Memoir:
Vivian Gornick, a memoirist, essayist, and MFA writing teacher defines memoir as a piece 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 event, deliver wisdom.” In other words, it is a non-fiction account written with the rigor and style expected from a novel. A good memoir has less to do with a seemingly interesting life than you might think. Gornick explains that what creates the integrity of memoir “is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened, not necessarily what happened.” It is the writer’s ability to create meaning from personal history and distill it artfully. A regurgitation of compelling events, in itself, does not make a memoir.
In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Greely vividly chronicles her life, woven with traumatic experiences from cancer and the facial disfigurement from its treatment. During a reading from her memoir, one of her fans voiced amazement at how she could remember the details from her childhood so well. Greely quickly clarified that she was a writer, and therefore created many of the details in her work of non-fiction. In the same vein, you may wonder if the events and dialog in David Sedaris’ memoirs are true. Like Greely implies, probably yes and no. There isn’t a clear line between fact and fiction, and the slanted but real version of truth becomes a difficult aim with personal essay and memoir writing. “Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction,” a line from the fictional film Storytelling, aptly conveys this difficult paradox for creative non-fiction writers. The distinction between reality and fiction is blurred in any narrative.
Mendelsohn makes an interesting distinction between memoir and fiction in The New Yorker: “But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent “a truth” about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent “the truth” about specific things that have happened.” This difference suggests that fiction has the power to uncover what would be too difficult to fully disclose in non-fiction. That the subconscious cannot fully divulge in such an open manner. Maybe he’s right, but there is clearly a current demand to know “truth” about actual incidents. While the canon of literature is mostly of fictional works, aside from philosophy and cultural criticism, but growing tolerance for topics that were once taboo could change that standard. Trumane Capote’s In Cold Blood delves into details of a murder investigation, non-fiction territory that would conventionally translate into journalism but was written as literature instead.
Nicholas Clee wrote an article that asserts Mendelsohn’s claim of people desiring to know “truth” about real incidents in an article about “misery memoir,” the popular type of memoir that seems to sell on harsh subject matter. “The titles of recent publishing successes sound like the cries you would hear if you opened the very doors of Hell. Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy's Struggle to Survive. No One Wants You: A True Story of a Child Forced into Prostitution. There’s also Stuart Howarth's Please, Daddy, No, in which the author recalls how he was repeatedly raped by his father.” Ouch. The titles alone have cringe value, and show there must be a demand for knowing about harsh personal lives of others. However, it’s doubtful that memoirs selling purely on their difficult subject matter will be remembered for long.
Even many well-respected contemporary novelists have written memoirs: Anne Patchet’s Truth and Beauty, Pamuk’s Istanbul, and Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, among numerous others. “Thirty years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir” (Gornick). The insatiable appetite in contemporary for memoir was blaringly apparent in an Oprah fiasco a few years ago, regarding the author James Frey. His “memoir” A Million Little Pieces, offered the kind of redemptive storyline generally suited for fiction. The book was lauded by Oprah and her audience, and when it came out later that Frey made up many of the events, Oprah didn’t have much to say to the press. The blind promotion for these types of memoirs might have something to do with why memoir sales have stagnated over the past couple of years.
Personal Essay:
While memoir focuses on an inward exploration by the writer, in personal essay the writer investigates herself in relation to the outside world. Memoirs tend to close with a truth the writer discovers for herself, but the journey in personal essay ends on a broader note. And as the word “essay” implies, they generally aren’t longer than a short story. What distinguishes “personal essay” from “essay”, however, is the openness and personal investigation the writer takes as she looks at her topic. For instance, Virginia Woolf observes and examines a moth in her essay The Death of the Moth as it relates it to her, and a universal theme of death. Similarly Edward Hoagland’s personal essay “The Courage of Turtles” is topically about his interest in turtles and is full of anecdotes about turtles in his life, but ultimately it reveals a deeper message about the divide between people and nature.
Like memoir and fiction, personal essay “needs conflict, just as a story does.” (Gornick). The narrator develops herself into a character, and as Gornick explains the “I” you’ll usually find in a personal essay “holds whisper of promised engagement,” and to carry out that promise it’s necessary to “build yourself into a character.” This development requires a detachment of sorts in order to fully disclose yourself. Phillip Lopate, a writer and writing teacher, warns that to create a “self” in personal essay “it is just as unsatisfactory to constantly underrate yourself as it is to give yourself too much credit.” The character should be as human as anyone, with vice and virtue. “The process of turning oneself into a character is not self-absorbed navel gazing but a potential release from narcissism,” he explains. Thus, the act of creating a character from yourself, honestly, can and should subvert ego. Successful personal essay writers “might not know themselves—that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us—but in each case—and this is crucial—they know who they are at the moment of writing. They know they are there to clarify in relation to the subject in hand—and on this obligation they deliver” (Gornick).
The ability to reveal yourself openly is absolutely critical in personal essay. This doesn’t mean that to write a personal essay you need to discuss traumatic or embarrassing incidents, like the earlier mentioned memoir-titles might indicate. Rather, it means that any personal correlation you have to your subject needs to be uncovered, otherwise you’ll end up writing an essay. Gornick explains that personal essay is not about “confession” but rather investigation of the self, a kind that allows for “motion, purpose and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required.” For these reasons it’s generally understood that in order to approach a subject for personal writing, waiting until you have emotional distance is effective. Writing teachers often encourage students to write down ideas and details you will probably forget, and it’s sound advice to do so, but realize you may not be able to tackle a personal essay or a memoir if it’s on an issue or topic you are currently experiencing.
How they Sell:
The “creative” kind of non-fiction isn’t as easy to sell and general non-fiction—in that what most publications are comprised of is journalistic writing, and most non-fiction books are not memoirs and personal essays, but self help books, travel guides and the like--but still, its prevalence in literature seems to grow every year. There’s even a journal titled Creative Non-Fiction. MFA programs in creative non-fiction are sprouting up all over the country, and a couple of PhD ones have as well. Creative non-fiction is hardly a new genre of writing, but it has become a newly respected form of literature.
Similar to fiction, memoir writing is a harder sell to most magazines. Literary journals like Tin House, McSweeney’s and magazines like The New Yorker do publish stories and memoir, but it’s more common to find personal essays in magazines rather than fiction or memoir. Of course, the slim chance of optioning a memoir for film is a possibility that is even slimmer for personal essays (I did recently read that Sloane Crosley’s compilation of essays How Did You Get This Number was sold for film), and likewise it’s easier, or so the shelves of Powell’s leads me to think, to sell a memoir or novel as an individual text than a compilation of personal essays.
Pointing out our self-referential culture shift is redundant, but it’s also impossible to overlook. Maybe we’ve become obsessed with ourselves, or maybe this lean comes from an impulse to understand what we’ve washed over with years of sitcoms. Is it because we feel more accountable for what is real, since we cannot escape some digitalized expression of ourselves that is broadcasted for many to see? The Bachelor and Survivor will show us the way. Ok, so they probably won’t. Gornick observes that our era “is characterized by a need to testify. Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their stories … civil rights movements and therapeutic culture at large have been hugely influential in feeding this belief.” The momentum for non-fiction is here, but whether we choose to explore it through reality TV shows or investigative personal essays and memoirs, well, that’s up to us. Roxanne MacManus
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