(No) thanks for the memories
Oct. 31st, 2003 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI’ve been reading Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors, a memoir of his pretty abysmal childhood that garnered a lot of attention when it was first published. One of the things I remembered reviewers saying most was that his childhood experiences (his psychotic mother left him in the care of her bizarre psychiatrist and his completely sick family, and he became involved with a pedophile living at the house who was 20+ years older than he) were horrific and terrifying and all kinds of –ify adjectives. So of course, I immediately said, “Oh, I have to read this!”
It’s not that I have a prurient interest or I get vicarious thrills reading about someone’s terrible young life. It’s more that I identify with the topics a little bit, and am often interested in seeing how people dealt with their traumas and scars, especially when they can write about it with humor, which was always mentioned in the reviews of Running. Because lately I seem to be doing better as a writer of essays than I may ever be able to with fiction, I’m especially interested in seeing how writers successfully shape events of childhood and troubled psyches into good literature. But I think now I’m memoired out.
Between David Sedaris’s books (which are more like little essay collections, but which form a memoir structure when compiled together), Mary Karr, and on and on, I’m at the end of my memory lane. At this point, it almost seems as if there’s some unspoken competition among publishers for who can find the worst, weirdest, most despicable or unusual childhood ever. Folks who’ve endured terrible things are shaping their lives to both amuse us and leave us in awe of their coping abilities and how far they’ve come as adults (and while I say yay for them, I’m just losing interest at this point). Reviewers tell us that the books are must-reads and generate interest by overstating the trauma associated with the growing up.
I thought Liar’s Club was a good example of that — while her life was by no means easy and it made a good story, I never felt that it was quite the unendurable trauma that many reviewers made it out to be. I knew kids who grew up in worse circumstances — my ex-partner, for instance, had one of the worst childhoods I’ve ever heard of, and outside of his basic issues that made me mildly insane, he turned out to be a fairly decent guy. But it was well-written and engaging; it just didn’t, for me, add anything to the genre, a genre that seems to be exploding. Running With Scissors is a nice book, and I’m really glad that the intense difficulties Burroughs suffered are over and that he came out to be a pretty good guy. But it brings home to me that this childhood-trauma memoir genre has just been exploited too far, and if the whole point is to keep finding new writers who had worse experiences than the last memoirist du jour, then maybe it’s a good place to stop. Only, since the whole killer genre has been taken over by writers inventing ever more bizarre and abstruse and complicatedly psychopathic serial killers (I’m waiting any day now for the serial killer who makes up all his victims like Judy Jetson and leaves notes written in Astro-speak), I’m not holding my breath that the memoir genre has peaked.
I wanted to read Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, but I figured that when the words alcoholic and difficult were mentioned on the jacket that maybe I should stop with the memoirs. I fondly remember the days when African childhoods weren’t about family traumas so much as unusual experiences (Flame Trees of Thika, West with the Night); now, if there isn’t colonial sex hijinks and loony alcoholic parents, then what’s the point, the publishers seem to be saying.
Which gets to one of the things that’s bothering me most about many of the kid misery books. I have a pretty good memory for bad stuff that happened to me (I rarely remember good stuff, but there are a few things). My friends are freaked by how much detail I remember of our youth. But I don’t remember whole conversations, I don’t remember every detail of feelings and sensations and the events swirling around me to the degree these memoirists seem to. Now, I know that embellishment and creativity are a huge part of the memoir. But at times I find myself thinking that I’m reading fiction. Unless these people were keeping detailed journal records of everything (which is entirely possible, I mean, I kept starting journals that of course my huge fan base would want to read after I’d won the Nobel for literature, and then never finishing them), I just don’t see how they’re providing such incredible detail for events that could be very hard for a young person to remember, let alone describe so acutely. At this point, I feel like the natural creative structure around fleshing out the remembered events has gone too far in the other direction. Adult memoirs such as Alice Sebold’s account of being raped and the aftermath don’t leave me with the same feelings, strangely, because the events are not only more recent, and seem more likely to be remembered, but also because I believe adults have far more descriptive powers than children. The intensity of the descriptions is what niggles at me, not necessarily that they’re saying they felt that way. There’s often a level of detail that is simply too creative.
In Running With Scissors, I also found it hard to have the level of sympathy that I think you’re supposed to feel. As terrible as things were, he even admits that he preferred living with the shrink’s family, and he’s so dismissive of things like one of the daughters starving a cat to death that I can’t identify with the guy, even though I want to. The good memoirist used to just suck you in to their feelings, how lost or empty or scared they were. Now, it’s like “my childhood sucked so much, and now you’re going to hear about it and feel bad, but I’ll make you laugh with my wry, healing prose!” I often don’t really feel much for these people, even though they make me laugh or they dazzle me with their language. I mean, I howl at Sedaris’s stories, but I don’t feel like I know him well, I don’t feel for him much. Liar’s Club was gorgeously written, but I never cared enough about Mary Karr to read her subsequent memoir Cherry (I think it was called). When I was young, I read all of Elspeth Huxley’s stuff about Africa and wished I’d had something as exotic to write about; most of the memoirs today have left me feeling like, well, huh. My life sure sucked, but I guess it didn’t suck enough to make a really good memoir and I don’t remember enough details to write one anyway. (Though, hmmm... thinking now about writing Ex’s story...)
