This is not my Beautiful Life: A Struggling Novelist Ponders the Memoir Form
by Art Edwards
The Writer
August 2011
Not long ago, I sat at a bar with a few writer friends. I'd been talking to one of them, a memoirist, about a skydiving trip he had planned. He mentioned that he would write about the experience, then added, “I only do things so I can write about them.”
This took me aback. I'd just been talking about the problems I had with working my past into memoir. The most compelling period of my life was the five years I'd spent in a successful rock band, but I'd forgotten to party like a rock star during this time. To read the flood of memoirs out there on similar subjects, without a lot of debauchery, my rock and roll memoir might as well be about car insurance. I'd begun to regret not having more provocative stuff to write about, which I hadn't regretted at the time.
I've spent the last fourteen years writing novels. Novels are what drew me to writing, and what I love, but one would have to be Thomas Pynchon not to see that memoirs are looking very novel-like these days, both in content and sales figures. I've also had little success publishing my novels, so after finishing three of them, I'm ready to compromise in my decade-long standoff with commercial publishing. The memoirist I spoke to had sold something like 100,000 copies of his memoir over the previous few years, ensuring a career in writing and a solid readership for years to come. I was all ears.
I became a writer in the age of Updike, Bellow, Roth and Morrison. Fiction, realism. But implied in many of these writers' works was the hint of autobiography. With Updike, I was fascinated by what in the character of Rabbit Angstrom was Rabbit and what was Updike himself. I'd read a biography on Bellow that revealed many if not most of his protagonists were cut whole-cloth from his life. Part of the thrill of reading these writers was the open-endedness of the experience. What, I wondered, was thinly veiled autobiography and what was the author making up?
With the shift of much readerly attention from the realistic novel to the memoir, the new focus isn't, as in realistic fiction, where the author is hiding herself in her work. It's what isn't true in her work. Instead of authors disguising themselves in their works, they're trying to disguise what they aren't in their works, what you might ferret out about their past that isn't 100% true. Think James Frey. Instead of reading fiction and looking for facts, we're reading facts and looking for fiction.
No matter the form, readers are voyeurs. We always want what's on the page to generate subtext, implication, rumor. We want to know what the author has to say, and we want to know what he doesn't want us to know. That hasn't changed as interest has shifted from the novel to the memoir.
For writers, however, the difference between writing novels and writing memoir is significant. The more you invent in your work, the less likely you can call what you write a memoir, which for those writing in the realistic long form seems the best path to publication these days. For the writer who wants to write memoir, it becomes necessary to live more, to do things the fiction writer need only imagine. With memoir, if you don't live it, you can't write it--or at least you can't write it in a way that suggests it actually happened--which forces everything you want in your memoir into the public realm. For writers, often cloistered folk, this can be a subject of worry.
I'm not suggesting anyone should cry a river because a few novelists have to come out of the basement and live a little. But consider this scenario.
Let's say I want to write a memoir about my interest in, relationship/obsession with writer Steve Almond. It would be modeled on Nicholson Baker's memoir U & I--a favorite memoir of mine--which is about Baker's interest in, relationship/obsession with John Updike. My memoir would be called A & I. It would start when I first encountered Steve Almond's book of short stories My Life in Heavy Metal ten years ago, my jealous avoidance of said book for eight years, my eventual reading and loving of the book, my fortuitous communication with Almond online, my interview of him for The Nervous Breakdown, and my awkward ten-second (I timed it) bum-rushing of him at Portland's Wordstock event in 2010.
I think this book is a great idea, and one I could pull off, but I immediately sense how the book could be better if I had more material. And of course, with memoir, I couldn't just make that material up. I'd have to do more Almond-related things in my life. I'd have to read more of his work. It might be good to schedule myself into the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop next summer, where Almond is a presenter and instructor. I could make sure to talk to Almond at the workshop's readings. I could get Almond in a one-on-one session ostensibly about my work, mining new experiences for my memoir. I could even “script” a few instances, finding subjects to ask Almond about in order to get his reactions.
And of course, I wouldn't have to stop with the workshop. What about following Almond around the country on one of his book tours? Or hanging out in Almond's hometown? Or stalking him? Before you know it, I'm living my life to write the best book I can about my connections with Steve Almond.
Is this kind of dedication to subject unusual? Of course not. Many writers sacrifice a great deal to create the best work possible. One could argue I've dedicated the last fourteen years of my life to writing novels. It's what writers do.
But here's what would be wrong with this scenario. This hypothetical life I would live to write A & I is not really me. It's not the true me. I love Steve Almond's work, and I think he's vital to our contemporary literary culture, but I'm not really obsessed with him. I wouldn't want to create uncomfortableness for Steve Almond by following him around and involving him in my false life. The memoir form makes me want to pretend I'm obsessed with Steve Almond when in fact I'm really just interested in him.
