itself as “apparitional,” “a featureless void.” His past is paradoxically both vivid and indistinct: “Memory selects a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience . . . Though I can’t now quite divide the total into separate occasions, the various items surprisingly swarm for me.” He does not master his past but interrogates it. He allows his readers—indeed forces us—to see how partial and unreliable his picture of his own past is. Critics have noticed (and some have complained) of the extent to which young Henry is not a central character in his own memoir; indeed, James calls attention to this in his title’s “others.” But neither are the other characters very distinct. This is not what we today think of as a relational narrative. It does not grow out of a single intimate and formative relationship; rather, it locates the small boy in a cohort of others, mostly children, many orphaned, who populate his memory. His own parents are not even particularly significant figures. In short, the narrative does not trace the emergence of a distinctive personality from a welter of influences, as “the childhood” conventionally does. Rather, it acknowledges—even at times seems to relish—the limits of its ability to re-create his early life with any clarity or certainty. The book ascribes its genesis to “the attempt to place together some particulars of the life of William James . . . so that any future memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting.” But the attempt to remember his brother quickly leads him to resurrect others as well: To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide—to see the world within begin to “compose” with a

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grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of difference, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleaded for preservation. (2)

What I would underline here is the sense in which memory is endowed with its own agency: James’s past opens to him and “composes” (the verb seems to be used intransitively). It populates itself, and that population calls for memorialization. James responds. But at the same time, he admits his inability to organize his memories: “I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment . . . in the vivid image and the very scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to experience.” He finds each moment so emblematic and/or bound up with others that he finds his past impossible to parse. Indeed, although the term is hard to avoid entirely, I would say that A Small Boy is only nominally narrative: it rarely, if ever, simply tells a story. It does not trade in anecdotes—at most, it summons up vignettes, scraps of scenes. It has little, if any, discernible narrative arc. What it does—and does supremely well—is render the action of memory—as it “composes” and decomposes and flits from one clue to another, like a search engine driven by some obscure algorithm. A Small Boy has been described as a highly interior “narrative.” That’s true. But the interiority is not that of the boy, which can never be recaptured or reentered; rather, it’s that of the mature man and novelist. James does not re-create his childhood; rather, he re-creates what it is like to try, unsuccessfully, to re-create it. In that sense, A Small Boy is—radically—a memoir. And it communicates better than most memoirs the very sensuous—even autoerotic—pleasure that reminiscence can provide. The characteristic action of the small boy seems to be to “dawdle and gape.” He is not an actor but an observer, and yet his apparent passivity is somewhat misleading; from the perspective of the adult, that behavior prefigured and shaped his novelistic sensibility—his ability to soak in

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multitudinous impressions without overthinking them. For such a writer, memoir involved rummaging through, and emptying onto the page, the “ragbag of memory.” What James produced was not an “interior monologue” in the literary-critical sense, because it has a narrator. Rather, A Small Boy is a monologue of interiority; in proceeding by nearly free association, it is as close to a stream-of-memory life narrative as I am familiar with. No memoir I am familiar with offers a more effective rendering of the mist and mysteries of memory. One more narrative merits mention in this overview. Before the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was known mostly as an experimental modernist—which is to say she was hardly known at all. She had been a student of William James at Radcliffe College, attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, then emigrated to Europe, where she paired up with Alice B. Toklas in 1907. The two of them established a household in Paris on the Rue de Fleurus that became a celebrated salon frequented by many of the major modernists. Among other things, then, the narrative offers an idiosyncratic view of this intellectual milieu before, during, and after World War I. The book became a kind of surprise best seller and made Stein famous and popular. It is not “experimental,” but in pretending to be the autobiography of her partner, it did involve a very original and intriguing innovation. In one sense, the writing of someone else’s autobiography is done all the time—by ghostwriters of celebrity autobiographies—and that’s one way to think of what Stein has done. But Stein was not working with or for a celebrity; she was more famous than Toklas. Nor was she collaborating with Toklas— interviewing her, transcribing and editing the results, then allowing her to vet the text. Rather, as she tells the story, she worked not only without Toklas’s participation but without her permission. Here are the book’s final paragraphs: I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author. About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know

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what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

Although Stein refers to it here as a simple, even impulsive decision, her assumption of the prerogative of writing Alice Toklas’s autobiography was a complex act, highly presumptuous and charged with risk—an invasion of privacy at the very least. As depicted here, the couple’s division of labor was in some ways conventional: Toklas was responsible for the wifely domestic duties, freeing Stein to live the life of a writer. Indeed, when Stein, according to her own account, had proposed that Toklas write her own autobiography, she suggested it might be called “My Life with the Great, Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat with, My Twenty-five Years with Gertrude Stein.” In other words, Stein saw Toklas’s “autobiography” as her memoir of Gertrude Stein—which is what Stein herself produced. So Stein’s taking the initiative to write her partner’s life single-handedly was an act of enormous chutzpah. The presumption would make the act inconceivable in most relationships. It was probably in part the queerness of the relationship that authorized it. The form itself suggests the intimacy of the relationship and even hints confessionally at its emotional and sexual dimensions. In the end, Stein’s use of Toklas’s viewpoint does not lead to caricature or condescension; rather, her compassionate portrayal of her loyal partner, her approximation of Alice’s voice in the narrative, and the frequent use of the first-person plural pronoun emphasize the interdependence of the two women and the mingling of their consciousnesses. This unorthodox narrative can stand, finally, as a loving recognition and reenactment of their partnership. This is, of course, an act of ventriloquism, and under other circumstances it might constitute a hoax. But another way to look at it is as an act of transpersonal life writing in which the intimacy of the relationship and its homosexuality allowed a transgression of the usual boundaries of the genre. What I have offered in this chapter is a highly selective sampling of the history of life writing in America. But I hope that it suffices to establish that (1) early American literature consisted in large part of what we now

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call life writing; (2) the development of American literature well into the national period was profoundly shaped by the invention of indigenous life writing genres (notably the captivity narrative and the slave narrative); (3) and even as American literature became more conventionally literary (i.e., it took the form of imaginative writing), various great American writers (e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Gertrude Stein) did some of their best work in life-writing genres. These significant antecedents—key subgenres and individual master works—not only make up a good deal of what continues to be valued in the canon of American literature; they constitute a very rich tradition of American life writing. As such, they provided the foundation from which the recent flourishing of the memoir has sprung.

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The common perception of contemporary memoir is somewhat distorted by a lack of historical awareness. Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History offers a helpful corrective to this shortsightedness. Among other things, it establishes that some supposedly recent developments are less new than one might think. “Plus ça change, plus c’est le memoir,” one might say. To begin with, the current boom is far from the first. I am old enough to have experienced one previous era of high-profile memoirs: during the 1960s and 1970s, narratives by African-Americans were widely read and celebrated—books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974). (Among these, The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been paid the dubious compliment of having a volume of CliffsNotes dedicated to it: a sure sign of its canonization.) But there were periodic booms in the production and popularity of memoir beginning with its emergence as a distinct genre in the eighteenth century. Previous booms have also generated backlash against the genre. So the phenomena of boom and backlash are hardly unprecedented. Neither are memoirs by scoundrels or “nobodies.” Contrary to popular belief, the writing of memoirs by people of low status or of ill repute is not at all a recent phenomenon. Memoir has been available for centuries to the infamous as well as to the famous. In both England and America, memoirs by rascals and scamps were published as soon as the genre developed. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Britain narratives by criminals and rogues were common. Granted, many took the form of 140

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death-row “confessions,” but their appeal lay more in their grisly details and glimpses of the underworld than in any expression of remorse. The confessional form licensed readers to experience crime vicariously in the knowledge of its sure punishment. Similarly, according to Diane Bjorklund, in America narratives in the “occupational” category criminal/deviant made up roughly one-quarter of those published in the first half of the nineteenth century. A best seller around the turn of that century was The Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798); the author was a New Hampshire preacher’s son who admitted to land fraud, adultery, and other mischief, including posing as a minister. It was in this context of “the [memoirs] of various public cut-throats and intriguers” that Benjamin Franklin’s friend Benjamin Vaughn urged him to write his life as a counterexample of a virtuous life. Evidently, then, memoir is not a genre that has only recently harbored trash. Trashiness was always part of its popular appeal. Nor are hoaxes a new phenomenon. False memoirs have competed with real ones since the emergence of modern memoir in England, and, as noted earlier, in the United States false slave narratives were published alongside authentic ones before the Civil War. So the recent memoir boom is not as novel as it has been made out to be. Still, there have been significant new developments in life writing in the last twenty or thirty years or so. Although I’ve argued that life writing achieved parity with more literary genres in the nineteenth century, Anglophone memoir achieved a kind of breakthrough only in the last generation. Only recently has memoir been recognized as a genre with literary potential on a par with that of the novel. I have suggested earlier that the literary status of life writing has suffered from its not being considered imaginative writing and that, conversely, when it achieves literary status (as with Walden), it is not always recognized as life writing and part of a tradition thereof. But there has been a significant shift in this regard in the last quarter century or so. There has probably never been a period in which contemporary memoirs have been granted canonical status in such large numbers. One manifestation of this is that memoirs are now taught in North American secondary and post-secondary schools. And not just in literature courses; in creative writing courses, as well. Never has memoir writing been encouraged among students so young. The idea that an MFA candidate or even an undergraduate may write memoir is no longer considered ridiculous on the face of it.

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Further evidence of the new status of the genre is that memoirs are more frequently and prominently published by prestigious presses and more widely reviewed than ever before. For example, the highly selective New York Times Book Review almost always assesses at least one memoir in each weekly issue; indeed, it often reviews as many memoirs as biographies. Memoirs often dominate nonfiction best-seller lists—and several, like Angela’s Ashes, have been made into feature films. This is merely the tip of a larger phenomenon. Beyond the academy, numerous writers’ guides and seminars encourage the writing of memoirs by everyday folks. Memoir-writing workshops are a fixture of life in residences for the elderly. There is even software designed to guide novices in organizing and shaping their experience. My English department regularly receives inquiries from people seeking editorial assistance with such projects. And in an age of very inexpensive self-publishing—facilitated by the ability to print copies on demand—huge numbers of memoirs are available through online booksellers. For better or worse, we live in an age of memoir. The boom is not confined to Anglophone countries. Memoir is increasingly of interest worldwide. Academic conferences on life writing are held around the world and attract scholars from an increasing number of countries. And memoirs are far more likely to cross linguistic and national boundaries than ever before, at least if they address issues of worldhistorical import. Thus, in recent years memoirs by women from Muslim countries have attracted large audiences in the United States. I am thinking of books like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran: A Memoir in Books (2003), Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2006), and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (2007) and its sequel Nomad: From Islam to America (2010)—not to mention Marjane Satrapi’s wildly popular Persepolis. The authors are by no means representative of the larger populations from which they come; most live in exile and write in English. Reading Lolita has to do with a group of university students exploring classics of Western literature in a covert, extracurricular reading group; not surprisingly, it was a great hit with women’s reading clubs in the United States. Ali has even renounced Islam, which has given her a very high and controversial profile. But such examples suggest that memoir rivals the novel as a medium of expression on the international stage.

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Without pretending to be exhaustive, this chapter will explore what I consider to be some of the most significant recent developments in life writing on the American scene, which I am most familiar with. In keeping with the new status of memoir as creative writing is the advent of the “lyrical memoir”—books like Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992), Eula Biss’s The Balloonists (2002), and Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon Peel: On Objects and Intimacy (2001). Lyrical memoirs are called that because they have some of the qualities of poetry: brevity (often fewer than 100 pages) and reliance on imagery, rather than narrative, to communicate some truth about a life and an identity. Given their eschewal of plot, they attract relatively few readers; they are hardly page-turners. But they represent a new niche genre that significantly expands the repertoire of memoir—both the kinds of lives that can be written and the way that lives can be written. Doty’s Still Life is a good example. It takes its title from a painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem, and it is very brief (a mere seventy pages) and highly imagistic. It opens with a description of a visit to the canvas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Much of it consists of meditation on Doty’s relationship with the painting. If it were only that, of course, it would not necessarily qualify as a memoir by most definitions. But it also includes vignettes from disparate phases of his life—his childhood in east Tennessee, his unlikely and short-lived marriage, his relationship with a partner who died of AIDS—that provide the biographical desiderata. The premise of this work—and of work like it—seems to be that one is what one sees (or likes to look at)—or what one feels in so doing: We think that to find ourselves we need turn inward, examining the intricacies of origin, the shaping forces of personality. But “I” is just as much to be found in the world; looking outward, we experience the one who does the seeing. Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying. (67)

This passage is not merely life writing but a theory of it: a manifesto of memoir that eschews story and is seemingly without ego. Doty’s rapturous descriptions of his response to the painting—and the connections it has to

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other realms of his life—reveal something important about him, and not just about his taste in art. They resonate with his deepest being. One much remarked upon aspect of the boom has been the popularity of the nobody memoir. In 2002, in a Washington Monthly review-essay entitled “Almost Famous: The Rise of the ‘Nobody Memoir,’ ” Lorraine Adams distinguished between what she dubbed the somebody memoir and the nobody memoir. What determines the classification of a given memoir is simply whether its author is known before its publication or becomes known only through its publication. Thus, Hillary Clinton’s Living History is a somebody memoir, while Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face is a nobody memoir. Somebodies, or celebrities, emerge in various fields of endeavor— from politics to entertainment and sports. They tend to achieve fame or notoriety in one of two distinct ways: on the basis of consistent prominence or excellence (in athletics or public service, for example) or on the basis of one unusual exploit (landing a passenger airline in the Hudson River, like Sully Sullenberger, say, or cutting off one’s arm to save one’s life, like Aron Ralston). Either way, the somebody memoir has a ready-made audience; the author’s fame—the literal pre-text of the memoir—usually guarantees publicity and sales. The somebody memoir has long been a feature of American political life. In the nineteenth century, campaign biographies were written to promote presidential candidates—Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one for his Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce—but in the late twentieth century, the campaign autobiography has become de rigueur. In the case of repeated campaigns, candidates like John McCain have produced multiple memoirs. And beginning with James Buchanan, American presidents have been candidates for self-canonization in the form of post-presidential memoirs. In the nineteenth century, Buchanan’s example was followed only by Grant, and his was more a military than a political memoir. But in the twentieth century, memoirs (sometimes more than one) were produced by Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Thus it is now standard procedure for ex-presidents to write their memoirs. The presidential memoir is a handy medium for burnishing

