In truth, we think Maud Newton (the esteemed blogger and book critic) is painting memoir with too wide a brush and setting up a bit of strawman (straw book?) argument here, but her thoughts on why she writes her life story as a novel instead of as a memoir are provocative, and here at Brevity (way up here, in our lofty penthouse office), we like provocative things. So have a listen:
It’s hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda’s assertion that the memoir has become the “central form” of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.
But I hope he’s wrong.
Of course some escape-from-my-wretched-childhood stories are smart and candid and complex. Shalom Auslander’s “Foreskin’s Lament” flies in the face of the therapeutic model: It closes on a troubling note, as Auslander worries that the God he’s turned his back on will punish him by killing his child.
For the most part, though, the general formula is simple, and quintessentially American — miserablism to triumphalism, with the closing benediction, through sales, of capitalism.
The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers’ belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger’s dime novels.
Newton’s full story can be found in the LA Times.
Oftentimes, at the end of a long day of manuscript sorting high up in the Brevity corporate towers, we will push back our chairs, throw some Miles Davis onto the big speakers, pour small offerings of Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon, and wonder at people who have trouble defining creative nonfiction. “Really,” we might say to one another. “It’s not a mystery. What we do is pretty straightforward. Can you pass the Blanton’s, Mr. Jeeves?”