Now, I could imagine being obsessed with him, and that's where the novelist in me would take off from to write a novel called A & I. The Almond events I've manufactured above are just as easily imaginable from what I already know about Almond. Of course I could always know more, and no doubt doing some of the tasks I mention would yield more real-life information to cull a good story from, but isn't that always going to be the case? There's never going to come a day when fictionalizing A & I, at least a little, isn't going to yield a better book, to my mind. I'm a fiction writer. It's what I do.
This line between living and manipulating your life for the sake of your art is blurry. Where exactly does an artist's life go from extreme dedication to a falsehood? What if I actually wanted to go to Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop and work with Steve Almond, and memoir-worthy things happened there? What if I wanted to follow him around the country attending each of his readings, bothering him with new questions every night? That might be a sincere life for someone, and maybe that someone should write a memoir called A & I.
And can I honestly claim innocence to the crime of manipulating one's life for the sake of one's work? Didn't I live my life in rock and roll with one eye toward my future writing life? Of course I did. I always knew that those goings-on might make good material someday, and I kept my eyes open. I can even remember one of my bandmates asking, “Well, if you're going to be a writer, are you going to write about us?”
I responded, only half-jokingly, “Hey, anything you guys say or do from here on out is fair game.”
It's times like these fiction writers can sympathize with James Frey. Here's a guy who lived a life, then imagined ways that life could make for a great story. He writes that story and is faced with an industry and readership that wants to call it a memoir. Sure, why not? It's almost a memoir, and the advance is how much?
But in the end such books are fiction, just like Goodbye, Columbus and Couples and A House for Mr. Biswas and Junkie are fiction. If those books came out today, the authors might be compelled to call them memoirs, but they'll always be novels to me.
As tough as it is to draw a line between novels and memoirs, readers clearly want that line drawn. They say so with their dollars. So what if A Million Little Pieces is more fictionalized than A Fan's Notes? It doesn't make a lick of difference to the reading experience--a story is a story; the reader likes it or doesn't--and the reader might not buy the book if it doesn't fall into the genre he wants.
And the line between an artist's life and her work can be just as blurry. It's up to each writer to decide if her life informs her work, or is contrived for the sake of it. It's a hard distinction, but the stakes are high, like whether the artist lives a fiction or not.
by Art Edwards
The Writer
August 2011
Not long ago, I sat at a bar with a few writer friends. I'd been talking to one of them, a memoirist, about a skydiving trip he had planned. He mentioned that he would write about the experience, then added, “I only do things so I can write about them.”
This took me aback. I'd just been talking about the problems I had with working my past into memoir. The most compelling period of my life was the five years I'd spent in a successful rock band, but I'd forgotten to party like a rock star during this time. To read the flood of memoirs out there on similar subjects, without a lot of debauchery, my rock and roll memoir might as well be about car insurance. I'd begun to regret not having more provocative stuff to write about, which I hadn't regretted at the time.
I've spent the last fourteen years writing novels. Novels are what drew me to writing, and what I love, but one would have to be Thomas Pynchon not to see that memoirs are looking very novel-like these days, both in content and sales figures. I've also had little success publishing my novels, so after finishing three of them, I'm ready to compromise in my decade-long standoff with commercial publishing. The memoirist I spoke to had sold something like 100,000 copies of his memoir over the previous few years, ensuring a career in writing and a solid readership for years to come. I was all ears.
I became a writer in the age of Updike, Bellow, Roth and Morrison. Fiction, realism. But implied in many of these writers' works was the hint of autobiography. With Updike, I was fascinated by what in the character of Rabbit Angstrom was Rabbit and what was Updike himself. I'd read a biography on Bellow that revealed many if not most of his protagonists were cut whole-cloth from his life. Part of the thrill of reading these writers was the open-endedness of the experience. What, I wondered, was thinly veiled autobiography and what was the author making up?
With the shift of much readerly attention from the realistic novel to the memoir, the new focus isn't, as in realistic fiction, where the author is hiding herself in her work. It's what isn't true in her work. Instead of authors disguising themselves in their works, they're trying to disguise what they aren't in their works, what you might ferret out about their past that isn't 100% true. Think James Frey. Instead of reading fiction and looking for facts, we're reading facts and looking for fiction.
No matter the form, readers are voyeurs. We always want what's on the page to generate subtext, implication, rumor. We want to know what the author has to say, and we want to know what he doesn't want us to know. That hasn't changed as interest has shifted from the novel to the memoir.