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(or restoring) a reputation, and recent ex-presidents have been able to command multimillion dollar advances. (Such volumes, I suspect, are more often purchased and displayed on coffee tables than read in their entirety.) Indeed, the value of the presidency as a literary property extends to presidential spouses. With the exception of Pat Nixon, every First Lady since Lady Bird Johnson has published a memoir. Perhaps because they are expected to offer a more intimate glimpse of the life in the White House, the wives’ memoirs often outsell their spouses’. Unlike the somebody memoir, a nobody memoir has to earn its readers the old-fashioned way: on its own merits. The nobody memoir must either offer an extraordinary story (an unusual set of life circumstances, like growing up in a commune or having a consensual affair with your father) or be an engaging read, a “page-turner.” Word of mouth recommendations may be as important as reviews in promoting these narratives. In any case, the rise of the nobody memoir is a self-fueling phenomenon: the success of each one helps to boost the credibility of the type: publishers are more likely to invest in new ones if previous ones have proved successful. And the last several decades have seen the spectacular rise of this unlikely category of memoirs. The reduction ad absurdum is the recent fad for six-word memoirs, which puts the form within reach of almost everyone. The editors of the storytelling magazine SMITH solicited such narratives from readers, and the response was such that in 2008 they published a collection, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, which has spawned sequels and imitators. (The volume’s title is one of the memoirs, in its entirety.) Implicit here is a new element in the literary marketplace—the aggressive role publishers may play in eliciting, developing, and marketing memoirs and kinds of memoirs. It may seem odd that the genre supposedly expressive of unique individual identity is considered amenable to product development and manufacture, but that seems to be the case. And it makes sense that editors would be less eager to steer and advise novelists (especially established ones) than memoirists, who are often novices, eager to publish and eager to please. What goes on behind the scenes in publishing is still largely opaque to literary scholars, but there is mounting evidence, not just anecdotal, that publishers play a powerful role in shaping the contemporary memoir.

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Based on a sample of more than 200 recent nobody memoirs, Lorraine Adams claimed that almost all fall into one of three types: The largest by far is the childhood memoir—-incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impoverished, minority, “normal,” and the occasional privileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage.

Often, one of the significant features of the nobody memoir is the relative youth of its typical author. No longer is the memoir exclusively or even primarily the product of middle age or later. Hence, perhaps, the emphasis on childhood in Adams’s sample; young authors have less life-experience to draw on. Another is gender: while women’s liberation has increased opportunities for women to become celebrities and write somebody memoirs, women are more commonly than men the authors of nobody memoirs. Women’s life writing, then, is no longer limited to private forms like the diary and the letter. Another contributor to the rise of the nobody memoir may be the professionalization of creative writing and the concomitant rise of the Master of Fine Arts as a terminal degree and credential. MFA programs have boomed in the last quarter century. According to Chad Harbach, in the mid-1970s there were fewer than 100 in the United States; now there are nearly 1,000. What is known as “creative nonfiction” is now recognized as “the fourth genre”—after fiction, poetry, and drama—and memoir is the most distinct and popular form of contemporary creative nonfiction. As the memoir becomes progressively democratized, professionalized, and novelized, it has great appeal to those studying to become, or starting out as, creative writers. Whereas prose writers’ first books used to be autobiographical novels, now they may be novelistic autobiographies. Lucy Grealy was an exemplar of these trends: she was trained at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, was her first book. Indeed, it has become common for women, especially, to produce memoirs before they reach the age of forty (or even thirty).

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As suggested already, the nobody memoir is by no means an entirely new phenomenon in the United States. As Ben Yagoda has reminded us, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, autobiographies by immigrants (stories of assimilation)—like The Promised Land (1912), by Mary Antin, born in Belarus as Moshke Antin—were common. Narratives of middle-class family life were popular from the 1930s (Clarence Day’s Life with Father [1935] and Life with Mother [1936]) through the 1950s ( Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies [1957]). In those times, however, nobody memoirs tended to be upbeat narratives of life in intact, sometimes quite large, nuclear families. The current wave of nobody memoirs is different from previous ones, in two ways. One is that the nobody memoir today is more likely to issue from a truly marginalized or victimized population—a hitherto oppressed group. Another, not unrelated, is that the nobody memoir is more likely to be a tale of woe and suffering, rather than of a normal or happy life. As Adams’s anatomy of the subcategories suggests, today’s nobody memoirs can be dark indeed, even when they issue from members of the white middle class. One of the prominent new subjects is family dysfunction, and the most extreme manifestation of that is child abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual. What does seem to be new, then—as is implicit in Adams’s catalog—is that the contemporary nobody memoir tends toward what has been dismissively dubbed the “misery memoir.” Notable examples would be Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club—both of which have considerable literary merit. It’s true that today the majority of childhood memoirs recount quite miserable experiences. And it’s true that one can tire of reading them. (In which case, one should avoid them.) But it’s facile and unfair to dismiss this trend as a mere fad or as a shallow reflection of a culture of self-help and therapy. Dysfunction is an unfortunate fact of much family life, and for far too long child abuse was hidden from view; the stigma attached to it served to silence its victims, adding insult to injury. The feel-good memoirs of middle-class family life published during the Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II were never fully representative of actuality. Similarly, home movies—a common medium for documenting middle-class family life from the 1920s onward—tend to highlight rites of passage, leisure activities, and vacation fun. Moreover, they tend to

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concentrate on prepubescent children. Collectively, then, they too offer a highly unrealistic, sentimental, and nostalgic portrait of life in the nuclear family. With a national divorce rate at about half of all marriages, we should not be surprised to find adults recounting painful childhoods. Even when divorce is best for all involved, broken families rarely yield happy memoirs. So memoirs of miserable childhoods correct an overly benign picture of family life. If we think of life narratives, whether written or visual, as collectively comprising a significant part of the historical record, we can see the current spate of “misery memoirs” as revisionist, filling out and correcting earlier, partial accounts. The dismissive attribution of such memoirs to an ethos of therapy seems to miss the point, a classic case of blaming the messenger. But it also seems ahistorical insofar as the memoir boom has coincided with the supplanting of psychotherapy by medication as the treatment of choice for mental illness and mood disorders. Most misery memoirs are not steeped in the language or concepts of psychotherapy. Rather, they are endeavors to expose private hells to the cleansing daylight of publication. They are not byproducts or versions of therapy so much as personal testimony of torment, or, like other serious memoirs, attempts to come to terms with difficult experience. They belong to the genre of survivor testimony. That they may be undertaken in part in the hope of healing is not a reason to dismiss them collectively. They deserve to be judged on their individual merits. Another novel aspect of the nobody memoir is not so obvious and has not been as fully acknowledged: the newly popular nobody memoir is often the memoir of some body. That is, the nobody memoir is far more likely than the somebody memoir to be concerned with what it’s like to inhabit, or to be, a particular body. Indeed, Adams’s latter two categories—physical catastrophe and mental catastrophe—are more or less congruent with two kinds of disability: some body memoirs are often odd body memoirs (or odd-body-ographies). Although this has generally not been acknowledged by mainstream critics, the memoir boom has at least coincided with, if not been impelled by, the rise of the disability memoir. Lucy Grealy personified—literally embodied— the nobody/some body memoirist. Starting out as a poet, she was little

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known before she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994. From its title on, Autobiography of a Face is concerned with what it was like to live with a body disfigured initially by the jaw cancer that Grealy suffered as a child and later by dozens of reconstructive surgeries, which required transplanting bone and flesh from other parts of her body to her face. Perhaps more than any other, her book established the commercial and literary potential of the disability memoir. One aspect of the emergence of the some body memoir is that many diseases or disabilities, some quite obscure, have generated small numbers of narratives. Some of these conditions are of relatively recent vintage, as modern biomedicine continues to generate diagnostic labels and to pathologize human variation; others, though long known, have never before been represented in nonscientific nonfiction, i.e., in life writing. In this latter category of conditions are amputation (Andre Dubus, Jr.), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease (Albert B. Robillard), anorexia and other eating disorders (Maryse Hornbacher), asthma (Tim Brookes), bipolar illness (Terri Cheney), borderline personality disorder (Susanna Kaysen), cerebral palsy (Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer), chronic fatigue syndrome (Floyd Skloot), cystic fibrosis (Laura Rothenberg), deformity (Kenny Fries), diabetes (Lisa Roney), epilepsy (Teresa McLean), insomnia (Patricia Morrisroe), locked-in syndrome ( Jean-Dominique Bauby), multiple sclerosis (Nancy Mairs), Munchausen syndrome by proxy ( Julie Gregory), obesity ( Judith Moore), obsessive-compulsive disorder (Amy Wilensky), Parkinson’s (Michael J. Fox), stuttering (Marty Jezer), stroke (Robert McCrum, May Sarton), and Tourette syndrome (Lowell Handler). A recent addition to this literature is You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, a narrative of prosopagnosia (face-blindness) by Heather Sellers. Another aspect of this trend is that a few conditions have generated large numbers of narratives. In my 1997 book Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing, I surveyed four such conditions—breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, deafness, and paralysis. I could easily have included three more: blindness, depression, and autism—four, if you consider addiction a medical illness or a disability. One way to understand the sudden surge in accounts of these conditions is against the background of civil rights movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Just as what we sometimes call the Civil Rights movement was accompanied by the

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proliferation and prominence of African-American autobiography, the Women’s Liberation movement had much to do with the emergence of breast cancer narratives. When my mother had breast cancer in the early 1960s, not a single published narrative was available to instruct or comfort her; the same would have been true a decade later. But narratives of breast cancer proliferated in the 1980s; this was a function not of medical, but of political, progress: women began to assert control over their own bodies. Similarly, HIV/AIDS narratives have both reflected and advanced the gay rights movement; a disease that simultaneously killed and outed so many gay men in the United States inevitably manifested itself in life writing as well as in more overtly political forms. A related trend has been the emergence of the narrative of gender or sex change. Such narratives generally issue from individuals blessed with high social stature and job security, such as the economist Deirdre (née Donald) McCloskey (Crossing [1999]) and Jennifer (née James) Finney Boylan (She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders [2003]). Their privilege enables them to publish stories that may stand for those of many less fortunate individuals in similar circumstances. Perhaps as important, these narratives enable a wider public to imagine what it would be like to inhabit a body at odds with one’s fundamental sense of one’s sex or gender and to undergo what seems a kind of mythic self-transformation. (Contrary to what one might think, these do not represent contemporary variants of the conversion narrative, because the radical change is situated not in subjectivity but in the body, which is brought into conformity with the inner self.) It should be obvious that the emergence of the disability memoir is related to the Disability Rights movement, but it’s rarely acknowledged, for the movement has gone unnoticed by much of the public. Nevertheless, it has been enormously significant. Its landmark accomplishment in the United States was the passage, in 1990, of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law that banned discrimination against people with disabilities. (After nearly two decades of erosion by legal challenges, its original intent was reaffirmed by Congress in the ADA Amendments Act in 2008.) As disabled people have become more visible in the public sphere, the increasing publication of their lives should come as no surprise. In Signifying Bodies, I argue that the disability memoir has given rise to a variant at the turn of the current century. For lack of a better term, I call this

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the new disability memoir. As examples, I discuss Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind (1997), Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen (1999), Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2005), and Anne Finger’s Elegy for a Disease (2006). The disabilities in question are various: paraplegia (Linton), blindness (Kleege and Kuusisto), and polio (Finger), and the memoirs have little in common formally. Kleege’s takes the form of a series of personal essays; the others are more conventionally narrative. If there is a new formal element in the new disability memoir, it is the use of the coming-out story to provide a narrative arc. This tracks the protagonists’ progressive acknowledgement of their disability status; coming out is a matter of claiming their rights, along with their identities, as disabled people. (These narratives are closer to conversion narratives, as the narrators undergo a radical reversal in attitude toward their impairments. Rather than disguise them to pass as nondisabled, they embrace them, even flaunt them.) So what distinguishes the new disability memoir is largely a matter of stance. These writers do not bemoan their impairments (some deficit or lack of function in their bodies); none of these is currently amenable to medical treatment or cure, nor can any of them be “overcome”— transcended by force of will. Rather, these memoirists bemoan, and protest, what is referred to in the new field of Disability Studies (in which all have played prominent roles) as their disability. Counterintuitively, disability lies not in the individual’s body but in the relationship between the body and its environment. More to the point, it consists of the ways in which people with anomalous bodies are disadvantaged, discriminated against—oppressed and marginalized—by social and cultural factors. These memoirists are well versed in disability history, culture, and law; most important, they all identify as disabled, as members of a proud but disadvantaged class. One more type of disability memoir deserves note here: the surge in publication of narratives by people who once would have been thought incapable of life writing because of their impairments: those with developmental disabilities, like Down syndrome; those with disorders that involve deficits in communication, like autism; those with forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s; and those with complete paralysis, such as locked-in syndrome. Narratives of cognitive disability are still quite rare, but narratives of autistic spectrum disorders (which I’ll refer to as autism for short),

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have been published in large numbers. Indeed they are so common that they have been given their own name: autiebiography. This phenomenon is significant for two reasons. First, at one time autism was represented in life writing exclusively in parental memoirs, like Clara Claiborne Park’s The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child (1967). Such memoirs continue to be produced, but they are now complemented by a wave of narratives issuing from people with autism. While parents may attempt to render their children fully and respectfully, they necessarily view the condition from the outside. Autiebiographies offer an inside, experiential perspective on autism. The second reason follows from the first: because they regard autism as limiting children’s opportunities and quality of life, parental narratives present it as a problem to be solved. In sharp contrast, autiebiographies may take autism for granted as a form of neurodiversity—a difference rather than a deficit. Some take the form of manifestoes proclaiming their authors’ pride in their identity and their wish to have their difference respected rather than extinguished. I first became aware of Temple Grandin when Oliver Sacks profiled her in the New Yorker in 1993, but she had already co-authored one memoir, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986), and she has since written another, Thinking in Pictures, and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995). She has become the most prominent spokesperson for her condition, and she is increasingly bold in portraying autistic consciousness as in some ways advantageous and important to cultivate, rather than to correct. In the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the impairment was not cognitive but physical; after a massive stroke, the French editor of Elle was utterly paralyzed, with the exception of his left eyelid. Nevertheless, with the aid of an attentive amanuensis, he managed to communicate by “eye-typing,” selecting letters by blinking as the alphabet was recited to him. The resulting memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), was a huge critical and commercial success; it was adapted into a film of the same title by Julian Schnabel (2007). In the case of all such disabilities—those that would seem to preclude authorship and autobiography—the mere existence of such memoirs itself makes a powerful point. The medium is its own message: people with even severe disabilities can, and do, represent themselves in memoir.

