Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature - Softcover

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Meredith Maran, a passionate reader and writer of memoirs, is the author of thirteen nonfiction books and the acclaimed novel A Theory Of Small Earthquakes. Meredith also writes book reviews, essays, and features for newspapers and magazines including People, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, and More. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Meredith lives in a restored historic bungalow in Los Angeles, and on Twitter at @meredithmaran. Her next memoir is about starting over in Los Angeles.

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Acknowledgments

Oh, Becky Cole. Becky Cole! What’s not to love about an editor who starts her edit letter, “Do you have five minutes? Then you can probably make the requested changes in the ms. Golly, it’s good.” Thank you, Becky, for keeping both of us laughing even when certain unnamed memoirists (not one of whom appears in this book) proved to be kind of, well, difficult, causing us to wonder whether we could get away with, say, thirteen or fourteen contributors instead of twenty.

Linda Loewenthal, you’re such a good person, it’s hard to believe you’re an agent. You’re more like a spirit guide. A spirit guide who’s also a hardass negotiator and brilliant thinker and editor and book-doula and muse and, most of all, an indefatigable, unflagging, loving literary companion. Thank you. I love you.

For time, space, and profound nourishment: a thousand picnic basketsful of thanks to the artists’ colonies MacDowell, Yaddo, the Mesa Refuge, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Mabel Dodge Luhan House.

Booksellers and independent bookstore owners: I hope everyone who buys this book will buy it from you.

To my friends and family: Thank you for holding me up, at all times, no matter what.

Introduction

I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.

Gloria’s right. You can’t divorce a memoir. But, as the twenty successful authors in this book attest, you can (and some do) divorce, disown, de-friend, or defame a memoirist. If you want to ruin your life and/or others’, there’s really no more surefire method than writing a true-life tale according to you.

Why, then, do so many authors risk public, private, and/or professional excoriation for the dubious pleasure of writing about themselves? What is it about sharing one’s deepest thoughts, feelings, and experiences with others that makes it worth the mayhem and mishegas?

Without demand, of course, there would be no supply. So we must also ask why we read memoirs. For centuries, readers, reviewers, and social commentators have been gobbling up first-person narratives, all the while diagnosing the books’ authors with attention-seeking disorders. Is the urge to read memoirs the same urge that makes us peek into strangers’ undraped windows at night—not just because we’re nosy, but to learn something from how other people live, in order to live better lives ourselves?

Whatever the reasons for our attachment to memoir, it’s a phenomenon that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. The genre has been around since St. Augustine wrote his thirteen-volume Confessions around A.D. 400. In one form or another, memoir lives on today—in the journal entry, blog, confessional e-mail, or Facebook post you wrote an hour ago. Forgive us, Descartes; today’s philosophy of existence might best be expressed thusly: “I overshare, therefore I am.”

People who love memoirs claim that the telling of the true-life story is the contemporary incantation of oral history, an invaluable contribution to the enlightenment, the collective consciousness, perhaps even the evolution of the species.

People who don’t love memoirs say the genre is a scourge upon the human race, a playing field upon which attention-craving, sensationalistic, crass, and craven narcissists head-butt and navel-gaze their way to the bestseller lists.

Between the covers of this book, twenty very different memoirists share their very different reasons for doing what they do and their sometimes different, sometimes overlapping approaches to the controversies that surround the genre.

“I’m always asking myself if material I have from my own life would be best used in a novel or a memoir or a short story or an essay,” says Cheryl Strayed. “I was moved to write Wild as a memoir because I thought that was the best way to tell that particular story.”

“I actually never intended to publish a book,” says Ishmael Beah, whose bestselling A Long Way Gone describes his life as a twelve-year-old soldier in Sierra Leone. “Writing [became] for me a way to prove my existence.”

“Some of us are the designated rememberers,” The Death of Santini author Pat Conroy told me. “That’s why memoir interests us—because we’re the ones who pass the stories.”

“I have never written memoir by choice,” says Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying. “Each time I write memoir, in short or long form, something happens that compels me to do it—something that feels pressing and urgent, something that there is no other way to express.”

How does memoir writing differ from journal keeping? Should a memoir be a work of art, produced for the benefit of the reader—or a cathartic writing experience for the benefit of the author?

“People want to believe that a memoirist has simply opened a vein and bled on the page,” according to Ayelet Waldman. “That’s a diary. A diary can be emotionally satisfying, it can be great therapy, but it’s not necessarily good writing.”

“A memoir is not simply stringing together the five or ten good stories you’ve been telling about your wacky childhood for your whole life,” Nick Flynn says.

But A. M. Homes says she wrote a memoir about her adoption “to organize the information and the experience—to put it in a container, if only to set the container aside for a while.”

When I asked the writers about the morality of memoir—whether memoirists are obligated to protect the privacy of the loved (and not-loved) ones in their lives—emotions ran high.

Sue Monk Kidd said that writing memoir is “a dance between being true to my need to write authentically and my responsibility to those around me not to cross over into their private hearts and extract something that doesn’t belong to me.”

Edmund White said, “Memoir should be extremely honest and personal. It should show the author for who he is, warts and all . . . A memoirist’s contract with the reader is that you’re telling the truth and nothing but the truth. That requires telling everything there is to say about everyone involved.”

“What I worried about most, writing the memoir,” said Kate Christensen, “was offending people or causing anyone pain. I’m used to writing about invented characters. Writing about real people was a huge stretch—a leap into new territory.”

“At first I was worried that my book would be really exploitive,” Anne Lamott said. “But then my editor said, ‘It won’t be exploitive if you don’t exploit anyone.’”

Whatever your thoughts and feelings about this provocative, evocative genre, whether you’re a producer or a consumer of memoir, or neither, or both, I hope you’ll benefit from the literary, emotional, psychological, and moral self-examination that’s on display in these pages.

In their own books, the memoirists included here bare all. In this book, they bare all about baring all, excavating the personal and professional agonies and ecstasies, moral conundrums, and psychological battles that come with the job.

—Meredith Maran

CHAPTER ONE

Ishmael Beah

There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it...