As much as I’d like to keep the momentum about essays going, I’m not sure I’ll ever be interesting enough to do that. In order to get published, I’d have to say my twin sister is a hermaphroditic crack-whore who was pushed into prostitution by our ex-con uncle who was married to his 12-year-old sister. But wouldn’t the reviews just be great!
It’s not that I have a prurient interest or I get vicarious thrills reading about someone’s terrible young life. It’s more that I identify with the topics a little bit, and am often interested in seeing how people dealt with their traumas and scars, especially when they can write about it with humor, which was always mentioned in the reviews of Running. Because lately I seem to be doing better as a writer of essays than I may ever be able to with fiction, I’m especially interested in seeing how writers successfully shape events of childhood and troubled psyches into good literature. But I think now I’m memoired out.
Between David Sedaris’s books (which are more like little essay collections, but which form a memoir structure when compiled together), Mary Karr, and on and on, I’m at the end of my memory lane. At this point, it almost seems as if there’s some unspoken competition among publishers for who can find the worst, weirdest, most despicable or unusual childhood ever. Folks who’ve endured terrible things are shaping their lives to both amuse us and leave us in awe of their coping abilities and how far they’ve come as adults (and while I say yay for them, I’m just losing interest at this point). Reviewers tell us that the books are must-reads and generate interest by overstating the trauma associated with the growing up.
I thought Liar’s Club was a good example of that — while her life was by no means easy and it made a good story, I never felt that it was quite the unendurable trauma that many reviewers made it out to be. I knew kids who grew up in worse circumstances — my ex-partner, for instance, had one of the worst childhoods I’ve ever heard of, and outside of his basic issues that made me mildly insane, he turned out to be a fairly decent guy. But it was well-written and engaging; it just didn’t, for me, add anything to the genre, a genre that seems to be exploding. Running With Scissors is a nice book, and I’m really glad that the intense difficulties Burroughs suffered are over and that he came out to be a pretty good guy. But it brings home to me that this childhood-trauma memoir genre has just been exploited too far, and if the whole point is to keep finding new writers who had worse experiences than the last memoirist du jour, then maybe it’s a good place to stop. Only, since the whole killer genre has been taken over by writers inventing ever more bizarre and abstruse and complicatedly psychopathic serial killers (I’m waiting any day now for the serial killer who makes up all his victims like Judy Jetson and leaves notes written in Astro-speak), I’m not holding my breath that the memoir genre has peaked.
I wanted to read Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, but I figured that when the words alcoholic and difficult were mentioned on the jacket that maybe I should stop with the memoirs. I fondly remember the days when African childhoods weren’t about family traumas so much as unusual experiences (Flame Trees of Thika, West with the Night); now, if there isn’t colonial sex hijinks and loony alcoholic parents, then what’s the point, the publishers seem to be saying.
Which gets to one of the things that’s bothering me most about many of the kid misery books. I have a pretty good memory for bad stuff that happened to me (I rarely remember good stuff, but there are a few things). My friends are freaked by how much detail I remember of our youth. But I don’t remember whole conversations, I don’t remember every detail of feelings and sensations and the events swirling around me to the degree these memoirists seem to. Now, I know that embellishment and creativity are a huge part of the memoir. But at times I find myself thinking that I’m reading fiction. Unless these people were keeping detailed journal records of everything (which is entirely possible, I mean, I kept starting journals that of course my huge fan base would want to read after I’d won the Nobel for literature, and then never finishing them), I just don’t see how they’re providing such incredible detail for events that could be very hard for a young person to remember, let alone describe so acutely. At this point, I feel like the natural creative structure around fleshing out the remembered events has gone too far in the other direction. Adult memoirs such as Alice Sebold’s account of being raped and the aftermath don’t leave me with the same feelings, strangely, because the events are not only more recent, and seem more likely to be remembered, but also because I believe adults have far more descriptive powers than children. The intensity of the descriptions is what niggles at me, not necessarily that they’re saying they felt that way. There’s often a level of detail that is simply too creative.
In Running With Scissors, I also found it hard to have the level of sympathy that I think you’re supposed to feel. As terrible as things were, he even admits that he preferred living with the shrink’s family, and he’s so dismissive of things like one of the daughters starving a cat to death that I can’t identify with the guy, even though I want to. The good memoirist used to just suck you in to their feelings, how lost or empty or scared they were. Now, it’s like “my childhood sucked so much, and now you’re going to hear about it and feel bad, but I’ll make you laugh with my wry, healing prose!” I often don’t really feel much for these people, even though they make me laugh or they dazzle me with their language. I mean, I howl at Sedaris’s stories, but I don’t feel like I know him well, I don’t feel for him much. Liar’s Club was gorgeously written, but I never cared enough about Mary Karr to read her subsequent memoir Cherry (I think it was called). When I was young, I read all of Elspeth Huxley’s stuff about Africa and wished I’d had something as exotic to write about; most of the memoirs today have left me feeling like, well, huh. My life sure sucked, but I guess it didn’t suck enough to make a really good memoir and I don’t remember enough details to write one anyway. (Though, hmmm... thinking now about writing Ex’s story...)
As much as I’d like to keep the momentum about essays going, I’m not sure I’ll ever be interesting enough to do that. In order to get published, I’d have to say my twin sister is a hermaphroditic crack-whore who was pushed into prostitution by our ex-con uncle who was married to his 12-year-old sister. But wouldn’t the reviews just be great!