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With the passage of time, the landscape of memoir continues to change. One interesting recent development is that today sometimes even somebodies claim disability. For example, Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (2009), a memoir by Frank Bruni, the former food critic of The New York Times, focuses in part on his growing up with an eating disorder. Another former New York Times writer, music critic and composer Tim Page, has written a memoir stimulated by his midlife diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome: Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s (2009). More recently still, Siri Hustvedt, American novelist and poet, has published a memoir called The Shaking Woman, or, A History of My Nerves (2010), which documents her idiopathic tremors. Somehow, it seems to have become desirable—even trendy—to write a memoir that proclaims, “Hey, I’ve got a disability, too.” This is a historic breakthrough in life writing—one more way in which contemporary memoirs depathologize somatic variation. The 1960s and 1970s saw ample numbers of memoirs addressing minority status in race, ethnicity, and gender; these recent memoirs of anomalous bodily conditions (including the “mental” as well as the “physical”) announce the citizenship of new groups of people in the democratic province of autobiography. This I regard as the most significant development in the contemporary Anglophone memoir. The destigmatizing of the life of the body extends to one’s sex life. Thus, another niche or mini-genre in this larger category of some body memoirs is the erotic memoir. These are not to be confused with the somebody erotic memoir, such as kiss-and-dish books by the sex partners of celebrities. (The revelation of Tiger Woods’ infidelities predictably led to the announcement that one of his mistresses, Loredana Jolie Ferriolo, was trying to peddle her story to a publisher.) As it happens—and this is a sign of our times—the majority of these, like Chelsea Handler’s My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands (2005), are written by young single women with active but relatively conventional love lives. But the narratives may be devoted to a particular kind of sex, like Toni Bentley’s The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004), which recounts her initiation into the pleasures of anal sex, or Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman: My Latelife Adventures in Sex and Romance (2003) and its sequel, Unaccompanied Women: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate (2006), which

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tell of the resumption of her sex life in late middle age. These memoirs have been respectfully reviewed and widely read. What links these categories of memoir is the fundamental endeavor to represent the individual as profoundly affected by the characteristics and the experience of the body. In the United States another kind of life writing reaching critical mass in the last twenty-five years is what I call filial narrative. By this I mean memoirs of parents by their sons or daughters. The experience of having parents typically provides a “chapter” of most full-life narratives, and of course it features prominently in any memoir of childhood. But until quite recently, little life writing had been dedicated exclusively to narrating a parent’s life, or one’s post-childhood relationship with a parent. There are isolated precedents, notably Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which was first published anonymously in 1907. Over the last quarter of a century, however, many memoirs of parents have been published in North America. Of these, the large majority concern fathers rather than mothers. When I first became interested in memoirs of fathers a few years ago, I quickly worked up a bibliography of nearly one hundred book-length narratives, and the list has continued to grow. Although the fathers in question are diverse in ethnicity, race, and class, and although the motives of the offspring are various, one common demographic factor propelling the phenomenon seems to be the aging of the baby boom generation. In the United States, this generation—those born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s—is marked off quite distinctly. The baby boom generation is defined by its relation to a war whose conclusion begot it, so to speak: the advent of peace reunited military men with their partners and led to a sharp rise in the American birthrate. The sheer size of this cohort endows it with considerable cultural, commercial, and political clout. Because of certain personality traits ascribed to it, it is also sometimes referred to as the “Me Generation.” As their parents age, become dependent, and die, baby boomers confront their own mortality and reflect on their parents’ lives and on their own. Their biographical clocks begin to tick, and presto, the filial memoir. One question raised by filial narratives is why narratives of fathers (patriographies) outnumber narratives of mothers (matriographies) by such a large margin. Part of the answer seems to be that, for the baby boom generation, the structure of the nuclear family privileged fathers. The

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predominance of narratives of fathers seems to result not directly from the domination of mothers by fathers, but rather from the division of labor in the patriarchal family, which assigns child care primarily to mothers and thus makes fathers comparatively inaccessible to their children—even when families are intact. (Of course, divorce can exacerbate this imbalance.) When children write a parent’s life, it seems, they are inclined to write a memoir of the more distant parent—indeed, of the absent one. The writing of the narratives is often a form of compensation: a way to restore, repair, or even establish a relationship with the missing parent. Although the filial memoir is a product of patriarchy, it is not necessarily patriarchal in its gender politics. Indeed, it can function as a critique of patriarchy. This is most obvious in the case of an important subset of such narratives: those by survivors of paternal sexual abuse—usually, but not always, daughters, e.g., Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1988). Not all memoirs of fathers, then, exhibit a desire to affiliate with the father; some clearly are driven by a desire to discredit the father and disassociate from him. The larger category of narratives of disaffiliation includes narratives whose authors accuse their fathers of wrongdoing against others, like Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for her Father (1996). Gordon’s father died when she was seven, and she long venerated his image. But in middle age she discovered that he was not at all the man he had pretended to be. Born Jewish, he had converted to Catholicism, written anti-Semitic journalism, and edited a pornographic magazine. Her extensive research forced her to radically reassess her paternal legacy. Although the impulse in memoirs of disaffiliation seems to be to condemn, even to disown, the father, it is significant that these children are not content merely to remain silent. Rather, they seem to feel an obligation to expose and denounce their fathers because their testimony has particular authority; indeed, this is so not just in cases in which they were directly victimized. There is a powerful sense of filiation implicit in this belief. So the narrative of disaffiliation is a function of, rather than a denial of, the parent-child relation. The aging of the baby boomers’ parents is an obvious factor in the emergence of another niche genre: narratives of parents with dementia. Such narratives address experience that is difficult to render despite the

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fact that it takes place in the presence of the children, sometimes in their own homes. It is especially fraught because of the fear that the scenario may presage the authors’ own end-of-life narratives. Although the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease is slightly higher in women—only because women live longer—nearly every narrative of a parent with dementia features a father. This seems to reflect the sexist assumption that dementia is more tragic for a man, especially one who had a distinguished career, than for a woman, who is less likely to have had such a career—or indeed any career. Moreover, they are nearly all written by their daughters, who are often the primary caregivers. This fact may give us pause, for these daughters are typically middle-class members of the baby boom generation, who lived through and benefited from, if they did not actively participate in, the Women’s Liberation movement. Some will view this filial dedication to senile fathers as touching reciprocation of paternal love; others will view it as troubling evidence of an unreconstructed patriarchy. The filial memoir poses challenges peculiar to it as a distinctive form of life writing. Sons and daughters usually have personal, and often have intimate, knowledge of their fathers; in any case, they have a direct (usually biological) connection with them that patriarchy and patrilineality endow with great significance. This first-hand experience and this (usually) genetic connection motivate and justify their memoirs. And yet children come to exist only after much of their fathers’ lives is over; children have no direct experience of their fathers’ formative (and often most eventful) years. They know their fathers first as their fathers; only late in their fathers’ lives, if at all, are children able to interact with their fathers as fellow adults. This inherent gap tantalizes and entices children. Patriography can be seen as emerging from, and attempting to fill in or diminish, that gap. This is clearly the case with one of the best known of filial memoirs, the graphic narrative Maus, which chronicles Art Spiegelman’s efforts to elicit his father’s story of surviving the Holocaust. Other well-known examples of this category in the United States would be Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991), a narrative of his father’s life prompted by the prospect of losing him to what proved his final illness; and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss (1997), which tells the story of an affair sparked when, after a long separation, her father reentered her life during her college years.

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The somebody/nobody distinction is operative with patriography, too. First, the distinction applies to the author. Celebrities can easily sell memoirs of their fathers, as newscaster Tim Russert did with Big Russ and Me: Father and Son (2004). So may professional writers; thus, in addition to Roth and Harrison, the following have also produced patriographies: Paul Auster, Mary Gordon, Calvin Trillin, John Edgar Wideman, and the step-brothers, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, who shared a father. Famous in their own right, these sons and daughters endow a kind of second-order celebrity on their otherwise obscure fathers, putting on record the lives of ordinary men. For obvious reasons, these narratives may be particularly “writerly”—self-reflexive in technique—and may thus expand life writing’s formal repertoire. Some reckon with the impossibility of adequately representing their present-but-absent fathers. A classic example is Part One of Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982). Titled “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” it meditates on the extent to which the senior Auster remains unknown and unknowable. It also uses family photographs in an interestingly counterintuitive way—to suggest the elusiveness, rather than the presence, of the father figure. The somebody/nobody distinction applies more obviously to the parent: children of famous fathers (“celebrats,” I call them) have a fast track to book contracts. No need to be a writer. Perhaps the first successful memoir of a celebrity parent was Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (1978), which chronicled her ill treatment at the hands of her dysfunctional adoptive mother, the actress Joan Crawford. Other actors whose children have written memoirs of them include Yul Brynner (Rock), Dean Martin (Deana), and Orson Welles (Chris Welles Feder). Political figures are also apt subjects of patriography: both of Ronald Reagan’s daughters, Maureen Reagan and Patti Davis, and one of his sons, Ron, have published memoirs of him. Recent filial memoirs have also been published by the children of the following intellectuals: Kingsley Amis (Martin), A. J. Ayer (Wendy W. Fairey, an illegitimate child), Anatole Broyard (Bliss), John Cheever (Susan), James Dickey (Christopher), Erik Erikson (Sue Erikson Bloland), Philip Guston (Musa Mayer), Dashiell Hammett ( Jo), Louis Kahn (Nathaniel), Ring Lardner, Jr. (Kate), Bernard Malamud ( Janna Malamud Smith), William Matthews (Sebastian), and J. D. Salinger (Margaret).

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Because intellectuals, writers, and artists may become public figures without leading public lives, their sons and daughters have more freedom to define their subjects in memoir than the children of other celebrities. But their fathers’ fame may be a problematic basis for memoir precisely because it accrues not from public actions but rather from private creations. Even if its products are available to visual inspection (like Guston’s paintings), the core activity of the creative life may defy representation—or at least narration. The memoir of the creative father may thus foreground a key issue in patriography—the inaccessibility of the father: ironically, the fact that creator-fathers often work at home may exacerbate, rather than reduce, their unavailability. Children conditioned not to violate the sacrosanct study or studio may feel their fathers’ inaccessibility more acutely than children whose fathers leave home to go to work and may appear in public media, like television. Furthermore, writing the story of the creative life usually entails a degree of public exposure that the father may not have desired and may in fact resent and resist. Thus, although these fathers are public figures, their memoirs raise questions as to the seemliness of breaching their privacy. It is one thing for a professional biographer to do this; it’s quite another for a son or daughter. J. D. Salinger, well-known for his obsession with privacy, could not prevent his daughter Margaret from publishing her memoir, Dream Catcher (2000), which documents her childhood as the daughter of the eccentric recluse. Although her portrait of him is quite sympathetic, we can be sure he was not pleased by its publication. Indeed, he reportedly cut off communication when he learned that she was going to publish it. Yet the children of creative intellectuals often feel a particularly strong urge to “claim their paternity”—that is, to assert a public claim on their fathers as their fathers. Their fathers’ oeuvre is in some sense public property, rather than their personal heritage. This is especially true of architects and writers; the work of the former is often literally open to the public, and the published work of the latter is available to all readers. Thus, the child of the celebrity artist may suffer not only from a sense of exclusion from the site of creation but from a sense of lacking privileged access to the work created there. The child may compensate by claiming a unique relationship to the work.

