The Memoir Blues

Memoir is a genre of writing in which I’ve taken an interest: Lately, it permeates my reading list as well as my own writing. To write about oneself is alleviating, indulgent and fun. Mostly, though, it’s complicated. There’s an unsettling idea underlying the genre—one that’s backed with considerable evidence if you browse any bookstore—that success as a memoirist hinges on a life of pain and hardship. Perhaps, the meager benefits of such a life include a lucrative book deal and the notoriety that comes with your pain being accessible to any reader who can shell out thirteen bucks for a paperback. Mary Karr, Tobias Wolffe, Jeannette Walls write memoirs that are as painful to read as I imagine they were to scribe. To be a good country singer, you need several bad breakups under your belt; to sing the blues, baby, you gotta know them.

The genesis of my interest was a writing class called “Creative Non-Fiction: Writing the Memoir.” The class was intense: Each week we were responsible for producing ten fresh pages about ourselves to be work-shopped by the professor (whom I worshipped) and the other fifteen budding memoirists (many of whom I came to worship). During the first workshop, a brave young woman read about her battle with anorexia, shocking us with vivid descriptions of hunger pangs, food repulsion and the ultimate therapy that led to her shaky recovery. We critiqued the piece as best as we could, finding it difficult to judge the deeply personal writing of a stranger right there in the flesh. How to talk about sentence fluency and voice when looking into the eyes of someone who just made public her darkest hour in ten double-spaced pages.

A week later, the girl was not in her normal seat, and tardiness was not customary. The professor explained matter-of-factly that she’d dropped the course. This happens all the time in college, but we stared back like she’d gotten false information from the registrar. One night later that week, I smiled at my former classmate in the dining hall and carefully watched her sinewy body as she contemplated her dinner. I felt guilty to be privy to information that made me wonder whether she should be at the salad bar. With no real way of knowing, I suspect she left the class because she got what she needed that first day: to transcribe and share her pain. Once she wrote about it, and stoically divulged to a room full of strangers bound by compassionate objectivity, there was nothing left but a dry pen. I never saw her in a writing class again and imagine she went on to study something harder like biology or international relations. 

Everyone wrote about sad things—an amateur anthology of painful experiences. Dan wrote about drug addiction in the Arizona desert, and Jamie wrote about familial dysfunction in New England. There were divorced parents and rape, there was disease and estrangement and death. On more than one occasion, writers’ workshop verged on group therapy, and I wondered what line separates the two in a setting devoted to exploring the personal. To be in the class was to enter into a contract of confidentiality; we made quiet promises to each other because we knew too much.

And here’s where I’m going to complain about living a charmed life, so stop reading if that offends you. Often, I’ve wondered if my life is too bland and carefree to write meaningful, transcendent memoir. My family is barely a lackluster iteration of dysfunction. Is it twisted to hypothesize that happiness impedes good writing? I wonder if my writing will be stunted—immature—until I’m faced with real hardship with which to fill pages. But what strange person welcomes hardship for the sake of art? During office hours one afternoon, I sat with my professor while she looked over my work, ruthlessly crossing out adverbs in green pen. I’d written about a friend whose painful life experiences had strained our friendship almost beyond repair. It was a good piece of writing, and yet.

“You know, this is lovely, but it’s about your friend, not you,” my professor asserted, looking up from the adverb massacre. I suspected she might say as much. The piece was a transparent attempt to write about pain, even if it was stolen and secondhand. Already, I had felt pangs of guilt and inadequacy in the class for writing about funny, happy moments. Though perhaps a necessary break from therapy—like when a Seinfeld rerun comes on TV the moment you need it most—I felt like the ugly duckling among mature, literary swans. Once, I wrote about my grandfather’s belated Texas Bar Mitzvah at age 75, a weekend that was nothing but inspiration and celebration. Insecure with my light topic, I thought to myself: no one’s gonna wanna read this.

I explained my frustration to my professor and asked like a child craving affirmation: “Are there any happy memoirs?”

She laughed at my question, though it was genuine beneath its innocent facade, and responded something along the lines of: “I’ll get back to you.” She did not. 

Like brutal clockwork, each of the past two Novembers was marked by the death of a grandparent. When faced with the unfamiliar terrain of death, I responded by writing—pages and pages. Our liberal, secular society gives young people few tools with which to grieve or mourn, so I looked to my own words as a way of alleviating pain and making sense of death. When I paused and scrolled up, what I wrote was good: raw and real. The therapy of ordering words into sentences, then paragraphs, then pages helped me remember and perhaps ultimately forget. I’m hesitant to admit this, but a sick, twisted part of me wondered if I’d finally found material in tragedy. If memoir was a genre in which I could now fully participate—the experience of death allowing me full membership in its angsty ranks. 

If I were to share my concern about memoir with my seventh grade students, they would look at me like I’m a crazy person and respond, “That’s messed up, Ms.” For once, middle school wisdom may prove sage. Indeed, the memoir genre is entrenched in pain, but there are no rules governing this or telling writers it must be so. Pain gives us something to write about—and writing repays in full by alleviating pain—but strong writing should never be dependent on pain. Really, the thought is masochistic. Looking back, the people whose writing I envied probably envied me for far more legitimate reasons: The material they possessed is not the sort you wish on others. What I know for certain is that personal writing is best when it’s real. If reality proves dull, write fiction—it’s just embellished memoir, anyway.