Come again?

Hello. I’m sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but it was as necessary as it was unexpected. I’ve been thinking – and playing catch up/reading – and I hope to regain the pace with which I flew through the first six books or so of this project. With five weeks of junior year left and “senioritis” already settling in my bones, I see no sign of that speed returning any time soon. Don’t fret, beloved reader! Memoir, the genre of silent conversation (I see that interrobang (?!, combined) over your furrowed brow. Let me explain…), will always lure me to the nearest armchair. Like any English major, I examine a memoir for its content and form, but judge the work for its character. Memoirs are petitions for sympathy, an open palm extended towards another.

I accept.

Finally returning to this project, I read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, a book on my “To Read” list since my sophomore year of high school. Born in the U.S., the America of beaming smiles and gilt eagles, McCourt immigrated to Ireland as a young boy. Job scarcity and his father’s alcoholism kept McCourt, his mother, Angela, and his younger brothers on the move, leaving one “lane” (slang for slums or ghettoes) for another, but never out of severe poverty. (I wonder, must a memoir include hardship of some kind, or merely a change, a shock to one’s system?)

Casting nets

For whom do we write? A memoir recalls and responds to intimacies lived. It is a collection of our experiences, many of which are foreign to others, simply because our life is not theirs. Whether we produce confessional or meditation, we must present our memories in a way that is not only intelligible to our readers, but accurate to the visceral and intellectual impressions of that experiences. Our words must be effective and affective. But, as with all writing, we risk being misunderstood: we anticipate the shape of our words’ impressions on the minds of others. In what shapes, what colors will traces of these words, these bruises, surface?

I’ll stop the melodrama, but the translation process from author- to readership, is an extractive, even violent one. You delve – dive, dive, dive – into the personal to find something for public consumption. You come back up for air and offer pearls to buyers. You offer, but is it the color or size they want? Do they even know what they want? When I finished Speak, Memory, the memoir of Vladimir Nabokov, I could not forget the distance between myself and the narrator, and between the experiences of author- and readership. How accurately can a memoir translate a person’s life into one with which I, the reader, can understand and sympathize (read: feel with)? 

Forget-me-not

Throughout the past week or so, I trudged through Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, a conglomeration of admirably-thorough research and disorganized storytelling, and while I can remember Foer’s place at the U.S. Memory Championships – I’ll save you the boredom of reading this and tell you that, gosh, he placed first! – I can’t remember the point of this book. Foer reaches deep, to antiquity and back again, to find the root of memory, when and where memory-as-art began. All his jumping about, however, made me glaze over. It’s not that the information was dense; I’ll give Foer credit for succinctly recounting the history of memory. This book drags because of mimetic fallacy: random mnemonic associations interrupt lengthier sections of logic, as if the reader were inside Foer’s mind during a memory competition. There’s a lot of effort to be wasted on this work, lost between nonfiction and grocery list. Without a narrative or reason, I don’t want to cook a meal. The instant gratification of a can of soup will suffice, but will it satiate?

Mind the gap

Warning: this post has nothing to do with London. Sorry.

For years, I never found the chance to pick up anything written by David Sedaris, but after reading one of his essay collections, Naked, I don’t want the chance to arise again any time soon. Honestly, “I never found the chance” reads like a euphemism: I never had enough interest in Sedaris and his scathing humor to want to read his work. Perhaps this was a poor first selection. Perhaps Sedaris has evolved, finally stepping down from his self-assembled pedestal, but I doubt it. While Naked is absolutely not the best book I’ve read, Sedaris’ method and form are bold, so jarring that I have a precise image of the person who wrote this: the guy who, pissed when his name is misspelt on his grande caramel macchiato with skim milk, extra foam, is too insecure to cause a scene, and sulks off to channel this melodrama into tens of thousands of words, passively heckling the barista who was (rightfully) more preoccupied with his term paper than said person’s Starbucks Gold Card loyalty.

I think 290 pages gave Sedaris enough time to seize my tongue.

This book is billed as a compilation of essays, not a memoir, though some book reviews argue this categorization. As an unfortunate result, the life within Naked is fragmented, broken into vignettes without a wisp of connection. The stories of the collection, however, seem to be broken even further, as mere shards of a life. I have no idea if Sedaris did more than loathe his father or pick-and-scratch at the hoards of people he saw during the holiday shopping rush. I can’t say if Sedaris values appearance or a quick high more, and I’ll never know if he sincerely felt fear, anxiety, or pride at an accomplishment of his or of a family member. Part of this, I recognize, is the price of comedy: in the text, Sedaris appears a cynical, yet fearful young adult, feebly attempting to arrive at a satisfying location post-graduation, but who wants to laugh at a truly sad person? This book received scores of praise – people were amazed at the tragic comedies of the American Midwest, and appalled, like Sedaris, that such ‘lunatics’ exist – but, because action and plot outweigh reaction and reflection, this is not a memoir.