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Thus Musa Mayer, a frustrated artist, ultimately comes to terms with her father’s art by writing a posthumous catalogue raisonné of his work— and of course by writing her memoir. Nathanial Kahn, the illegitimate son of the celebrated architect Louis Kahn, employs his skill as a documentary filmmaker to put himself quite literally in his father’s work: in a key scene, he films himself roller-skating solo around a plaza in one of his father’s signature buildings. Janna Malamud Smith comes to terms with her father in part by identifying concealed references to her in his fiction. The memoir of a paper orphan thus seeks to reclaim the father from the public, to privatize him, by restoring him to the family unit. Ironically, however, this occurs only if the narrative is published, which threatens to further dilute the author’s sense of ownership by rendering the private life public. The best-selling and most widely read contemporary patriography is Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995). While the cause of the father’s absence from his household was unusual, the memoir is in some ways representative of the subgenre. The memoir takes its title, and its conception, from a father who was unavailable to his son by virtue of early abandonment (when his son was two), geographical distance (his return to Africa from Hawai’i), and early death (when his son was only eighteen). In part because of those factors, but also because his father’s life trajectory proved so disappointing—his career fizzled out after he returned to Africa—Obama had to look beyond his father as a model of behavior to his larger legacy. In any case, by affiliating himself with his African father, Obama looked beyond the shores of the United States to create an identity that is—if not post-racial—multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Rather than situate himself squarely within the African-American struggle against oppression, then, Obama fashioned out of his father’s legacy a more global and forward-looking heritage. Like the some body memoir, then, patriography illustrates how life narratives may collectively, as well as individually, reflect and illuminate political, social, cultural, and demographic dimensions of American culture. Another noteworthy innovation in the contemporary American memoir is the invention of the graphic memoir. The first of these to be well reviewed and widely read—and still probably the best known—is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which renders not only his father’s memories of the

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Holocaust but also the interaction which elicited the reluctant Vladimir’s oral testimony. It is thus a form of collaborative testimony or witness. As befits the arduousness of its production over a thirteen-year period—both the labor-intensiveness of its being drawn and the fraught process of evoking painful memories from his father—the book was issued in two volumes separated by five years: Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History was published in 1986 and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began in 1991. The use of drawing as a medium for narration is not confined to nonfiction; it’s far more common in fiction. But its use for memoir is a significant innovation in contemporary life writing. For one thing, it licenses or authorizes memoirs by those whose talent is primarily in visual art— people who identify as “artists” rather than as writers; thus, another set of lives becomes available for self-representation. Of course, most graphic narratives contain a large number of words, and a graphic memoirist needs to be able to write convincing dialogue—lots of it. Moreover, producing a graphic memoir is not as simple as just drawing instead of writing; a graphic memoirist needs to condense story lines into a discrete number of carefully sequenced panels. Graphic memoir can be highly complex and sophisticated in its construction. Indeed, critics have pointed out that no two of pages of Maus have the same format; each one presents a unique arrangement of panels. Experiential evidence of the complexity of graphic memoir as an art form is that it is surprisingly time-consuming to read. I expected to breeze through my first one (Maus) and was surprised how slowly I had to proceed. In fact, graphic memoir is much harder to skim than written memoir. Its form may hold another surprise. One might think that drawn narratives would necessarily consist entirely, or at least largely, of scene rather than summary (showing rather than telling). But this is not at all the case. For one thing, narratives often involve “voice-overs”—disembodied narrative voices that make transitions, set scenes, or comment on the action. For another, what is drawn is not always a unique incident; often scenes are meant to represent typical events. So graphic narrative is not bound to the seemingly direct methods of depiction characteristic of hi-def memoir, which deploys a great deal of very specific detail. In fact, graphic renderings of scenes are often quite generalized—“sketchy.” Surprisingly, graphic

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memoir tends to be far less invested in the kind of verisimilitude characteristic of much contemporary written memoir. As his title signals, Spiegelman’s Maus involves an additional distinctive feature—the representation of human characters as animals: Jews are rendered as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs. This is not an inherent feature of graphic memoir, and it is in my experience still unique. Obviously, Spiegelman used it very deliberately and provocatively. The technique highlights the relationship of the graphic memoir to “low” visual art forms, the cartoon and the comic. Its use in this memoir, given its weighty content—the memories of an aging Holocaust survivor—seems ironic—even potentially sacrilegious. It is certainly edgy, in two ways. First, as a technique derived from “the funnies” and animated cartoons, it risks trivializing its subject matter, rendering it “light” or “cute.” Second, it trades blatantly in stereotypes. It is presumably meant to play on the racist Nazi metaphor of Jews as vermin. Spiegelman’s work simultaneously inaugurated and legitimized a new genre, vaulting it to critical acclaim. The exact nature of the genre, however, has been problematic, in part because of the unfortunate term graphic novel. Thus, presumably solely because of its being drawn, Maus was initially classified by The New York Times Book Review as fiction. Only after Spiegelman publicly, vehemently, and rightly objected was it reclassified as nonfiction. (Ironically, such reclassification usually goes in the opposite direction, when a “memoir” is revealed to be untrue—as has been the case with more than one recent Holocaust narrative. See chapter 4.) In the wake of Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has also become a hit with critics and readers. It also has an intergenerational, split focus—on the author’s father, a high school teacher and funeral home director who was also a closeted homosexual and a possible suicide, and on Bechdel’s own coming of age as a lesbian. And in the early years of the century, graphic narratives about illness are also burgeoning—a visual variant on the some body memoir. (For example, Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer.) As I have noted earlier in connection with Thoreau and Dana, contemporary life writers have revived and popularized the memoir devoted to an account of a deliberate, temporary deviation from normal life. Such writing has been wittily dubbed “shtick lit.” The Yiddish term refers to a signature act for which one becomes known through repetition. The term

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applies better to the narratives of George Plimpton, however, than to those of Thoreau. The patrician editor of Paris Review, Plimpton achieved great popular success in the 1960s and 1970s with a series of books recounting his Walter Mitty-like exploits performing among professional athletes. Perhaps the best known of these was Paper Lion (1966), in which Plimpton recounts trying to quarterback the Detroit Lions (in practice). Plimpton’s athletic exploits have recently been imitated in intellectual pursuits. The writer A. J. Jacobs has made a shtick of reading major tomes. A year devoted to reading the entire thirty-two-volume Encyclopedia Britannica led to The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004). A subsequent reading of Jewish and Christian scripture generated The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007). In neither case did Jacobs leave home, but the second experiment involved more than just reading excessively. He—and his long-suffering wife—had to change their daily habits considerably. At best, these experiments are more than stunts; they can be serious endeavors to live differently for a time, either to learn something or to make a point. A well-known example is Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 Super Size Me, a documentary film chronicling a regimen of living exclusively on McDonald’s food for an entire month—three meals a day, every day, supersized whenever he was prompted. The message of the film is literally apparent; Spurlock gained a considerable amount of weight— almost a pound a day—and suffered potentially harmful health effects. (Indeed, he completed the experiment against his internist’s advice.) Thus, Spurlock put his body at risk to demonstrate the dangers of fast food, which too many Americans consume too much of. (Some credit his film with bringing an end to the insidious “supersize me” promotion, which was suspended six months after the movie’s premiere.) Several shtick memoirs have grown out of bloggers’ accounts of stunts in progress. One has even been the basis of a feature film, Julie and Julia. In 2002, Julie Powell began cooking (and eating) her way through the 500-plus recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After her blog, “The Julie/Julia Project,” attracted fans and media attention, Powell was offered a contract for a memoir, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005), and, in turn, a movie contract.

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(The 2009 film draws on Julia Child’s own memoir, My Life in France, as well as Powell’s.) As noted earlier, stunt memoirs are related to immersion journalism, which involves professional journalists going undercover to experience a subculture or to penetrate an institution incognito. Thus, various journalists have pretended to be students in college, or even in high school. This is not much of a stretch for people who have already experienced life as a student, however, and such experiments are usually not undertaken with the goal of learning something about themselves. But some experiments have potentially larger personal and social implications. For example, Norah Vincent, an op-ed columnist and somewhat masculine-looking lesbian, decided to try to pass as a man for a year; her memoir of this episode is Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back (2006). She did not attempt to pass all day every day. Rather, she undertook discrete self-contained experiments, while carrying on the rest of her life as usual. Thus, she played in a men’s bowling league, joined the men’s movement (even attending a retreat), dated various women, sojourned in a monastery, and so on. The experience did affect her sense of herself, but mostly it confirmed her sense of her gender and sexuality. Its major revelation seems to have been about masculinity rather than her identity: her account is surprisingly sympathetic to men insofar as it suggests that rigid gender codes have harmful, restrictive effects on men as well as women. The book had an interesting aftermath: the rigors of cross-living precipitated a minor mental breakdown. After spending some time in a mental hospital, Vincent conceived of her next project: posing as a mental patient in various hospitals. The result was another stunt memoir: Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (2008). Again, the focus is more on the milieu than on the self. But in this brief catalog of examples we can see that experimental memoir is being used in our era to explore aspects of identity—sexuality and gender, disability and mental illness— that are at the forefront of many other media. A related set of narratives has to do with experiments in living green lives. A notable one is Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, a documentary film tracing his family’s attempt to minimize its carbon footprint. Examples like this hearken back to Thoreau in their eschewal of materialism and mass consumerism. Indeed, I have come to think of Walden retrospectively as a

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kind of nineteenth century Mini-mize Me.) While stunt memoirs may not always be as rich in self-discovery and self-revelation as the best of memoirs, they deserve recognition as a distinct kind of life writing, one that echoes Thoreau, whose example reminds us that the world and the self are not as distinct as we sometimes think. A curious trend in the contemporary memoir has been the centering of narratives on animals. These are hardly without precedent. In 1933 Virginia Woolf published a playful stream of consciousness “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush, and in 1956 J. R. Ackerly wrote a memoir of his relationship with his dog Queenie (renamed Tulip in the book, presumably to protect her privacy). But only recently has animal life writing reached critical mass. Many of the animals in question are pets, and books about pets—especially dogs—typically sell well. Not to be left out are our feline companions. Indeed, some kind of precedent has been set by the 2011 video, Cat Diaries, edited from footage “shot” by cats carrying tiny cameras around their necks. (Given our national love of cars, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see memoirs devoted to them as well, which would give a new meaning to auto-biography. Already in print is Michael Perry’s Truck: A Love Story [2006], which weaves together narratives of restoring an old truck and starting up a new romance.) No doubt the most successful recent animal-centered memoir is John Grogan’s Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog (2005), which, predictably, was also made into a feature film. (Indeed, with its various spin-offs, it amounts to a franchise.) But while some are trivial and sentimental, animal memoirs can stretch the boundaries of the genre, since “life writing” is generally defined as the nonfictional representation of human beings. We can think of such memoirs as logical extensions of the domain of relational life writing; for better or worse, some of our significant relationships do involve nonhuman beings. An interesting narrative in this respect is Mark Doty’s Dog Years: A Memoir (2007), which attests to the way his two dogs sustained him after his partner’s death. So memoirs of relationships with pets are to be expected—and perhaps respected. But more substantive memoirs tend to result when the animal in question is not just a pet. Thus, a more ambitious volume than Grogan’s is Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process (2008), by Irene

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Pepperberg. This book recounts the author’s thirty-year relationship with a gray parrot, her prime research subject in her work on animal cognition. The intelligent bird became somewhat of a celebrity as a result of Pepperberg’s academic work. But his death occasioned a memoir that mixes anecdotes with serious scientific claims for animal intelligence. Similarly, the special relationship between a guide dog and its owner is the subject of Rod Michalko’s The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (1999). Michalko convincingly depicts that relationship as extending his sense of selfhood, which is to say that his book presents a post-human or trans-human subject. A pioneer in life writing devoted to animals was Dian Fossey, whose Gorillas in the Mist (1983) was adapted into a movie directed by Michael Apted and starring Sigourney Weaver, in 1988. Books in that mode reveal the potential significance of this new kind of memoir. In an age when animals’ rights are being increasingly recognized and protected, and when our human ability to degrade the planet is all too obvious, the animal memoir is a subgenre whose time has obviously arrived. Indeed, such memoirs are a manifestations of “posthumanism” in contemporary memoir—the recognition that the human species is flawed, fallible, and dependent on recourse to both the animal and the machine realms. The memoir boom has more or less coincided with the advent of literary postmodernism, and this chapter would not be complete without a consideration of the postmodernist memoir. Postmodernism is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to define, and I will not attempt to pin it down conclusively here. But among its distinctive features are the mixing of high and low culture, the open appropriation of elements of previous creative works, a parodic impulse, and the trope of the world as a labyrinth. For teaching purposes my favorite example is John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse.” There, the “low” is found in the story’s pop-culture setting, a funhouse complete with a hall of mirrors. This also provides the image of the labyrinth, which is a metaphor for adolescence, among other things. The “high” is found in self-consciously literary voice of the narrator (who turns out to be also its protagonist, a rather precocious, but also horny, teenager named Ambrose). Perhaps the signature feature of postmodernist art or literature is its self-reflexiveness: its tendency to remind the consumer that it is only art,

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not reality. In this case, the narrator keeps interrupting his story (which he casts in the third person to make it sound more impersonal, authoritative, and writerly) to comment on his own technique. Or lack thereof: his diffidence as a narrator causes him to second-guess himself endlessly and to expatiate on his use of various conventions—italics, initials rather than full names, and so on. The harder he strives to create verisimilitude, the more his efforts backfire. The narrator constantly undercuts his own credibility; the story constantly reminds the reader that it is only a fiction, a figment of its narrator’s—and ultimately the author’s—imagination. The memoir boom has produced a few postmodernist memoirs. But only a few. I can think of only two American memoirs, both published in 2000, that engage in full-blown postmodernism: Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And to me the interesting thing about postmodernist memoirs is that there have been so few. I discussed Slater’s memoir in the context of ethics in chapter 4. Let me elaborate a little here on how her narrative undermines its own credibility. To begin with, the book has an introduction purportedly by a USC philosophy professor, but, as skeptical readers will suspect, he does not exist. Slater describes treatment, including brain surgery, at the hands of a physician who also does not exist, as she hints. The book is full of inventions whose main point seems to be that they are just that. Perhaps the best single example of its postmodernism is a chapter purporting to be a memo from Slater to her publisher; in it, the author muses on whether the book should be marketed as fiction or nonfiction. Shades of James Frey! But of course Slater avoids his ethical and legal trouble precisely by letting the reader see behind the scenes. The book’s postmodernism lies in its exposure—sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle—of its own indeterminate truth status. Eggers’s memoir is far more extravagant in its postmodernism. Like Slater, Eggers has a serious story to tell: how he struggled to raise his younger brother Christopher after their parents died of cancer in quick succession. At the same time, it acknowledges—perhaps flaunts—its own artifice. On the copyright page, right below the Library of Congress cataloging data, Eggers indicates his height, weight, eye and hair color, and other personal characteristics, including his sexual orientation

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(as marked on a continuum from perfectly straight to perfectly gay). This suggests that he thinks these traits are essential to the identity claim that his memoir makes—or that they are somehow pertinent for cataloging purposes. Below that the reader finds a warning that begins: Note: This is a work of fiction, only in that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author’s imagination.

