"Maybe loving the memoirs of other people counts only as a misdemeanor compared
with the felonious act of writing one." ~Patricia Hampl (Boston Globe, Nov. 30, 1997)
It's All About Me
There are those who think there are far too many people writing about themselves. A few years ago, The New York Times ran an article in its book section entitled, We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It? In it, author William Grimes notes that the classic memoir was once a genre that produced writings about “important events related by the great [men] who shaped them.” His premise is that this is no longer the case.
In 2001, shortly after Dave Eggers best seller, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius came onto the scene, Sarah Brennan, an editor for bookreporter.com, penned When In Doubt, Write a Memoir:The Staggering, Heartbreaking Memoir-Writing Craze “The only thing worse than a memoir written by a half-witted, famous-by-birth author,” wrote Brennan, “…is one written by an altogether uninteresting person who, for some completely inexplicable reason, is convinced they have lead an extraordinary life and feels compelled to wax philosophical about it.” She laments the passage of memoir from the telling of lives sublime to the blather of those leading lives of mediocrity. "Once a specialized genre—reserved for larger-than-life personalities," she writes,"memoir writing has replaced Monopoly and baseball as the great American pastime. Feeling bad? Write a memoir. Feeling good? Write a memoir. Feeling indifferent to feeling either good or bad? Write a memoir.”
She categorizes memoirs, or rather, the people who write them as follows:
• people with an inalienable right to a memoir;
• people who have experienced and/or overcome tragedy;
• people who are extremely successful;
• people related to people who have achieved any of the above and finally,
• ordinary people who think they lead extraordinary lives.
It's All in the Art
In fact, memoir is no different than any other form of writing. When one reads a bad novel, one does not then deplore all fiction. To meet the challenge of good craft, memoir must do four things:
- take the reader to another place
- take a simplemoment and reveal its extraordinary nature.
- relate a life experience in a way that matters to the reader
- take a personal moment and allows it to represent a larger life truth
Bottom line is that like any medium, for it to be worthy of credit, it must be done well. As V.S. Pritchett said, “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.”
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