It began, like any revolution, almost imperceptibly. Could it have been the tremendous success of "Darkness Visible," William Styron's memoir of his bout with suicidal depression, that opened the floodgates? Or was it "Girl, Interrupted," Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir of life in a mental institution? Or maybe it wasn't until Mary Karr burst on the scene last year with "The Liars' Club" that the full force of this new trend started to make itself felt. But if the monent of inception is hard to locate, the triumph of memoir is now established fact. Consider the evidence: nearly two dozen memoirs are being published this spring, with more to come, supplementing the 200 titles -- by one book review editor's estimate -- published last year. A random inventory of the galleys and review copies that have lately come across my desk: "First Comes Love," by Marion Winik, the tale of a Jewish Harvard-Law-School-bound poet from New Jersey and her marriage to a gay working-class Italian hairdresser doomed to die of AIDS (like any revolution); "The Net of Dreams," by Julie Salamon, about her parents' journey from Auschwitz to a small town in Ohio; "A Message From God in the Atomic Age," by Irene Vilar, the history of a suicide-afflicted family. (They're not all so dark: Daniel Duane's "Caught Inside," an ebullient memoir of growing up in California, is billed as "a cultural history of surfing.")
It's a democratic genre -- inclusive, a multiculturalist would say. The old and
the young (Veronica Chambers, author of "Mama's Girl," is 25); the
famous and the obscure; the crazy and the sane: the contemporary memoir is like
the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma in Kafka's fable "Amerika," where
everyone can be an artist. Everyone can be an autobiographer.
Why this pull toward the anatomy of self? In part, it reflects a phenomenon
pervasive in our culture -- people confessing in public to an audience of
voyeurs. In an era when "Oprah" reigns supreme and 12-step programs
have been adopted as the new mantra, it's perhaps only natural for literary
confession to join the parade. We live in a time when the very notion of
privacy, of a zone beyond the reach of public probing, has become an alien
concept. What Christopher Lasch famously labeled "the culture of
narcissism" has been replaced by the culture of confession. It's a
phenomenon that transcends high and low. Celebrity bios revel in the sexual
peccadilloes of magnates and movie stars; John Updike, in
"Self-Consciousness," recounts the time he brought a woman to orgasm
in the back seat of a car while his unsuspecting wife sat in the front.
Why should aspirants to literature be immune to this climate of unbridled
candor? As Robert Lowell, our great confessional poet, put it, "Why not say
what happened?" There's no rule -- not even an ethical one -- to prevent
the poet and former Princeton professor Michael Ryan, in "Secret
Life," from revealing that he had sex with his dog. Writers no longer need
to furtively disguise their transgressions as fiction. If Proust were writing
today about his penchant for observing handsome young men stick hatpins in live
rats, he wouldn't hide behind the Narrator of his novel: "A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu" would be a memoir.
The license to tell all has produced a virtual library of dysfunctional
revelation. What Joyce Carol Oates memorably called "pathography" --
biographies that dwell on the sordid excesses of their subjects -- has yielded
to "autopathography," dwelling on the sordid excesses of oneself.
Alcoholism is a particularly hot topic. (Caroline Knapp's "Drinking: A Love
Story" will be in the stores next month.) So is mental illness. (See Kay
Redfield Jamison's best-selling "Unquiet Mind.") Physical ordeals are
also a memoiristic staple: the canon of contemporary autobiography includes two
memoirs of facial disfigurement, Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a
Face" and Natalie Kusz's "Road Song." (Kusz's face was nearly
ripped off by an Alaskan husky when she was a child.) Our belief in the
recuperative powers of letting it all hang out has never been stronger. The
triumph of the therapeutic predicted by the sociologist Philip Rieff a
generation ago is a reality.
Yet this urgency to get at the facts -- or what are presumed to be the facts --
has a long tradition; it reflects our historic American longing to discover who
we are. The literature of the self has a long tradition in America; the
Emersonian "I," declaring the primacy of subjective consciousness, was
a vigorous 19th-century theme, nowhere more pronounced than in Whitman's
"Song of Myself." But until not long ago, it was more traditional
forms of narrative, in particular the novel, that provided instruction in
manners and morals, that sought to explain -- in Trollope's words -- the Way We
Live Now. Our hunger for authenticity found expression in stories that were
realistic but fictional. Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and Dos
Passos worked close to the vein of autobiography, drawing on the material of
their own lives. The history of American literature is a history of private
experience enacted on a public stage.
Can the novel still claim this primacy? Can it compete with TV, with the lure of
our wondrous new computer technology, with the sheer pace of contemporary life?