Notice that the thrust of the qualifier beginning “only” actually negates the claim it seems to qualify; Eggers is categorizing the book as nonfiction. Following the title page, however, is a preface that sends mixed signals: “For all the author’s bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes.” These are disclaimers that could, and perhaps should, introduce any number of contemporary hi-def memoirs. Not content with these, however, Eggers added to the paperback edition an appendix, “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda.” One minor example of its content will have to suffice; having mentioned “elms in the front yard” in the main text, Eggers adds a note that begins, “I can’t be sure they were elms. Elms sounds right.” What begins as a qualifier, however, becomes a rambling 2500-word excursus on the trees in their yard—not exactly a correction and not in any way a clarification. One is inclined to grant the author prose license rather than to plow through such extended addenda. The point, however, seems to be to mock the very ideal of factual veracity. It is in Eggers’s preface that we begin to sense how postmodernist his narrative will be: “The dialogue [is] essentially true—except that which is obviously not true, as when people break out of their narrative time-space continuum to cloyingly talk about the book itself.” So, just as characters in postmodernist novels may be aware that they are “just” characters, individuals in this memoir may interrupt the narrative to comment on it. Such meta-textuality is a signature feature of postmodernism.

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Graphic memoirs, which I’ve discussed as innovative in their own terms, are postmodern insofar as the medium is coded as a “low,” often comedic, one, while the subjects for which it is used are often deadly serious, as in Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: the Holocaust and paternal suicide, respectively. And yet for obvious reasons, neither Spiegelman nor Bechdel wants to pull out all of the postmodernist stops. And this may offer a clue to the scarcity of postmodernist memoirs. With visual art and with fiction, the message of postmodernism is, in part, that the object being consumed is “only” art, not reality. This is necessarily also true of postmodernist memoir, which admits that it constitutes not life but only life writing—a partial and highly mediated representation of experience. But the implications of this message differ crucially as we move from pure art or “imaginative” literature to nonfiction. The artist or novelist who exposes the artificiality of the art object is also reminding the consumer of his or her creativity. In contrast, memoirists may not be eager to remind readers of the artifice of their constructions. Why not? The answer should be obvious: because, as I’ve been arguing all along, memoirs and novels have different relations to reality. Memoirs make certain kinds of claims—identity claims, biographical and historical claims—that novels do not. Memoirs are, undeniably, artful. And it is salutary to remind readers that, in the end, memoirs are just “texts.” They’re never the whole truth, never truth-ful. They’re errant, fallible, fictive human constructions. They should be read skeptically, not confused with that which they purport to represent. And yet, and yet. There is a danger to the memoirist in flaunting this notion as postmodernism does: the more the creator insists on its artificiality, the less force the narrative may have, the weaker its “purchase” on the world. The memoirist has more at stake, more to lose, from this admission than the novelist. We return to the notion that the novel and the memoir are complementary genres. They have different ontological statuses and different designs on their readers. So insistence on the artifice of memoir can be counterproductive. To remind readers of the fictiveness of fiction is to remind them of what they already should know; it reinforces their intuitive sense of the nature of the genre. But to flaunt the artificiality of memoir is to go against the grain; to contradict its essence.

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[7] THE WORK OF MEMOIR

My original plan for this book called not only for a chapter on “Reading Memoir” but for an additional, final one on “The Work of Memoir.” The former would discuss what’s distinctive about reading memoir; the latter, what memoir tries to “do.” But the more I thought about it, the more these two aspects of memoir seemed so closely related that they did not require separate treatment. Indeed, they didn’t allow it: we read memoir the way we do because of the particular work it does. Although this chapter is meant to extend and conclude an ongoing discussion, in this chapter, I allow myself a little more subjectivity. So I need to offer some caveats. First, I do not mean this chapter to be prescriptive: I do not intend to tell readers how to read memoir. Reading is a highly individualistic activity. It involves negotiating a relationship with an absent other (the author) through the medium of a silent text. Various quirks and predilections may come into play. That’s less true with classroom reading, which is more analytical and disciplined, than with casual reading. But even in the classroom, valid approaches can vary enormously—and the nature of life writing is such that it is read in a wide range of disciplines, not just language and literature. Second, while I will be focusing here (as in the previous chapter) on memoir, not on related forms of life narrative (like biography or testimony), memoir itself is highly various; as we’ve seen, it comprises numerous subgenres. I will generalize out of necessity. That said, the thrust of this chapter is to pursue the premise of the volume: that memoir is significantly different from its fictional counterpart—even, perhaps especially, when it may be hard to distinguish from it. The texts of realistic novels and memoirs may appear very 169

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similar—so much so that memoir cannot always be identified by inspecting the text alone. And reading memoirs offers some of the same pleasures as reading novels—the gratifications of suspense and resolution, for example. But we (properly) read memoir differently from fiction. How so? That is, exactly how is reading a memoir different from reading a novel? And, so what? That is, what difference does that difference make? These are the key questions for this chapter. The answers have to do with the distinctive relationship between a memoir and the world and the work that that relationship enables memoir to do. Both of these matters are in some sense matters of rhetoric—of the relation between the author, the text, and the consumer—but to put it that way is to understate the importance of this distinction. A better way to put it is to say that memoir engages readers differently. Because memoir stands in a particular relation to the world, it may seek to enlist—to conscript— the reader in that stance. To put it yet another way, memoir seeks to exert leverage (force) on reality in a way that fiction typically does not. It has, or aspires to have, more traction (pulling power) than fiction. I’ve said earlier that novels are not capable of being frauds or hoaxes in the same way that memoirs are. Here we can see why false memoirs are so vexing when they are exposed: readers feel that the rug has been pulled out from under them, so to speak. They resent having invested (I use the verb advisedly) emotionally in a fiction, thinking it’s a fact. If they didn’t invest differently in fiction and nonfiction, they wouldn’t feel betrayed. This reaction reveals an intuitive grasp of the difference that reading memoir makes. On some level, then, despite the similarities between the memoir and the novel in composition, reading one is quite different from reading the other. Thus, while memoirs and novels have many elements in common— character, plot, conflict, suspense, and theme—and while they share many narrative techniques and formal features, we rightly respond to these elements differently. One reason is obvious, if we think about it. Memoirists do not invent the worlds of their narratives, but novelists do. Because novelists create their own worlds, including the inhabitants thereof, readers can and do speculate about the “meaning” of every detail in those worlds. In fiction, to begin with, characters’ names are subject to interpretation;

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they often signify. Dickens is famous for devising names, known as characteronyms (like Mr. Gradgrind) that are plausible enough to seem real yet also expressive of their owners’ personalities. With Chillingsworth and Dimmesdale, whose names also hint at their essences, Hawthorne is perhaps Dickens’s American counterpart. Not incidentally, however, such names also bear the distinctive signature of their author; they thus flaunt their inventedness. Similarly, the deliberate choice of certain previously used names can anchor a whole pattern of allusion. Beginning with Adam, the Bible is a repository of names that can summon up rich associations. Among American novelists, Melville (Ahab and Ishmael) and Faulkner (Absalom) notably drew on biblical names to supply resonance to their characters. Thus, fictional personages can be characterized and given symbolic significance merely by naming them. Place names, too, may be symbolic or thematic. Fiction commonly trades in this literary shorthand. In contrast, even when memoirists invent names to protect real individuals’ privacy, they tend not to use symbolic or allusive names. Character, too, functions differently in memoir than in the novel. It’s a different phenomenon, and we perform a delicate negotiation in reading “character” in memoir. On the one hand, we need to remember that even here characters are authorial creations; like characters in novels, they are functions of words on a page. And therefore, (unless they are known to us independently) we know about them only what the text tells us. They are creatures of their creators. But in another sense, they are not like fictional characters: they do not exist solely within the narrative. They stand (in) for real, mortal people who share a world with us, whose rights may be violated, and whose interests may be harmed in a way that is not possible, or even conceivable, with fictional characters. Memoirists thus have much less freedom in the creation of characters than novelists. More to the point, they have a responsibility toward their characters that is more than aesthetic. As a result, we talk about character in memoir quite differently. We are likely to use the word in a different sense, to refer to a person’s traits (as depicted) or to mean “moral strength.” Memoir is about “building character” in a very different sense than the novel is. We tend not to discuss personages in memoirs as “mere” characters, much less symbolic ones.

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Similarly, we often get much more in the way of literary allusion and intertextuality in fiction—a sense that the world of one novel is related to the world of other novels, that novels may be read as interpretations, revisions, or even parodies of earlier ones. I don’t mean to suggest that memoirs are not to be read intertextually. On the contrary, I’ve been at pains to show that contemporary memoir is heir to its own rich tradition. But memoirists are less often professional writers, and so are less often consciously writing in a tradition—extending or deviating from the work of forerunners. This may be somewhat less true today, when the self-awareness of memoir has been raised a notch, than it once was. And yet, memoirists are limited in the use of allusion by their commitment to a degree of factual fidelity; while memoirists may change names and other details to protect others’ privacy or to avoid charges of libel, they are not so likely to invent names and places for symbolic effect. Nor are they as likely to write in direct response to previous literary texts—unless those texts are about them. (One interesting contemporary phenomenon is the memoir spins off from another memoir—as with the McCourt brothers—or responds directly to it—as a memoir by Margaret Robison, the mother of Augusten Burroughs, rebuts his account of her negligent parenting.) The situation is similar with plot. In fiction, plot is said to be character in action. And we infer theme from plot, generalizing and abstracting from it. Since memoirists do not invent their plots, however, we are less likely to infer themes from what occurs. We are more likely to be interested in how an event shapes personality and identity: what choices a real person makes, what influences he or she detects in the formation of his or her character. And so on. We tend to examine the issues that the I faces and how they are resolved—and not just by the I-then (the protagonist) but also by the I-now (the narrator). In fact, one major concern in reading memoir arises out of the relation between the I’s. In confession and conversion narrative, which do somewhat different things, a gap remains—or opens up—between the I’s. In bildungsroman, we follow the process by which one I becomes the other. Because memoir makes distinctive identity claims, we are right to focus on identity issues in reading it. So the very elements that seem to connect memoir and fiction in actuality function quite differently in each; they evoke different reading responses.

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Another difference between reading memoir and reading fiction interests me. While writing this book, I’ve been thinking about my own reading habits. Despite, or perhaps because of, my scholarly focus on various forms of life narrative, I seek out fiction for most of my pleasure reading. So my reading life is somewhat bifurcated. My work demands that I read lots and lots of memoirs, past and present (as well as scholarly analysis thereof), but for pleasure, I generally read fiction. In addition to genre fiction (crime novels), I also read a good deal of contemporary literary fiction. I would readily concede that there are far more good novelists writing than there are good memoirists. (That’s partly because most novelists are career writers, while most memoirists are not.) But the point I want to make here is that I find myself valuing very different sorts of things depending on whether I am reading memoir or fiction. Part of what I most enjoy about fiction is its knowing observation of the social scene—especially of venues otherwise inaccessible to me. How novelists know what they seem to know is a mystery to me. For example, how does Richard Price—a literary crime novelist and author of Clockers—know so much about the lives of ghetto drug dealers—how they dress, how they talk, how they run their businesses? To choose a novelist with a very different milieu, how does Meg Wolitzer know so much about the lives of the young housewives she depicts in The Ten-Year Nap? Well, one obvious resource—and not just for “historical” fiction—is research. It may seem odd that despite their license to create freely, novelists are more likely than memoirists to research their books. But it makes sense, because they are responsible for creating richly detailed, fully imagined, coherent, and convincing worlds. Ultimately, I don’t really care how novelists obtain their knowledge—through reading, on-site observation, or osmosis. But I suspect that some writers are drawn to fiction precisely because they have the ability to depict others’ lives convincingly and comprehensively. This goes well beyond a talent for mere description— though that is particularly valuable in fiction. It also involves insight into social rituals, patterns of conversation, and lifestyles—the total milieu their characters occupy. Fiction offers us access to worlds other than our own circumscribed personal orbits and a superior window on the world. I am enormously admiring of, and grateful to, novelists who provide that. To revert to an earlier distinction in technique, I think that showing and

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telling, scene and summary, mimesis and diegesis, are both vital to this rich rendering of the world, which at once depicts and illuminates it. Memoir can, and sometimes does, provide this effect, especially when it is in an ethnographic mode. For example, Samuel Fussell’s Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, offers a fascinating picture of the subculture of male bodybuilders—the gyms, the drugs, the dietary regimens. But when memoir does this, it is usually a one-off, whereas the same novelist may convincingly create different worlds in different books. Novelists generally have a larger “range” than memoirists (though stunt memoirists may explore different milieus in different books). More to the point, though, when memoir renders a world in the fashion of the novel, it may do so at a cost to its value as memoir. Thus, Muscle is quite disappointing as a story of character building, as distinct from bodybuilding. Fussell provides very little insight into his motivation or the aftereffects on him of his temporary detour into this subculture (which was not explored with the memoir in mind). There are other reasons that memoir offers less of this kind of gratification. One may be that memoirists may lack, or haven’t nurtured, the novelist’s talent for rich and suggestive renderings of the social scene. But a more important reason has to do with genre, because even when novelists (like Philip Roth) write memoir, they do not supply the same pleasure, the same effect—to put it crudely, the same product—as when they write fiction. What I am suggesting here is that the novel has a broader scope than the memoir, and it may be better at depicting large panoramas of life. Memoir’s tendency to focus on a single unique person limits it in this regard. This may help explain why the more memoirists write like novelists (preferring scene over summary, showing over telling), the less satisfying their memoirs are—at least, to me. For one thing, they may lack a key trait of the talented novelist; for lack of a better word, I’ll fall back on one that sounds dated: vision. For another, it’s because readers like me want something different from a memoir. What I value most in memoir is not knowingness about the world out there—no matter how exotic— but knowingness about the world in there: self-awareness, insight into the author’s identity, that of some other actual person, or the relation between them. To invoke another old-fashioned sounding word here, too, what I

