Reality Hunger (13 page)

Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the
reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, an autobiographical work has the same responsibility that a short story or novel has: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of “facts,” “truth,” “reality”), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. The lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door.

In English, the term
memoir
comes directly from the French for
memory, mémoire
, a word that is derived from the Latin for the same,
memoria
. And yet more deeply rooted in the word
memoir
is a far less confident one. Embedded in Latin’s
memoria
is the ancient Greek
mérmeros
, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian
mermara
, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp:
mer-mer
, “to vividly wonder,” “to be anxious,” “to exhaustingly ponder.” In this darker light
of human language, the term suggests a literary form that is much less confident than today’s novelistic memoir, with its effortlessly relayed experiences.

Autobiography is ruled by chronology and is date-driven. It’s a line running through time, punctuated by incident. The very thing that would seem to be the basis of autobiographical writing—a life over time—is not the ground the memoir can stand on. It has to root itself in the same dilemmas and adventures as poetry and fiction. It has to make a story. In doing that, it has to disregard a lot of the life. The inevitable incompleteness of memoir may account for the fact that people can write more than one memoir. Presumably, you would write only one autobiography. You can write multiple memoirs, though, coming at your life from different angles.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. The facts of the situation don’t much matter, so long as the underlying truth resonates. Memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make
of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is required.

I’m interested in the ways in which stories of suffering might be used to mask other, less marketable stories of suffering.

Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction, to counteract and assimilate with reality shows.

Defending
A Million Little Pieces
, Oprah said, “Although some of the facts have been questioned, the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.” However, a few days later, clearly influenced by her miffed audience, she apologized for leaving the impression “that the truth doesn’t matter.”

Stoic marketing plan: on TV, ingest a ton of shit—a form of abuse—and transcend it by finding the product that catapults you off the couch into another lie, I mean another life (celebrity).

Oprah has created around herself a “cult of confession” that offers only one prix-fixe menu to those who enter her world. First, the teasing crudités of the situation, sin or sorrow hinted at. The entrée is the deep confession or revelation. Next, a palate-cleansing sorbet of regret and repentance, the delicious
forgiveness served by Oprah on behalf of all humanity. Fade to commercial as the sobbing witness, who has revealed harm done to or by an uncle or a neighbor, through carelessness, neglect, evil intent, or ignorance, is applauded by the audience, comforted by Oprah. Her instincts are fine, her integrity unquestioned, and she would never tell us a story that isn’t true.