This piece titled MEMOIRS is from the regular “My Reading Life” column by Elinore Standard in the Record Review – September, 2004.
Works mentioned in this piece: Deceits of Time, Best Awful, Liar’s Club, One Writer’s Beginnings, Darkness Visible, An Unquiet Mind, Spiral Staircase, Road Song, Between Meals, Images and Shadows, A Cab at the Door, Midnight Oil
In “Deceits of Time”, by Isabel Colegate (Viking, 1988), one character says, “Like all stories, the story of a life could only be an approximation to the truth, or perhaps a parallel.” She goes on go say these approximations, “…did not mean that one should stop testing them against such discoverable truths as one could lay one’s hands on.”
Carrie Fisher was interviewed by the New York Times about her new novel, “The Best Awful” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) and said, “I was going to write this as a memoir, but then I couldn’t do a memoir. The truth is a very stern taskmistress, and I can’t adhere to it. I have a very bad memory.”
Although I have not written a memoir myself, I do read many of them. I read memoirs mainly to test the reality of my own life and to see how, by comparison, I’m doing.
Memoirists walk a fine line between fact and fiction. Every time you see a line of dialogue in a memoir, you know it is a reconstruction of a moment, and perhaps, as Carrie Fisher says, it is all an unreliable memory casting back over years. “The Liars Club” by Mary Karr (Viking, 1995), with its rich and plentiful dialogue, really reads like fiction, but does it matter? If Karr says it’s a memoir, then it is a memoir. Hers is another dark, crazy, desperate American childhood, and “Liars Club” is the story of growing up in an alcoholic family in a refinery town on the Texas Gulf Coast.
I like a makeover. My preferred memoirs are those by people who, by changing their lives, emerge from major trouble into happiness and productivity. Generally, a secure and happy life makes for ho-hum reading. A major exception to this observation is Eudora Welty, whose “One Writer’s Beginnings” (Harvard, 1983) tells of a quiet Southern girlhood in a comfortable household with wonderful parents. At the end of this gorgeous little work, Welty concludes, “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
Many memoirs seem to tell of a before and an after, an emerging from darkness into light. William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” (Random House, 1990) looks at his long journey out of alcoholic paranoia and suicidal depression. He describes the despair of his sickness and the tormented road back to a productive life. He likens his return from the abyss to the “ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths” and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.”
Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison talks about hitting bottom in
An Unquiet Mind” (Knopf, 1995) a memoir about her struggle with manic-depression (she resists calling it “bi-polar disorder” which she thinks is too tame) throughout years of therapy and various drug treatments. “I was well on my way to madness,” she says, as she describes spinning wildly out of control and finally trying suicide. Thanks to intervention by loyal friends and to her own amazing resiliency, Jamison goes on to a distinguished career writing and teaching in a medical school about mood disorders. The spectacular highs of hypermania are addictive, she says, and even at her sanest, in some corner of her mind, she says she misses them.
“The Spiral Staircase” by writer and theologian Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 2004), is the story of an emergence of a different kind. Armstrong spent seven years of her young womanhood in a convent where she lived in an authoritarian community, accepting the discipline of the order. At the age of 24, she resigned her vows and then found herself cast adrift, fitting into neither the sacred world nor the secular. She heard voices, saw visions, hallucinated, had blackouts, fainted in public, and experienced general mental and physical collapse. Psychiatrists failed to help. Suicide seemed inevitable.
Like Jamison and Styron, Karen Armstrong had loyal friends and loved ones and a kind of personal strength that kept her going. Finally, no thanks to the psychiatrists, she was diagnosed as an epileptic, a sufferer of grand mal seizures. From that point, it was a long road back to a safe and productive life but there was enormous relief just in knowing she had something physical wrong with her that could be treated. Since then, Armstrong has fashioned a successful and fulfilling life, coming to peace with religion after a long struggle. She remains, to her great regret, an outsider and a sort of misfit.
One unforgettable account of emerging from darkness into light involves not a struggle with alcohol or drugs or depression, but a struggle to live through and overcome a horrible maiming which took place when the author was six years old. “Road Song” by Natalie Kusz (Harper, 1990) is now by way of being a classic. I’ve seen it on young people’s reading lists and I’ve taught it in writing courses. Written when she was 28, Kusz takes us back to the moment on a frigid Alaskan afternoon when she was attacked on her way home from school by a neighbor’s ravenous sled dog. In the writing, Kusz makes time stop. She nails us to the moment when the dog began tearing at her little body.
“Road Song” is a tribute to the sturdiness and faith of a family and their willingness, over a long haul of endless operations and hospitalizations, to stay together, to hope, and to persist after what the author describes as, “the thousand substitutions of new plans for old.”
I keep an annotated list of memoirs I’ve read. It is in alphabetical order and I add to it periodically so, by now, the list has grown long. In looking it over, I notice books on the list I thought I had forgot. I just discovered that A. J. Liebling’s “Between Meals” first published in 1959 and a strong and early entry on my list, is soon to be reprinted in a boxed set along with other Liebling works. I found Iris Origo’s “Images and Shadows” (Harcourt, 1970) in the local library and am glad to know it’s there because I don’t own a copy. V.S. Pritchett’s “A Cab at the Door” and “Midnight Oil” (Chatto, 1968, 1971), two volumes which take him from a childhood out of Dickens into adulthood are on my shelves and they can also be obtained through most library systems. These three writers are precious voices from what seems like a long-ago, far-distant past, voices echoing from a more hopeful world than the one we live in now.