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value in memoir is a kind of wisdom, understanding of the formation of the self, the nature of one’s identity—or of a significant other. I value most highly reflective memoirs that probe the self or other in search of new understanding. Novels don’t provide that. By nature, they can’t. The work of memoir is different from that of the novel, and so reading it is, for me, very different. And one reason I resist the trend toward hi-def memoir—all showing and no telling—is that it largely obviates the need for wisdom and self-knowledge. In fact, I would argue that it militates against it. The more a memoirist writes in highly detailed scenes (especially in the present tense), the less distance there is between narrator and protagonist, the less room for illuminating perspective, the less possibility for self-discovery and the achievement of self-knowledge. To me, such writing abdicates an important obligation of the memoirist. In any case, it sharply diminishes the pleasure I get from, and the respect I have for, memoir. The ultimate goal of this volume is to enable readers to appreciate, but also to think critically about, what memoir does, and obviously, I think that it does something distinctive and important. This chapter’s title has to do with the fact that, while the memoir and the novel may mirror each other in form, their force may be quite different. Granted, in the most general terms, memoirs, like novels, may seek to entertain and enlighten (and also, of course, to make money for their authors and publishers). Everybody loves a page-turner, and it is considered especially high praise when this phrase is applied to nonfiction. But memoirs take on the world more directly than fiction, and this has consequences. So the significance of genre lies less in knowing what a particular memoir is (its genre or subgenre) than in understanding what it is doing (which is, however, related to what it is). So for example, while some stunt autobiographies are easy to dismiss as narratives of rather trivial tours de force (like A. J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All), others, more in the Thoreauvian vein, are not only trying out, but modeling, beneficial—even utopian—ways of living. I don’t mean to deny that fiction often manifests strong ethical impulses and can have powerful real-world effects. To pick an obvious example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited (if that’s the right word) by Abraham Lincoln with having prompted the Civil War. (When they met, he is supposed to have said, “Is this the little woman

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who made this great war!”) As we’ve seen, however, a whole genre of life writing—slave narrative—was also instrumental in condemning slavery and changing minds about it. That was its very raison d’être. And its circulation laid the groundwork, and helped to create the audience, for Stowe’s novel. It is somewhat ironic that the more instrumental genre was not credited with leading to the war that resulted in the abolition of slavery. But the very instrumentalism of slave narrative no doubt somewhat limited its readership. As a novel, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin could, and did, reach a much larger (and more diverse) audience than slave narratives, and the richness of its fictional world, its powerful appeal to sentiment, its memorable invented characters, and its suspenseful plot all contributed to its impact. So I don’t claim a higher moral value for memoir. And I certainly don’t claim a higher aesthetic value; as I’ve already conceded, the novel is a far more capacious and flexible genre. While memoir is more literary today than ever before, fiction still commands a larger repertoire of technique; it can do things and go places that memoir cannot. On the other hand, we need to recognize that the very limitation of memoir—its being tethered to the real world, so to speak—is the source of its distinctive power. Memoir has different aims and agendas than fiction. It also works on the world in a more direct way. And it thus can do things fiction cannot. I have previously touched upon the functionality of life narrative in this volume. It is so fundamental to it, I could hardly avoid it or defer it to the final chapter. For instance, in my initial discussion of genre, I showed that some genres of life narrative are defined by what they do. Thus, most slave narrative could be described as “abolitionist” even when it was not solicited and sponsored by anti-slavery societies. That is why it died out after the Civil War; ironically, just when all former slaves were free to tell their stories, the genre most accessible to them was rendered obsolete. It was that rare thing, an ad hoc genre, which would dwindle in frequency and significance once its work was done. Similarly, contemporary testimonio is all about witnessing and resisting oppression; it exists in order to have real effects in the real world. It has little, if any, pretension as literature. But life narrative is a key medium for asserting and expanding human rights, worldwide. Life writing of this kind may be prompted by particular

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incidents or crises; and urgency may militate against full-length narrative and time-consuming print publication. Thus, in the fall of 2010 the suicides of several gay teenagers prompted gay adults to post online testimony of their survival as part of a campaign titled “It Gets Better.” Admittedly, these narratives are situated toward the utilitarian end of a continuum from the most instrumental to the most literary. They aren’t what we consider memoir today. Even when we turn to memoir proper, however, some common forms of it are distinguished according to their inherent functions. It matters whether a memoirist is confessing, boasting, defending, witnessing, or accusing. Each action involves a different stance toward past experience and the audience; therefore, reading involves identifying the author’s stance. For example, confession seeks to negotiate a response from its audience regarding some past action of its author. Traditional devotional confession, addressed to the Almighty, seeks absolution—interestingly, not something it can bring about on its own. Contemporary confession functions more horizontally; by acknowledging some wrong or shortcoming, it seeks to restore the author’s reputation—and influence—among a human audience. Although it denies wrongdoing, apologia functions similarly; by defending and justifying some past action, its author seeks to burnish his image and perhaps change his audience’s assessment of his past acts. In this way, these memoirs face forward as well as backward: they seek to affect the future, not merely to examine the past. They perform the work of selfrehabilitation. Thus, in many instances, the work of the memoir is built into the subgenre itself. And although fiction may imitate—may take the form ofconfession or apologia, it cannot do the work of memoir for its author. The relation of the reader to a confession differs enormously with its status—as fiction or as memoir. In the case of memoir, the reader is in a position to grant—or withhold—the absolution sought. The reader’s response is necessary to the work of the confessional memoir; he or she participates in a very direct way in the negotiation the work enacts. This is simply not the case with fiction. While it may elicit powerful emotional and ethical responses, it is a less interactive medium. Although we (properly) think of memoir as an individualistic genre, the work it undertakes sometimes has a collective dimension. In my

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discussion of the contemporary memoir, I singled out the rise of the some body memoir as a significant development in North American life writing during the boom. I linked it to the claiming of their rights by previously marginalized or oppressed populations: gays and lesbians, people with various stigmatized illnesses and disabilities, and so on. It involves self-representation by the hitherto silenced; their very speech is significant work. This is especially so when the authors may have been considered incapable of self-representation: there the work has a performative dimension. It acts out its message: I’m here and I can speak for myself. When a narrative is not “just” telling a story but performing some more significant kind of social or cultural work, the act of reading is more engaging or demanding. This I think explains why we read memoir differently from fiction (or poetry). Those more aesthetic modes of self-expression demand interpretation. If we dwell on them, read actively and analytically, we tend to ask what they mean. Certainly in the classroom this is a major focus of attention. With memoir, meaning is not so much the issue. We may take it for granted that we get the meaning. Memoir is likely to be less ambiguous, less oblique, less metaphorical or symbolic. Instead, we may ask, what is it doing? Not what is its point, but what is its purpose? Is this memoir merely celebrating its author? Or is it probing some larger social and cultural concern? With the case of Susanna Kaysen, I was at pains to suggest that Kaysen was not primarily concerned with her own predicament. Her memoir, oddly, was not very personal. Had it been, it likely would have supplied far more of her own backstory. Rather, it was concerned with a concatenation of personal, cultural, social, and political trends that landed her and a cohort of young female patients in mental hospital even though few were certifiably insane. Her use of her medical records, her achronological arrangement of the chapters, her use of medical discourse—all these features pointed away from her own pathology (not to deny it) toward the context in which she was found in need of medical care. The work of her narrative could not have been done by a novel, like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. More generally, the explicit consideration of the role of the body in the shaping of identity and life course in recent memoir helps to reshape our culture. I don’t admire all the narratives that foreground the body, but I welcome the examination—from the inside—of this too often

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taken-for-granted aspect of human experience. The enhancement of our understanding of the role of our bodies in constituting our identities is a distinctive contribution of the some body memoir. It is memoir’s being rooted in an identity claim that permits memoir to do this work: a memoir of living with condition X stands in a different relation to the world than a novel about living with X. This is not to say that we should only read memoirs about such conditions, or that we should read them uncritically. On the contrary, we should give them the same respect and the same scrutiny we give to fiction. Similarly, I tried to suggest that the recent proliferation of patriography and matriography is not a mere epiphenomenon of the aging of the baby boom generation. (Nor is it confined to that generation.) Rather, such narratives do significant work, both individually and collectively. One of the fundamental capabilities of memoir is that it can endow its subject(s) with a degree, or a kind, of immortality. Now, seeking to immortalize oneself by writing a memoir is not necessarily a noble endeavor. But when memoirs immortalize someone other than the author, a different sort of impulse is involved. Note that, because the subjects of biographies are generally already famous, biography proper does not so much confer, as reinforce, immortality. For this reason, if fame is deserved, the celebrity memoir is redundant. (If not, it’s hype—a matter of gilding the Lilliputian.) In contrast, the nobody memoir may confer unexpected immortality on a hitherto anonymous, but noteworthy, person. If it focuses on someone other than the author, the conveying of immortality can be an important and generous gift—to a partner, to a parent, to a child, to a colleague or a friend. To be sure, fiction can create immortal characters, and it can confer immortality on its authors, but it cannot memorialize actual human beings, as memoir can. Patriography and matriography may appeal to their authors in part as a way to memorialize the parents who gave their authors life, completing a circle, returning a gift. (There’s a sense in which, in filial memoirs, authors beget their parents.) People do not write memoirs of their parents solely to immortalize them, of course. For one thing, some memoirs characterize parents as deserving condemnation, rather than praise or even respect. Child abusers are not depicted to memorialize them but to give witness to the phenomenon of child abuse and, ideally,

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to curb its incidence. Other memoirs are written to complete the always unfinished business that children have with their parents. They may try to repair, revive, or even enact a relationship with a missing or absent parent. Most subjects of filial memoirs are deceased, and whether it is possible to affect a relationship with a dead person may be a metaphysical question. But I think many patri- and matriographers would claim that it is possible. An interesting case in point, and a patriography I admire, is Nicholas Lachenmeyer’s The Outsider: A Journey into My Father’s Struggle with Madness. The senior Lachenmeyer, Charles, was a brilliant sociologist but a failed academic; late-onset paranoid schizophrenia derailed his career. After a divorce, when Nicholas was eleven, Charles was largely absent from his son’s life. He rarely visited. He wrote letters regularly, but they became so disturbing that Nicholas finally broke off contact. Eventually, Charles became unemployed, unemployable, and homeless; he lived on the streets of several New England cities, finally dying in his early fifties of a heart attack in Burlington, Vermont. Only when Nicholas was notified by the police did he learn the full extent of his father’s degeneration. In his narrative, then, he painstakingly—and painfully—reconstructs his father’s missing years, using his father’s personal papers, court records, and interviews with policemen, merchants, street people, and shelter workers. His memoir is necessarily unusually biographical in its methodology. While writing it no doubt accomplished important personal work for its author, that end could have been served without publishing the result. What the book’s publication does, however, is put a face on the homeless mentally ill person that so many of us shun in real life—the very sort of person who scared young Nicholas in the company of his still sane father. This patriography functions as a case study of sorts—after all, it is based in part on the testimony of caseworkers; at the same time, it counters the generalizing thrust of case studies by attending to the uniqueness of this particular man. One reason I am attracted to The Outsider is that I have been writing a memoir of my own father, with whom I had a rather strained relationship, and who also suffered from mental illness (depression). My father died quite young (sixty-nine) not long after my mother died even younger (sixty-five). In cleaning out our family home, I came across a substantial cache of documents I did not know existed. Some were biographical

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records (his high school and college yearbooks, his college transcript, my parents’ marriage certificate, and so on), but most were letters to or from family and friends (male and female) before he married and had children. These documents were a revelation to me. Supplementing them with historical research, I have been able to reconstruct periods of his premarital life that I knew very little about. It has not been lost on me that I have been able to do this only because he, his siblings, and his friends wrote their lives as they lived them. My life writing is parasitical on theirs; it quotes, contextualizes, interprets, extends, and publishes it. In the process of writing this biographical memoir, I believe that I have come to know my father better in death than I knew him in life. This is of enormous value and importance to me, and it could not have been accomplished by my writing a novel based on his life. I feel that in doing this I am making use of my real patrimony—the letters themselves. And I feel that I am honoring my father in a way that I did not, and could not, when he was alive. So in addition to immortalizing and memorializing its subjects, memoir can acquaint its author with its subject; it can bring the two parties together in a relationship. Thus, I would say that memoir can affect—or even effect—a relationship between its writer and its subject, even when that subject is deceased. In any case, memoir writing can be a powerful way of coming to know someone better—a significant other or oneself. I think the belief that memoir writing can accomplish these ends is one reason for the democratization of memoir writing. I refer here to the proliferation of guides and workshops on memoir writing. A good deal of unpublished or selfpublished memoir is no doubt prosaic and dull—of interest mainly to its authors and immediate family. But we are not discussing literature here. We are just noting that the impulse to write memoirs is different from the impulse to write novels, and that the difference has to do with the “work” that memoir is capable of doing. After all, memoir often puts on record lives that would otherwise be transient, evanescent. I for one am in favor of narrating lots of lives, and lots of kinds of lives. At the risk of sounding preachy, I think that, as the most democratic province in the republic of letters, memoir is a powerful expression of democracy. It may not be necessary to it, but it is capable of strengthening it and enriching its culture.

