Memoirs

Nowadays I'm sick of memoirs. Celebrity memoirs, president memoirs, fake memoirs, and part fiction part fact memoirs. In the fall I took a course called Modern fiction and this girl told the class that her senior thesis was on the explosion in number of memoirs in the 90s. The professor also commented that many writers today often begin by publishing a memoir (or a fictional piece, which is really a thinly disguised autobiography) and then move on to fictional works. Why!?

I feel like a lot of memoirs serve more of a therapeutic purpose for the author than actually presenting the reader with anything of real value.

Yet, from a distanced perspective, memoirs, in theory, are interesting. This La Times author discusses the ethics of memoir writing. What happens when you're telling someone else's story? What happens if you recall an event different than someone else?

Here's a quote:

This was the beginning of my understanding of the most serious moral principle of memoir: The act of writing about another person occurs not just in the world of literature but in real life. It cannot help but change your relationship, and this should be the first thing you think about.

What is interesting about memoirs is that they necessarily blend fact and fiction. They are derived from the 'real world.' The characters in memoirs are real people walking around and trying to go about their real lives. Fiction writers don't have this problem. None of their characters can call them up and say, "I'm nothing like that!" or "That didn't happen like you wrote it." In memoirs people can question the author's version of reality, while fiction writers freely create their own realities.

This article made me think about the Melvin Burgess kerfuffle. He's an author who's known for his controversial young adult fiction. Recently he wanted to publish a story which has strong ties to his real life growing up. His publisher decided not to publish it because of the 'invasion of privacy' clause.

Writing that invades a person's privacy...I guess this could be true, I wouldn't want thousands of people putting me under the microscope (which may distort things). Yet, no matter the story, doesn't it have the right to be told? Or is the answer that writers need to take up an ethical responsibility and inform the people that they wrote about them and give them a chance to challenge their version.

The La Times author suggests that people who have had their stories told for then take up a pen themselves. I tend to agree. Instead of laws limiting free speech, maybe people should be encouraged to speak for themselves.