There has been lately a number of articles about the Rise of the Memoir, or this being The Golden Age of the Memoir, some bemoaning it as the book version of The Jerry Springer Show. The memoir has been around since Saint Augustine chiseled his confessions in 398AD. With all of his stealing pears and his "floundering in the broiling sea of fornication," Augustine's book could have fit neatly in a joint review with Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors, or Permanent Midnight by Jerry Stahl.
If you walk into most bookstores, the new & noteworthy sections will be a virtual mosh pit of memoirs. It seems everyone who has ever done anything can get a memoir published. A. J. Jacobs writes about his reading the Encyclopedia Britannica in The Know-It-All. Haven Kimmel gave her second memoir the scintillating title, She Got Up Off the Couch. (These are both actually really good books).
There is a backlash or jadedness creeping into editors and reviewers for certain types of memoirs. Do we really need another memoir about the wackiness of the dating life? Or growing up with an alcoholic parent? After Anne Lamott's brilliant Operating Instructions spawned literally thousands of memoirs by other single mothers, mothers with disabled children, mothers of adopted children, these books are now being derisively called MOM-oirs.
However, the seeming glut of memoirs is not new.
When I was a bookstore clerk (way back in the 70s), many signature best sellers of the time were memoirs. Our rent was paid by James Herriot, writing about being a country vet; Gay Talese, on his sex life; Carlos Castanda, chasing mushroom induced thoughts in the Southwest; and Russell Baker's Growing Up.
Decades old memoirs like This Boy's Life, Blue Highways, Woman Warrior, Duke of Deception, and Liars' Club, are still being read along side the more recent "hot" memoirs Eat, Pray, Love, The Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the frightening to some, Marley & Me.
Poking at Liars
Lately there's been a lot of hue & cry made about truthfulness in memoirs. Riverhead recently recalled their copies of Love and Consequences when the author, Margaret B. Jones, was revealed not to have been a gun toting and drug selling gangsta living in the ghetto, but Margaret Seltzer, a lily white child of suburbia looking to make a buck from a faux-confessional memoir.
James Frye's A Million Little Pieces was THE book publishing story of 2006 when the best selling Oprah Picks memoir was revealed to include some fabrication. Both Frye and the book's publisher were vilified in public for perpetrating a ruse on the reading public.
Personally, I feel the penalty far out weighed the crime. If Frye's girlfriend cut her wrists rather than hanged herself, as he wrote, she's still dead. How can a publisher be accountable to fact check the life of a private person? If you had a memoir in which you write your first sexual experience was with Billie sneaking onto a golf course, when actually Billie wouldn't give you the time of day, how would an editor or a publisher ever know otherwise?
The fact is, even exhaustively researched history or biography by the late Barbara Tuchman or Stephen Ambrose "round the corners of the truth" by what the writers choose to include and what to leave out. I borrow the phrase "rounding the corners of the truth" from John Berendt when he defended some of his "composite characters" (i.e. made-up) in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The fear instilled in publishers by James Frye and Margaret Jones/Seltzer has reached such a level that Monica Holloway's 2007 memoir, Driving With Dead People, opens with a disclaimer. She confesses that some of the people in her book are composites (i.e. made up).
The blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction are not new.
More than 25 years ago, The Education of Little Tree migrated from the nonfiction bestseller list to the fiction bestseller list (and lost its subtitle, A True Story) when readers learned a fair amount was just made up by "Forrest Carter," whose real name was Earl. Frank Conroy's seminal Stop Time was originally published as a novel in 1967, then later repositioned as a memoir when the category gained greater acceptance.
Bill Clinton was paid 12 million dollars by Knopf for his autobiography, and that boy has been known to lie. Keith Richards was recently paid 7.3 million dollars for his memoir, and a lot of us believe he can't remember the names of all the Rolling Stones if you spot him Ron Woods and Charlie Watts.
My personal favorite celebrity biography is Dutch by Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize winning writer, after he was chosen to be the official biographer of Ronald Reagan, basically drove himself crazy over 14 years of trying to find the essential core of what Morris would call "one of the strangest men who's ever lived." There seemed to be no "real" Ronald Reagan, so Morris just made up much of his biography, including a fictional character, named Edmund Morris, who he wrote was intimately involved in the breadth of Reagan's life and deeply involved in many critical decisions. Fabulous!
"I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it" (Ray Bradbury) While I don't subscribe to this being a new era of the memoir, I do believe we are experiencing one new thing -- the career memoirist. A writer used to be good for one, in rare cases two memoirs, James Herriot's 12 books being a noted exception. We now have writers like Elizabeth Wurtzel, who turned her '94 best seller, Prozac Nation, into a five-book (and counting) oeuvre. Augusten Burroughs, following his '02 mega-seller, Running With Scissors, has published four more books in six years. At 42, he may set the all-time record for memoirs by one writer.
There's also a new sort of post-ironic self-awareness in memoirs. In addition to the previously mentioned She Got Up Off the Couch, Daniel Harris penned the delightfully titled, A Memoir Of No One in Particular: In Which Our Author Indulges in Naive Indiscretions, A Self-Aggrandizing Solipsism, and An Off-Putting Infatuation with His Own Bodily Functions.
Do these post-ironic or career memoirists signify a new era of over saturation, spewing out books with little more merit or lasting value than a daily blog or a MySpace entry? Do they signify the Death of Literacy and the End of Civilization?
No, that would be back in 1992 when the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, NBCC Award winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, somehow thought we wanted to read about his masturbating in between writing paragraphs of his memoir, Making Love. Or in '95 when Princeton professor, Michael Ryan, revealed in his memoir, Secret Life, his former love affair with Topsy, the family dog.
Michael Murphy has been in book publishing 28 years. He started at Random House, where he was a VP and worked 13 years, later becoming the Publisher at William Morrow. Last Fall he formed his own literary agency, Max & Co. More may be learned at the website www.maxliterary.org