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I’d like to conclude this volume by addressing one other thing that memoir can do. And by deferring it to last place, I do not mean to minimize it. On the contrary. Many poststructuralist critics have been much taken with an idea ascribed to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who wrote “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” This has been translated as saying there is no outside the text, or there is nothing outside the text—a position that has been derided by many. This translation distorts Derrida’s meaning, but it does reflect the postmodernist notion that what we think of as reality (outside of textuality) is sometime more textual (more culturally constructed) than we realize or than we like to think. The major impact of this in life-writing studies has been to turn a simplistic conception of life narrative on its head. In the naïve view, selves exist; they have being; then, at some point they may put themselves in writing. The text is thus a product (not necessarily reliable, of course) of a preexisting (extra-textual) self. The view prevailing in the academy today is the opposite: that selves (or subjects) are always in the process of being constructed; that identity is a function of performative traits, such as gender; that this process is driven by social factors and cultural assumptions (also known as ideology) of which the individual may not be aware; and that life narrative produces a new subject. So the emphasis in academic study of life writing has been on how the text in some sense produces a subject, rather than the opposite. The advantage of this approach has been to focus readers’ attention on the text and its effects. Naïve readers still assume that they can see through a “transparent” text to the subject within or behind it. Poststructuralist critics would remind them that the only access they have to that subject is by means of the mediation of the text, which is constructed according to various codes (such as the conventions of genre). And therefore, one needs always to remember that the textual subject is . . . only a textual subject. This is not to deny that such texts can have real-world effects or that they represent extra-textual people, of course. What I am getting at here, though, is that while this approach can seem to box off life narrative from life itself, ideally it does not. Ideally, it reminds us that what we have in life writing is the writing, not the life; but (and) that the power of life narrative resides in the narrative. This counterintuitive approach can be seen, not as

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denying the life in life writing, but as empowering life writers—and life writing. Let me conclude then, by citing a lifelong life writer, Nancy Mairs. She is primarily an essayist; of the many books she has published over the course of her career, only one, Remembering the Bone House, is strictly speaking a memoir. But, perhaps in part because she has suffered all of her life from sometimes suicidal depression, in part because she has been a committed political activist as well as a writer, she has a good deal invested in the power of writing to affect and alter reality, including selfhood or subjectivity. In Ordinary Time, she has memorably said of her writing: “The only way I can find out [why and how I’ve done things] is through language, learning line by line as the words compose me.” For her, then, writing is a crucial means of self-discovery, even self-creation. Notice that she is not referring to the critical commonplace that as an essayist she creates a “persona” not quite identical to her “real” self. She is claiming that, in some significant sense, when she writes, the process brings a new, real self into being. There’s a sense in which she constitutes herself in (life) writing. This is another thing that memoir, undertaken conscientiously and reflectively, can do that fiction can’t. So when we read memoir, we may, among other things, witness and in some sense participate in this marvelous act of self-discovery.

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Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth, and Steven B. Kaplan. I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Simon, Rachel. Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey. New York: Plume, 2003. Skloot, Floyd. The Night-Side: Chronic Fatigue and the Illness Experience. Ashland: Story Line, 1996. Slater, Lauren. Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another. New York: Random House, 2002. ———. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. Prozac Diary. New York: Random House, 1998. ———. Welcome to My Country. New York: Random House, 1996. Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. New York: Knopf, 2005. Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Smith, John. The General History of Virginia. In Baym, Norton Anthology of American Literature, 45–57. Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York: Ecco, 2010. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, ed. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. ———. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986. ———. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Literary Guild, 1933. Stendhal. Vie de Henri Brulard. 1890. Reprint. Paris: Champion, 1913. Sterne, Lawrence. Tristram Shandy. London: 1759–1769. Stevens, George, Jr. Thurgood. New York: Booth Theater. 2008. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Archibald Constable, 1897. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder: Westview, 2006. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852. Styron, William. Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967. Sullenberger, Chesley B. Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. With Jeffrey Zaslow. New York: William Morrow, 2009. Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Kathbur Pictures, 2004. Tarnation. Dir. By Jonathan Caouette. 2003. Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen E. Tabatchnick. New York: MLA, 2009. Temple Grandin. Dir. Mick Jackson. HBO Home Movie, 2010. Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. 1864. Reprint. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

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Wolff, Geoffrey. The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father. New York: Penguin, 1986. Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. New York: Grove, 1989. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1933. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: Or, the Growth of a Poet’s Mind. 1805. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Stephen Gill. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead, 2009. Zaslow, Jeffrey. The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-year Friendship. New York: Gotham, 2009.

198

INDEX

Abrams, M.H., 33 Ackerly, A.J., My Dog Tulip, 164 Adams, Abigail, 112 Adams, Clover, 133 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, 11, 131–133 Adams, John, 112, 117–118 Adams, Lorraine, 144, 146 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, Infidel and Nomad, 142 “Amazing Grace,” 39 American literary tradition, 108–139 Colonial, 110–117 American Renaissance, 126–129 American Revolution, 109, 117 Americans with Disabilities Act, 150 Americans with Disabilities Amendment Act, 150 Amis, Kingsley, 157 Amis, Martin, 157 Angelou, Maya, 51 Antin, Mary, The Promised Land, 147 Apology (or apologia), 9, 14, 38, 40, 41, 115, 177 Augustine, Saint, Confessions, 39, 108 Auster, Paul, The Invention of Solitude, 157 Authorized biography, 100–101 Autiebiography, 152, (see also memoir, and autism)

Autobiographical pact, 79–80, 130 Autoethnography, 43 Autopathography, 43–44 Autothanatography, 43, 121 Ayer, A.J., 157 Baby boom generation, 154–156 Barth, John, “Lost in the Funhouse,” 165–166 Bauby, Jean-Dominique, 149, 152 Beavan, Colin, No Impact Man, 13, 163 Bechdel, Alison, Fun Home, 12, 65–66, 77, 161, 168 Bellow, Saul, Dangling Man, 59 Bennett, Michael, A Chorus Line, 96–97 Bentley, Toni, The Surrender, 153 Berne, Suzanne, Missing Lucille, 4 Bible, 108 Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), 108, 113, 121 New Testament, 108 Bildungsroman, 38, 41, 63–64, 66, 68, 172 (see also coming-of-age narrative) Biography Channel, 29 Biopics, 28–29 vs. documentaries, 37 Birkerts, Sven, The Art of Time in Memoir, 54 Biss, Eula, The Balloonists, 143 Bjorklund, Diane, 141 Black Elk, 97–98 (see also John Neihardt)

199

INDEX

Bloland, Susan Erikson, 157 Boylan, Jennifer (née James) Finney, She’s Not There, 150 Bradford, William, Of Plimoth Plantation, 112 Brookes, Tim, 149 Brown, Claude, Manchild in the Promised Land, 140 Broyard, Anatole, 157 Broyard, Bliss, 157 Bruni, Frank, Born Round, 153 Brynner, Rock, 157 Brynner, Yul, 157 Buchanan, James, 118, 144 Buckley, Christopher, Losing Mum and Pup, 19 Bunyan, John, 72, 108 Burgos-Debray, Elizabeth, 91–92 Burroughs, Augusten, 172 A Wolf at the Table, 19 Burroughs, Stephen, Memoirs, 141 Bush, George H. W., 144 Bush, George W., Decision Points, 3, 40–41, 85, 144 Byrd, William, 112 Caldwell, Gail, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 5 Campaign autobiographies, 144 Campaign biographies, 144 Caouette, Jonathan, Tarnation, 28, 37 Capote, Truman depiction of in Capote and Infamous, 29 depiction of in Tru, 30 Captivity narrative, 68, 112–114, 117, 121, 139 Carter, Jimmy, 144 Case study, 101–102, 180 Cash, Johnny (Walk the Line), 29 Cat Diaries, 164 Cellini, Benvenuto, Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 109 Charles, Ray (Ray), 29 Cheever, John, 157 Cheever, Susan, 157 Cheney, Terri, 149 Child, Julia, 162–163 Christianity, 108, 123–124

Catholicism, 116 Protestantism, 108, 114–116, 121 Cleland, John, 110 Clinton, Bill, My Life, 40, 144 Clinton, Hillary, Living History, 144 Coe, Richard, 133 Columbus, Christopher, 111 Coming-of-age narrative, 9, 38 (see also bildungsroman) Confession, 9, 14, 31, 38–39, 68, 140–141, 172, 177 Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, 58 Constitution, American, 117 Conversion narrative, 9, 31, 38, 68, 108–109, 111, 115–117, 120, 123, 126, 150–151, 172 Coolidge, Calvin, 144 Copyright, 110 Coupland, Douglas, Microserfs, 59 Crawford, Christina, Mommie Dearest, 157 Crawford, Joan, 12, 157 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., Two Years before the Mast, 11, 125, 161 Davis, Angela, 140 Davis, Patti, 157 Day, Clarence, 147 Death notice, see obituary Declaration of Independence, 117–118 Defoe, Daniel, 58, 72, 109–110 Defonseca, Misha, Surviving with the Wolves, 93 De las Casas, Bartolomé, 111 Dell’Abbate, Gary, They Call Me Baba Booey, 3 De Rossi, Portia, Unbearable Lightness, 3 Derrida, Jacques, 182 Detective fiction, 36 Diaries, 30, 42, novels as, 58–60 Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, 63, 171 Dickey, Christopher, 157 Dickey, James, 157 Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking, 43 Documentary films, 28–29, 31, 37, 46, 102, 147 Dössekker, Bruno (“Binjamin Wilkomirski”), Fragments, 92–94

200

INDEX

Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 11, 122–124, 129 My Bondage and My Freedom, 124 The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 124 DNA testing, 46–47 Dillard, Annie, 127 Disability, see memoir, and disability Disability vs. impairment, 151 Doty, Mark Dog Years, 164 Still Life with Oysters and Lemon Peel, 143–144 Dubois, W.E.B., 125 Dubus, Andre, Jr., 149

Foster, Thomas C., How to Read Novels Like a Professor, 54 Fox, Michael J., 149 Frank, Anne, 30 Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography, 11, 22–23, 50, 72, 117–120, 141 Fraser, Antonia, Must You Go?, 4 Fraser, Sylvia, My Father’s House, 155 Free indirect discourse, 62–63 French Revolution, 109 Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces, 6, 16–17, 33, 34, 55, 75–76, 80–88, 166 Fries, Kenny, 149 Full-life narrative, 22 Fussell, Samuel, Muscle, 174

Eakin, Paul John, 25 Earhart, Amelia (Amelia), 29 Edwards, Jonathan, Personal Narrative, 116–117, 123 Egan, Susanna, 43 Eggers, Dave, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 13, 166–167 Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed, 11, 125 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 144 Elizabeth II, Queen (The Queen), 29 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 127 Epistolary fiction, 58–60 Erikson, Erik, 157

Gaines, Ernest J., Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 37 Galsworthy, John, The Forsyte Saga, 57–58 Gass, William, “The Art of Self,” 47–48 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., African American Lives, 46 Genre, 9, 14, 19, 33–53 as action, 41–42, 52–53 and bookstore layout, 35–36 criteria for, 33 and gender, 35, 42 prestige of, 34 proliferation of terms for, 42–45 and reader response, 38 and television programming, 35 George VI, King (The King’s Speech), 29 The Ghost Writer, 95 Gide, Andre, The Pastoral Symphony, 59 Gilbert, Elizabeth, Eat, Pray, Love, 4, 117 Gittleman, Edward, 117 Glancy, Diane, Claiming Breath, 143 “Go Down, Moses,” 121 Golden, Arthur, Memoirs of a Geisha, 37 Gordon, Mary, The Shadow Man, 12, 155, 157 Gordimer, Nadine, biography of, 100–101 Gornick, Vivian, The Situation and the Story, 54 Grafton, Sue, 36 Grandin, Temple, 152 Grant, U.S., 131 Gray, Spalding, 30

Fairey, Wendy, 157 Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury, 60–61 Feder, Christine Welles, 157 Fielding, Helen, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 59 Fielding, Henry, 110 Fies, Brian, Mom’s Cancer, 161 Fighter, The, 29 Filial narrative, see memoir, of a parent by a child Finger, Anne, Elegy for a Disease, 151 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, 61, 63, 67, 80 Tender is the Night, 80 Ford, Gerald R., 144 Fossey, Dian, Gorillas in the Mist, 165

201

INDEX

Grealy, Lucy, Autobiography of a Face, 5, 50–51, 144, 146, 148–149 Great Awakening, First, 116 Gregory, Julie, 149 Grogan, John, Marley and Me, 55–56, 164 Guston, Philip, 157, 159 Hall, Ron, Same Kind of Different as Me, 4 Halpern, Justin, Shit My Dad Says, 3–4 Hammett, Dashiell, 157 Hammett, Jo, 157 Handler, Chelsea, 4–5 Are You There Vodka, 4 My Horizontal Life, 4, 153 Handler, Lowell, 149 Harbach, Chad, 146 Harris, Robert, The Ghost, 79, 95 Harrison, Kathryn, The Kiss, 156 Hawthorne, Nathaniel as biographer, 144 as novelist, 171 Heard, Alex, 81 Hemingway, Ernest, 56, 71 The Sun Also Rises, 61, 63, 67 Henke, Suzette, 43 Hildreth, Richard, The Slave, 92 Hillenbrand, Lauren, Seabiscuit, 56 Hoover, Herbert, 144 Hornbacher, Maryse, 149 Howells, William Dean, 117–118 Hughes, Howard (The Aviator), 29 (see also Clifford Irving) Hustvedt, Siri, The Shaking Woman, 153 Impairment vs. disability, 151 Interior monologue, 60–61 Intertextuality In memoirs, 172 In novels, 79, 172 Irving, Clifford, 87, 89–90 “It Gets Better,” 177 Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically, 13, 162 The Know-It-All, 162, 175 Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, 11, 122–123