For writers, however, the difference between writing novels and writing memoir is significant. The more you invent in your work, the less likely you can call what you write a memoir, which for those writing in the realistic long form seems the best path to publication these days. For the writer who wants to write memoir, it becomes necessary to live more, to do things the fiction writer need only imagine. With memoir, if you don't live it, you can't write it--or at least you can't write it in a way that suggests it actually happened--which forces everything you want in your memoir into the public realm. For writers, often cloistered folk, this can be a subject of worry.
I'm not suggesting anyone should cry a river because a few novelists have to come out of the basement and live a little. But consider this scenario.
Let's say I want to write a memoir about my interest in, relationship/obsession with writer Steve Almond. It would be modeled on Nicholson Baker's memoir U & I--a favorite memoir of mine--which is about Baker's interest in, relationship/obsession with John Updike. My memoir would be called A & I. It would start when I first encountered Steve Almond's book of short stories My Life in Heavy Metal ten years ago, my jealous avoidance of said book for eight years, my eventual reading and loving of the book, my fortuitous communication with Almond online, my interview of him for The Nervous Breakdown, and my awkward ten-second (I timed it) bum-rushing of him at Portland's Wordstock event in 2010.
I think this book is a great idea, and one I could pull off, but I immediately sense how the book could be better if I had more material. And of course, with memoir, I couldn't just make that material up. I'd have to do more Almond-related things in my life. I'd have to read more of his work. It might be good to schedule myself into the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop next summer, where Almond is a presenter and instructor. I could make sure to talk to Almond at the workshop's readings. I could get Almond in a one-on-one session ostensibly about my work, mining new experiences for my memoir. I could even “script” a few instances, finding subjects to ask Almond about in order to get his reactions.
And of course, I wouldn't have to stop with the workshop. What about following Almond around the country on one of his book tours? Or hanging out in Almond's hometown? Or stalking him? Before you know it, I'm living my life to write the best book I can about my connections with Steve Almond.
Is this kind of dedication to subject unusual? Of course not. Many writers sacrifice a great deal to create the best work possible. One could argue I've dedicated the last fourteen years of my life to writing novels. It's what writers do.
But here's what would be wrong with this scenario. This hypothetical life I would live to write A & I is not really me. It's not the true me. I love Steve Almond's work, and I think he's vital to our contemporary literary culture, but I'm not really obsessed with him. I wouldn't want to create uncomfortableness for Steve Almond by following him around and involving him in my false life. The memoir form makes me want to pretend I'm obsessed with Steve Almond when in fact I'm really just interested in him.
Now, I could imagine being obsessed with him, and that's where the novelist in me would take off from to write a novel called A & I. The Almond events I've manufactured above are just as easily imaginable from what I already know about Almond. Of course I could always know more, and no doubt doing some of the tasks I mention would yield more real-life information to cull a good story from, but isn't that always going to be the case? There's never going to come a day when fictionalizing A & I, at least a little, isn't going to yield a better book, to my mind. I'm a fiction writer. It's what I do.
This line between living and manipulating your life for the sake of your art is blurry. Where exactly does an artist's life go from extreme dedication to a falsehood? What if I actually wanted to go to Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop and work with Steve Almond, and memoir-worthy things happened there? What if I wanted to follow him around the country attending each of his readings, bothering him with new questions every night? That might be a sincere life for someone, and maybe that someone should write a memoir called A & I.
And can I honestly claim innocence to the crime of manipulating one's life for the sake of one's work? Didn't I live my life in rock and roll with one eye toward my future writing life? Of course I did. I always knew that those goings-on might make good material someday, and I kept my eyes open. I can even remember one of my bandmates asking, “Well, if you're going to be a writer, are you going to write about us?”
I responded, only half-jokingly, “Hey, anything you guys say or do from here on out is fair game.”
It's times like these fiction writers can sympathize with James Frey. Here's a guy who lived a life, then imagined ways that life could make for a great story. He writes that story and is faced with an industry and readership that wants to call it a memoir. Sure, why not? It's almost a memoir, and the advance is how much?
But in the end such books are fiction, just like Goodbye, Columbus and Couples and A House for Mr. Biswas and Junkie are fiction. If those books came out today, the authors might be compelled to call them memoirs, but they'll always be novels to me.
As tough as it is to draw a line between novels and memoirs, readers clearly want that line drawn. They say so with their dollars. So what if A Million Little Pieces is more fictionalized than A Fan's Notes? It doesn't make a lick of difference to the reading experience--a story is a story; the reader likes it or doesn't--and the reader might not buy the book if it doesn't fall into the genre he wants.
And the line between an artist's life and her work can be just as blurry. It's up to each writer to decide if her life informs her work, or is contrived for the sake of it. It's a hard distinction, but the stakes are high, like whether the artist lives a fiction or not.