Why We Read Memoir

Previously, I discussed why we might write a memoir. Here, I want to look at the other side of the equation: why we might want to read one.

First of all, we need to relate to the writer. If the writer is not famous -- in other words, his or her only claim to fame is the actual writing of the book we are reading -- this is especially important. How is the writer like me, we want to know. Does s/he have a problem similar to mine that has been explored, clarified, or resolved through writing? What can I learn about my own situation? (And what I learn might only be the realization that I am not alone with my difficulties.)

But even if the writer is well-known for other endeavors, we still need to relate to him or her. Even if the person's fame is beyond what the ordinary person can ever imagine, we want to know that s/he is human, that he or she has foibles, and vulnerabilities. And we don't want to hear a gripe list -- how others have wronged this person while s/he has never made any mistakes.

I read a memoir some years ago. I don't remember the book's or author's name, but I remember the content. Years ago, this now-elderly woman tells, when she was young and living in France, she'd had an affair with Sartre. This was no fame-by-association memoir, however. It was a complaint -- a very loud one. She was a student at the school where Simon de Beauvoir taught, and she claimed that de Beauvoir seemed to favor her and befriend her but in fact, she was procuring young girls for Sartre. I have no idea how true this is, but it's certainly the way this woman experienced it. And now, many decades later, she still resented her treatment.

There's a certain dirty-laundry aspect of this kind of tale that makes it a good read. It also has a shirttail aspect: that is, no one would read a book like this if the other participants in the story weren't famous. But how much more interesting such a book would be if there were a bit of introspection.  The author spends the whole book trashing two people who were in the intellectual vanguard of a whole generation.  But the wider significance of her tale is never discussed.  

It can't be denied that desire for titillation offered by such a tale can be a reason to read a memoir. But it isn't the best or highest reason. The writer who learns something about himself or herself as a result of writing is the writer whom we as readers also learn from. This is where the motives for writing and reading a memoir intersect.

Writing a Memoir for the Best Reason

As we get older, many of us want to write a memoir -- to press into stone before it is too late what our lives were about, what was significant. But what was significant to us as writers may not be what would be significant to readers. Writing a good memoir, it seems, requires some of the same empathy that writing a good novel does: we need to ask what is universal about experience and frame our narrative in such a way that others can see themselves even in a tale whose facts are very different from those of our own lives.

So, a good memoir requires an intersection of the writer's reasons for writing and the reader's reasons for reading. I'm going to talk about the first in this post, and in a subsequent post, I'll talk about the second. And in talking about the first, I mean to discuss not only what a writer's motive should ideally be but what it actually is in various cases.

When I was younger, a certain man in my spiritual community had developed Parkinson's. He was a big, strapping man, and he so disliked his new, dependent condition that he was often resentful and uncooperative when his wife tried to help him. In the end, unable to deal with both the difficult medical issues and the changes in personality due to her husband's disease, she moved him to a long-term care facility

He hated it! He wanted to go home again. But it was not going to happen.

I had known this man before disease struck as both generous and wise, and, sorry to see him trapped in a situation over which he had no control, I began to visit him. He told me that he wanted to write a memoir of the time he'd spent in Africa when he was young. He had been an aid worker and also climbed Kilimanjaro. He couldn't perform the physical act of writing anymore -- and this was before the various digital aids were available -- but he proposed that he would record his experiences on tape. Would I be willing to transcribe them?

I saw this project as something this man desperately needed for his survival in a situation  where so little of what he had been remained. He would assert that, indeed, his life had meaning -- both to him and others. So, while I didn't have a lot of free time, I acceded to his request, suspecting that my services would in fact never be needed anyway.

In fact, although I visited my friend several more times, it wasn't long before his mind was so confused that recording a memoir was the last thing that would have occurred to him. The final time I visited, he didn't even recognize me. Kilimanjaro and Africa had blown away with the wind.

Did the world lose a good book because someone waited too long to write it? I can't know the answer to that. But I do believe that the motive to put your life on paper before it's too late isn't enough to make a compelling read -- assuming you are expecting readers other than family and friends. And this is true even if your experiences were unusual or interesting. 

What motive is necessary, then, to create a good book?  I'm reading two memoirs currently, One is On My Own by Diane Rehm, the NPR talk show host. The other is The Way Around: Finding my Mother and Myself among the Yanomami bv David Good, the son of an anthropologist and a woman in the Amazonian tribe his father was studying. It's easy to see how different these books are, and I'll talk about that in the next post, when I discuss why people might want to read a memoir. I've barely started both books, but I think the titles and first pages give an idea of why these authors took up their pens.

Although Diane Rehm is near the end of her life, she didn't just want to record her experiences so they wouldn't be lost. The title, On My Own, gives a hint of her main aim. She wants to record how she is growing, changing as a result of having to live life without her long-time, recently deceased husband. What is she learning or has she learned from this?

David Good is not well known and he is only in his thirties. Unlike Rehm's book, his would not have been published had he not had an extraordinary story to tell. And yet, his motive, it seems to me, is not so different from Rehm's. He is looking for himself -- or, rather, for aspects of himself that he has not accessed yet. It's about self-discovery.