The fact is -- and it has been widely documented -- we do still read. More than
ever, in our diverse and volatile society, literary narratives offer a
substitute for the institutions -- school, church, family -- that once furnished
us with a sense of personal identity. "People want a window on how to
behave," Mary Karr has said. They want to read about someone's life and
say, This is how it was. This really happened. The novelist writes disguised
autobiography; the memoirist cuts to the chase. "I want to record how the
world comes at me, because I think it is indicative of the way it comes at
everyone," writes Phillip Lopate, an inveterate practitioner of the genre.
It could be the memoirist's credo.
The habit of self-examination can grow tiresome. That a book purports to be a
true confession doesn't mean it's good -- or, for that matter, true. As Janet
Malcolm has noted with her characteristic tartness: "The subject of an
autobiography is no less at the mercy of the writer than the subject of a
biography." The excesses of the form are easy to satirize. William Gass, in
a recent Harper's essay, "The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of
Narcissism," loudly objected that literature was being taken over by a
bunch of narcissists: "Look, Ma, I'm breathing. See me take my initial
toddle, use the potty, scratch my sister, win spin the bottle. Gee whiz, my
first adultery -- what a guy!"
Point taken. But try reading Gass's bloated novel about a closet Nazi, "The
Tunnel," on which he labored for three decades. Fiction isn't delivering
the news. Memoir is. At its best, in the hands of a writer able to command the
tools of the novelist -- character, scene, plot -- the memoir can achieve
unmatchable depth and resonance. "The Liars' Club," which recently
reached No. 5 on the paperback best-seller list, is a classic of American
literature. Tending her postage stamp of reality, as Faulkner advised, Mary Karr
conjures the simmering heat and bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town
with an intensity that gains power from its verisimilitude -- from the fact that
it's fact. "French Lessons: A Memoir," Alice Kaplan's beautifully
evocative account of how, as a child, she filled the void left by her father's
death by immersing herself in another culture, is an equally compelling variant
on the making of a writer: it chronicles the journey from there to here.
Contemporary memoir comes in many forms; it's as various as the stories its
practitioners relate. From edgy post-modern memoirs like "Sex Death
Enlightenment: A True Story," by Mark Matousek, a harrowing account of his
philandering mother, deadbeat dad and suicidal sister, to "Being
Brett," Douglas Hobbie's devastating journal of his daughter's death,
written in the third person (as if no I could bear it), the genre eludes precise
literary definition. Some memoirs are written as history, replete with documents
and genealogies; others are terse, impressionistic catalogues of moments in a
life. What memoirists have discovered is that they can bring to their own
stories the narrative sweep of fiction or biography. Fiction demands that the
writer invent; memoir exploits as material the gift of lived experience. Tobias
Wolff, like his brother, Geoffrey ("The Duke of Deception"),
alternates between fiction and memoir. His "In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of
the Lost War" is one of the most graphic books to come out of Vietnam.
"The conventions of American war fiction are so powerful, so deeply rooted
and seductive that when I tried to write about it I found myself distracted by
the truth that I really did have command of," Wolff says. "How was I
going to write something fresh and true about that experience? For me, the only
way was to write my own memories."
The memoirs assembled here reflect the energy of a generation of writers for
whom fact has become as compelling a medium as fiction. Mary Gordon's new book,
"The Shadow Man," excerpted in these pages, is a startling departure
from "Final Payments," the novel that established her reputation
nearly two decades ago as a "Catholic" novelist. In "The Shadow
Man," she revisits the theme of a daughter's struggle to resolve her
feelings toward a dead father -- only in this instance, it's the actual father,
Mary Gordon's father, and he turns out to have been Jewish, a revelation that
transforms the author's life and brings it into sudden focus.
Many readers will also be familiar with the work of Leonard Michaels, a master
of the short-story form, and Susan Cheever, best known for "Home Before
Dark," a portrait of her famous novelist father. Art Spiegelman, whose
comic-book portrait of his father's escape from the Nazis, "Maus," was
one of the most original works to come out of the Holocaust, now turns to that
event's meaning in his own life. Others, introduced here to a wider public, have
found in memoir the means to what Joyce Carol Oates calls, in her contribution
to this issue, "an inventory of our lives." If they have a common
theme, it's the pull of childhood, the sense that the writers' formative years
came early; they are works in progress that reflect lives in progress, still
waiting to be edited and shaped.
Can it last? Will memoir prove as evanescent as other cultural phenomena?
There's a danger of burn-out: "Everybody's got one of these babies in
him," as a famous novelist recently remarked. Maybe only one. Memoirs
(unlike novels) don't generally get written twice. Yet the form could turn out
to be surprisingly robust. A sure sign: the catalogues of universities now offer
courses in memoir and the literature of self. Perhaps an even surer sign:
literary agents making their annual pilgrimages to the famous writing program at
the University of Iowa and signing up memoirists for six-figure deals. (They
used to sign up novelists.) With auguries like these, who can doubt the memoir
is here to stay -- if not forever, then for a good long while?