James, Danny (“Danny Santiago”), 91 James, Henry, 132 The Middle Years, 133 Notes of a Son and Brother, 133 A Small Boy and Others, 11, 131, 133–137 James, William, 133, 135 Jamison, Kay Redfield, An Unquiet Mind, 19 Janzen, Rhoda, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, 4 Jefferson, Thomas, 117–118 Jezer, Marty, 149 Johnson, Lyndon B., 144 Jones, Edward P., The Known World, 121 Journalism, undercover, 125, 162 Junger, Sebastian, Restrepo, 31 Juska, Jane, 153–154 Kahn, Louis, 37, 157 Kahn, Nathaniel, My Architect, 37, 157 Karr, Mary, 6, 50–51, 75, 76, 147 Kaufman, Sue, Diary of a Mad Housewife, 59 Kaysen, Susannah, Girl, Interrupted, 66–67, 149, 178 Kerr, Jean, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 147 King, Stephen, 36 Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior, 16, 43, 64–66 Kleege, Georgina, Sight Unseen, 151 Knapp, Caroline, Drinking, 5 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 112 Koontz, Dean, 36 Krakauer, Jon, 88 Kuusisto, Stephen, Planet of the Blind, 39, 151 Lachenmeyer, Nicholas, The Outsider, 180 De Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 59 Lardner, Kate, 157 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 157 Lejeune, Philippe, 79–80 Leopold, Aldo, 127 Libel, 79 Life narrative, see life writing Life writing ambiguity of term, 24 about animals, 55–56, 164–165 in electronic media, 27, 45–46 forms of, 9

202

INDEX

and human rights, 176–177 vs. life narrative, 24 memoir as variety of, 24 oral forms of, 25–26 origins and development of, 25–28, 108–110 on stage, 29–30 and subjectivity, 25–26 as umbrella term, 42 visual forms of, 27–29, 147 (see also portraiture, biopics, documentary films) Linton, Simi, My Body Politic, 151 Lippman, Laura, Life Sentences, 6–8 Lowell, Ivana, Why Not Say What Happened?, 4 Mairs, Nancy, 149, 183 Malamud, Bernard, 157 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 140 Marshall, Thurgood (Thurgood), 30 Martin, Dean, 157 Martin, Deana, 157 Martin, Ricky, Me, 3 Masters, Alexander, Stuart, 98–99 Matthews, Sebastian, 157 Matthews, William, 157 Matriography, see memoir, of a parent by a child Max, Tucker, 3–5 Assholes Finish First, 3 I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, 4 Mayer, Musa, 157, 159 McCarthy, Mary, The Group, 58 McCloskey, Deirdre (née Donald), Crossing, 150 McCourt, Alphie, A Long Stone’s Throw, 5, 171 McCourt, Frank, 171 Angela’s Ashes, 5, 14, 142, 147 Teacher Man, 5 Tis, 5 McCourt, Malachy, A Monk Swimming, 5, 171 McCrum, Robert, 149 McGreevey, Dinah Matos, Silent Partner, 21 McLaughlin, Emma, and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries, 59

McLean, Teresa, 149 Meir, Golda (Golda’s Balcony), 30 Melville, Herman, 125, 138, 170 “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 58, Moby-Dick, 67, 79 Memoir and AIDS, 21, 45, 143, 149–150 (see also memoir, and disability) and Alzheimer’s, 21, 149, 151, 155–156 (see also memoir, and disability) and autism, 151–152 (see also memoir, and disability) vs. autobiography, 18–24, 34, 50–51 vs. biography, 36–38 and breast cancer, 149–150 (see also memoir, and disability) character in, 171 and child abuse, 147, 155 of a child by a parent, 21, 104–105 chronology in, 64–67 and civil rights, 149–151 closure in, 67–68 collaborative ethics of, 94–99 celebrity scenario, 94–96 ethnographic scenario, 96–99 comic plot in, 44–45 commodity value of, 17, 83–84 comprehensiveness of, 22–24 contemporary American, 140–168 democratic potential of, 26, 109, 117–118, 181 development of, 14, 58–61, 108–139 dialogue in, 53, 68, 72–76, 160, 167 and disability, 12, 20, 21, 43–44, 102, 105–107, 148–153 disclaimers in, 83–85, 167 erotic, 153 ethics of, 10–11, 79–107 responsibility to historical record, 79–100 responsibility to subjects, 99 of extremity, 56 factual accuracy in, 79–88, 131, 168 false (hoaxes), 53, 87, 92–94, 141, 170 by First Ladies, 145 graphic, 12–13, 16, 159–161, 168

203

INDEX

Memoir (continued) “hi–def,” 72–76 identity claims in, 37–38, 80, 88–89, 92, 168, 172 and illness, (see memoir, and disability) as literary face of life writing, 9 lyrical, 143–144 meaning(s) of the term, 9, 15, 18–31 memorial function of, 179–180 memory as basis of, 19, 81, 130–131, 134–137 methodological transparency in, 84 and MFA programs, 50, 141–142, 146 of misery, 5–6, 147–148 names in, 170–171 and narcissism, 47–48 narrative perspective in, 56–63 narrative techniques of, 9–10 by a nobody, 5, 12, 48, 140, 145, 146–147 and (vs.) the novel, 9–10, 15–17, 47–49, 53, 54–79, 90–92, 109–110, 146, 169–183 novelists’ hostility toward, 6–8, 47–50 of a parent by a child, 12, 20–21, 37, 105, 106, 154–160, 179–180 of a partner, 21, 103–104 performative dimension of, 178 popularity of, 3–6 postmodernist, 12–13, 165–168 present tense in, 70–75, 134–135, 175 presidential, 40, 118, 144–145 “prose license” in, 81 publishers’ role in developing, 145–146 relational, 20, 34 roots in early American literature, 11–12 scene vs. summary in, 68–78, 134, 160–161, 173–175 self–discovery in, 183 self–experimentation in, 127, 175 and self–publishing, 142 and sex change, 150 showing vs. telling in, see scene vs. summary in of a sibling, 105 six–word, 145 by a somebody, 145 of some body, 148–154, 178–179

as subgenre of autobiography, 18–21, 24, 61 as subgenre of biography, 18–21, 61 subgenres of, 38 (see also apology, bildungsroman, confession, conversion narrative, testimony) and relation between the I’s, 38–41, 172 stunt, 13, 161–164 teaching of, 141–142 transactional transparency in, 99 truth claims in, 10, 55, 73–74, 82–83 ventriloquism in, 138 verisimilitude in, 68, 71–78, 160, 165 as a way of knowing, 180–181 the “work” of, 13–14, 169–83 Memoir boom(s), 89, 140–144 Memory research, 93 Menchú, Rigoberta, I, Rigoberta, 85–89, 91–94 Michalko, Rod, The Two in One, 165 Michener, James, The World Is My Home, 19 Miller, Sue, 12 Mirror, invention of, 108 Moaveni, Azadeh, Lipstick Jihad, 142 Modern Language Association, 16 Modes, literary dramatic, 34, 71 expository, 34, 71 lyric, 34, 143–144 narrative, 34 Monette, Paul, Becoming a Man, 39, 76–77 Moore, Judith, 149 Morris, Edmund, Dutch, 63 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 121 Morrisroe, Patricia, 149 Mortenson, Greg Three Cups of Tea, 4–5, 88 Stones into Schools, 4 Morton, Thomas, New English Canaan, 112 Muir, John, 127 Mullan, John, How Novels Work, 54 Myerson, Julie, The Lost Child, 104–105 Myron, Vicky, Dewey, 4

204

INDEX

Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Teheran, 142 Native American autobiography, 114–115 (see also Black Elk) Neihardt, John, Black Elk Speaks, 97–98 New disability memoir, 151 New York Times Book Review, 3–5, 142, 161 Nixon, Richard M., 144 Norris, Kathleen, Dakota, 117 Norton Anthology of American Literature, 111 Novel (see also memoir, and [vs.] the novel) hoaxes in, 90–91 as imitation of life writing, 57–60 narrators’ degree of knowledge in, 62–63 as oral narrative, 58 Oates, Joyce Carol, A Widow’s Story, 43 Obama, Barack, Jr., Dreams from My Father, 159 Obama, Barack, Sr., 159 Obituary, 9, 27, 30–31 Occom, Samson, 114–115 O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 79 Page, Tim, Parallel Play, 69–70, 76 Paretsky, Sara, 36 Park, Clara Claiborne, The Siege, 105 Patchett, Ann, Truth and Beauty, 5 Patriography, see memoir, of a parent by a child Pepperberg, Irene, Alex and Me, 164–165 Pepys, Samuel, 30, 42 Personal ads, 46 Piaf, Edith (La Vie en Rose), 29 Plagiarism, 79, 84 Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar, 178 Plimpton, George, 161–162 Portraiture, 24, 26–28 Poststructuralism, 182 Powell, Julie, 162–163 Presidential memoirs, 3, 41, 85, 144 Price, Richard, Clockers, 173 Prose, Francine, Blue Angel, 49–50 Prosopography, 31 Puritanism, 116–117, 119–120 Rak, Julie, 18 Reagan, Maureen, 157

Reagan, Ron, 157 Reagan, Ronald, 12, 144, 157 Renaissance humanism, 109 Reunion book, 31 Richards, Keith, Life, 3–4 Richardson, Samuel, 59, 72, 109 Robillard, Albert B., 149 Robison, Margaret, 172 Roman à clef, 79 Roney, Lisa, 149 Roosevelt, Theodore, 144 Roth, Philip, 12, 72 Patrimony, 68–69, 71, 156 Rothenberg, Laura, 149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Confessions, 39 Emile, 133 Julie, 59 Rowlandson, Mary, 112–113 Rumsfeld, Donald, Known and Unknown, 40 Russert, Tim, 157 Sacks, Oliver, 101–102, 152 Saga, 57–58 Salinger, J.D., 105, 157–158 Salinger, Margaret, Dream Catcher, 105, 157–158 Sanford, Jenny, Staying True, 103–104 Sanford, Mark, 39, 103–104 Sarton, May, 149 Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis, 16, 142 Schine, Cathleen, The Three Weissmans of Westport, 6, 48 Scrapbook, 31–32 Scriptotherapy, 43, 113 Sedaris, David, 82 Sedgwick, Edie (Factory Girl), 29 Sellers, Heather, 149 Seven Up series, 31 Sewall, Samuel, Diary, 42, 112 Shafer, Jack, 81 Shakespeare, William, 33 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 36 Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth, 149 Simon, Rachel, Riding the Bus with My Sister, 105

205

INDEX

Single-experience narrative, 22, 129 (see also captivity narrative, conversion narrative, slave narrative, travel writing) Skloot, Floyd, 149 Slater, Lauren, Lying, 13, 106–107, 166 Slave narrative, 14, 68, 92, 120, 122–126, 139, 141, 176 (see also Douglass, Frederick, and Jacobs, Harriet) Smiley, Jane, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, 54 Smith, Anna Deavere, 30 Smith, John, The General History of Virginia, 112 Smith, Janna Malamud, 157 Smith, Patti, Just Kids, 4–5 Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson Getting a Life, 45–46 Reading Autobiography, 42 Smollett, Tobias, 110 Sonnet, 33 Spiegelman, Art, Maus, 12, 16, 21, 156, 159–161, 168 Spitzer, Eliot, 39 Spurlock, Morgan, Super Size Me, 162 Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 11, 137–139 Stendahl, Vie de Henri Brulard, 133 Sterne, Lawrence, Tristram Shandy, 22, 110 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 59 Stoll, David, 85–86 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 92, 175–176 Styron, William, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 121 Suresh, Ronald, 100–101 Suspension of disbelief, 17, 57–58, 72, 74 Taylor, Edward, 112 Testimonio, 86–89, 92, 111–112, 176 Testimony, 9, 11, 30, 38, 41, 53, 67, 92–94, 103, 106, 115, 121, 124, 148, 155, 160, 177 Thoreau, Henry David, 176 “Resistance to Civil Government,” 40 Walden, 11, 52–53, 126–127, 129, 141, 161, 163–164 Tragedy, 33 Travel writing, 129

Trillin, Calvin, 157 Truman, Harry S., 144 “Truthiness,” 83 Turner, Frank, John Henry Newman, 100 Twain, Mark Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 56–57, 129 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 56 Autobiography, 3–4, 11, 130 Innocents Abroad, 129 Life on the Mississippi, 130 “Old Times on the Mississippi,” 130 as pseudonym, 130 Roughing It, 129 Vincent, Norah Self-Made Man, 13, 163 Voluntary Madness, 163 Walls, Jeanette, The Glass Castle, Washington, Booker T., 125 Watson, Julia, see Smith, Sidonie Welles, Orson, 157 Whitman, Walt, 129 “Song of Myself,” 126–128 Specimen Days, 128 Wideman, John Edgar, 157 Wigglesworth, Michael, 112 Wilder, Thornton, Our Town, 70 Williams, Gregory Howard, Life on the Color Line, 73–74 Williams, Tennessee, The Glass Menagerie, 70 Winfrey, Oprah, 6, 16–17, 82, 87 Wolitzer, Meg, The Ten-Year Nap, 58, 193 Women’s liberation, 156 (see also memoir, and civil rights) Wood, James, How Fiction Works, 54, 71 Woolf, Virginia, 164 Wolff, Geoffrey, 157 Wolff, Tobias, 157 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 128 Yagoda, Ben, Memoir, 3, 8, 11, 73, 78, 80, 109, 140, 147 Zaslow, Jeffrey, The Girls from Ames, 31

206