I've heard other memoirists say as much -- that you don't write about what you know about yourself but you write in order to find out something you didn't know. Your book is the result.    

Kazuo Ishiguro -- Congrats!

So nice to see something good happening in the world. So good to see someone as deserving as Ishiguro win the Nobel Prize.

I heard clips of several of the many interviews he did yesterday. He talked about the many themes of his work -- how people miss opportunities, how they lie to themselves in order to continue in what would otherwise be intolerable situations.  His work is varied and always profound. He said that, although he was raised in the UK, he grew up in a Japanese household, so he saw things through Japanese eyes. Sounds like a thesis for some graduate student somewhere.

Congratulations to a great writer, and, maybe more important these days, a good man.

Was Lewis Carroll enlightened?

I daresay I'm like most of my contemporaries in knowing about Lewis Carroll's Alice books – without having read them. As a child, I owned a 45 rpm record containing the songs from the 1951 Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland and I saw the movie as well. But, having just read Anthony Lane's article in the June 8 and 15, 2015 New Yorker, I see now how much I didn't know about these tales.

Of course, we are talking about a journey here – and Lane's choice of quotations, if not his text, make it clear that this is a spiritual journey. Here's the first:

“'You know very well you're not real.'

'I am real!' said Alice, and began to cry.

'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: 'there's nothing to cry about.'

'If I wasn't real,' Alice said – half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous – 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'

'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.”

Was Carroll enlightened? Or just amusing himself? Or maybe a combination of both?

Here's another: 

“I hardly know which is me and which is the inkstand. . . . The confusion in one's mind doesn't so much matter – but when it comes to putting bread-and-butter, and the orange marmalade, into the inkstand; and then dipping pens into oneself, and filling oneself up with ink, you know, it's horrid!”

Rumi, who definitely wasn't kidding, expressed it thus:

                                              There are no words to explain

                                  no tongue,                                             

                                              how when that player touches

                                 the strings, it is me playing

                                 and being played,

                                              how existence turns

                                 around this music, how stories

                                 grow from the trunk, 

                                              how cup and mouth

                                 swallow each other with the wine. . . .

George Eliot, Self-Centeredness and Fiction

Not too long ago I received an email from an acquaintance who, knowing I'd written a novel, and perhaps as an apology for being uninterested in reading it, said that he and his wife didn't read novels anymore as such reading material was incompatible with their spiritual journeys.

It may be that this man believed that novels are just entertainment. He may have been one of the many serious people I have met who believe that “truth” means facts and therefore only comes in nonfiction form. But even though my own definition of truth obviously differs from this, I myself have some doubts about the novel as a means of delving into the deeper truths of who or what we are.

Some define a spiritual novel as one about spiritual topics. But maybe it's more a matter of what the underlying assumptions are. In most novels, literary or not, we follow one or more characters over a fictive period of time. Does this not reinforce the idea that the stories we each tell ourselves about our own lives are true? Do we not believe that, like the characters of whose lives we read, we have a true history that reveals what we essentially are?

Perhaps, then, a spiritual novel is not so much about spiritual topics as about challenging this belief in a fictive self as representing a fundamental truth about being human. I've been reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, an unclassifiable book that is part criticism, part biography, and part autobiography. Mead quotes George Eliot as saying, “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” (p. 158, quoting from an essay by Eliot entitled, “The Natural History of German Life”).

Mead goes on to show how this attitude is exemplified in Middlemarch: “This notion – that we each have our own center of gravity but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we do – is one that is constantly repeated in the book. The necessity of growing out of such self-centeredness is the theme of Middlemarch. In one of the most memorable editorial asides in the novel, Eliot elaborates upon this idea of how necessary it is to expand one's sympathies: 'We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,' she writes.”

This sounds suspiciously like a Buddhist teacher lecturing her students on the inter-connectedness of all beings.

Those who are really serious about spiritual awakening or enlightenment – especially those who have had a glimpse or more of it – might say that the self-centeredness into which we are all born only disappears when we realize “no self,” and that it is not something that can even be approximated by identifying sympathetically with others. Nonetheless, surely it is worth something to be able to glimpse what the world might look like if we all really knew in our guts what we know in our minds: that our own perspective is only one of a multitude of perspectives – that each and every being on the planet comes from a center known as a “self” and that each of these perspectives is equally, relatively speaking, valid.

Following another's path

I'm reading Consolations by Sally Wolfe, a novel about a woman who converts to Catholicism and becomes a nun. It was Thomas Merton who inspired the protagonist, and reading this caused me to recall my own reading of Merton and how I also felt drawn to Catholicism because of him, although, unlike the protagonist in Consolations, I never followed through.

It's probably a good thing. There were other times when, inspired by someone following a certain path, I did do so. When we are young, we are looking for someone who knows because, God knows, we don't. And there's a lot of danger in that – because we all have our own individual path in life, and the trick is to find that path, not to follow someone else's.

How do we find the confidence when we are young to look inside and “follow our bliss” as Joseph Campbell counseled?

Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis of Afghanistan by Kenneth P. Lizzio

In a book I recently reviewed, Kenneth P. Lizzio tells a fascinating story of his life with present-day Sufis, adding much historical background to his tale. See my review here:

http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2014_07_020733.php