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with
Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers
Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
Works mentioned in this piece: Deceits of Time, Best Awful, Liar’s Club, One Writer’s Beginnings, Darkness Visible, An Unquiet Mind, Spiral Staircase, Road Song, Between Meals, Images and Shadows, A Cab at the Door, Midnight Oil
In “Deceits of Time”, by Isabel Colegate (Viking, 1988), one character says, “Like all stories, the story of a life could only be an approximation to the truth, or perhaps a parallel.” She goes on go say these approximations, “…did not mean that one should stop testing them against such discoverable truths as one could lay one’s hands on.”
Carrie Fisher was interviewed by the New York Times about her new novel, “The Best Awful” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) and said, “I was going to write this as a memoir, but then I couldn’t do a memoir. The truth is a very stern taskmistress, and I can’t adhere to it. I have a very bad memory.”
Although I have not written a memoir myself, I do read many of them. I read memoirs mainly to test the reality of my own life and to see how, by comparison, I’m doing.
Memoirists walk a fine line between fact and fiction. Every time you see a line of dialogue in a memoir, you know it is a reconstruction of a moment, and perhaps, as Carrie Fisher says, it is all an unreliable memory casting back over years. “The Liars Club” by Mary Karr (Viking, 1995), with its rich and plentiful dialogue, really reads like fiction, but does it matter? If Karr says it’s a memoir, then it is a memoir. Hers is another dark, crazy, desperate American childhood, and “Liars Club” is the story of growing up in an alcoholic family in a refinery town on the Texas Gulf Coast.
I like a makeover. My preferred memoirs are those by people who, by changing their lives, emerge from major trouble into happiness and productivity. Generally, a secure and happy life makes for ho-hum reading. A major exception to this observation is Eudora Welty, whose “One Writer’s Beginnings” (Harvard, 1983) tells of a quiet Southern girlhood in a comfortable household with wonderful parents. At the end of this gorgeous little work, Welty concludes, “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
Many memoirs seem to tell of a before and an after, an emerging from darkness into light. William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” (Random House, 1990) looks at his long journey out of alcoholic paranoia and suicidal depression. He describes the despair of his sickness and the tormented road back to a productive life. He likens his return from the abyss to the “ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths” and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.”
Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison talks about hitting bottom in
An Unquiet Mind” (Knopf, 1995) a memoir about her struggle with manic-depression (she resists calling it “bi-polar disorder” which she thinks is too tame) throughout years of therapy and various drug treatments. “I was well on my way to madness,” she says, as she describes spinning wildly out of control and finally trying suicide. Thanks to intervention by loyal friends and to her own amazing resiliency, Jamison goes on to a distinguished career writing and teaching in a medical school about mood disorders. The spectacular highs of hypermania are addictive, she says, and even at her sanest, in some corner of her mind, she says she misses them.
“The Spiral Staircase” by writer and theologian Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 2004), is the story of an emergence of a different kind. Armstrong spent seven years of her young womanhood in a convent where she lived in an authoritarian community, accepting the discipline of the order. At the age of 24, she resigned her vows and then found herself cast adrift, fitting into neither the sacred world nor the secular. She heard voices, saw visions, hallucinated, had blackouts, fainted in public, and experienced general mental and physical collapse. Psychiatrists failed to help. Suicide seemed inevitable.
Like Jamison and Styron, Karen Armstrong had loyal friends and loved ones and a kind of personal strength that kept her going. Finally, no thanks to the psychiatrists, she was diagnosed as an epileptic, a sufferer of grand mal seizures. From that point, it was a long road back to a safe and productive life but there was enormous relief just in knowing she had something physical wrong with her that could be treated. Since then, Armstrong has fashioned a successful and fulfilling life, coming to peace with religion after a long struggle. She remains, to her great regret, an outsider and a sort of misfit.
One unforgettable account of emerging from darkness into light involves not a struggle with alcohol or drugs or depression, but a struggle to live through and overcome a horrible maiming which took place when the author was six years old. “Road Song” by Natalie Kusz (Harper, 1990) is now by way of being a classic. I’ve seen it on young people’s reading lists and I’ve taught it in writing courses. Written when she was 28, Kusz takes us back to the moment on a frigid Alaskan afternoon when she was attacked on her way home from school by a neighbor’s ravenous sled dog. In the writing, Kusz makes time stop. She nails us to the moment when the dog began tearing at her little body.
“Road Song” is a tribute to the sturdiness and faith of a family and their willingness, over a long haul of endless operations and hospitalizations, to stay together, to hope, and to persist after what the author describes as, “the thousand substitutions of new plans for old.”
I keep an annotated list of memoirs I’ve read. It is in alphabetical order and I add to it periodically so, by now, the list has grown long. In looking it over, I notice books on the list I thought I had forgot. I just discovered that A. J. Liebling’s “Between Meals” first published in 1959 and a strong and early entry on my list, is soon to be reprinted in a boxed set along with other Liebling works. I found Iris Origo’s “Images and Shadows” (Harcourt, 1970) in the local library and am glad to know it’s there because I don’t own a copy. V.S. Pritchett’s “A Cab at the Door” and “Midnight Oil” (Chatto, 1968, 1971), two volumes which take him from a childhood out of Dickens into adulthood are on my shelves and they can also be obtained through most library systems. These three writers are precious voices from what seems like a long-ago, far-distant past, voices echoing from a more hopeful world than the one we live in now.
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with
Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers
Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
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