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  • The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative
  • E. Nicole Meyer (bio)
Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio UP, 2007. 211 pp. ISBN - 978-0-804-01101-3, $16.95.

While it can easily be argued that discussions of memoirs and/or autobiographies have been done and even overdone, Thomas Larson’s contribution is well worth reading. He deftly handles his own roles of writer/memoirist/ writing coach/critic as he argues for a distinction between autobiography and memoir, prioritizing the latter, which has become a form of choice for many contemporary writers seeking “a particular life experience to focus on” (15).

Larson writes as practitioner, leader of memoir-writing courses, and critic. His readings are exceptionally perceptive and succinct, the product of someone who has looked deep within himself as well as carefully dug beneath the surface of the texts he examines. In writing on James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” Larson remarks that Baldwin’s “narrative writing about his family reveals the universal stickiness of our parents’ lives: whatever has angered and disillusioned them often rears up as unresolved themes in their children. . . . Their vulnerabilities and paradoxes live on in us” (5). Larson’s spot-on reading of James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother proves most revealing. In this “family memoir about a very tight-lipped family” (169), the narrator comes “to grips with the fact” that he has never really known the person he loves the most, his mother. Many readers of Larson will find this particular discussion not only an enlightening analysis of McBride, but also an intriguing invitation to examine their own selves, to peel away layers of their own tight-lipped family.

In his sixth chapter, Larson discusses the writer as archeologist, asking “how deep do we dig?” (69). He himself digs with gusto into the relationship [End Page 874] of writing about one’s past to avoid writing about another, the past that lies behind the original drive to write. Larson succeeds at explaining a complex process in a most revealing manner.

Elsewhere, using Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club: A Memoir, Larson explores the capturing of the freshness of the moment (e.g., that first sip of coffee in the morning), the roles we play in our family (such as that of “the Family Watcher” [74]), and the considerations of what is truth in a memoir. When we “remember,” do we reproduce the actual sentiment rather than a false one? What is honesty when narrative enters? “But in memoir what is telling truth?” he queries, “And whose truth are we telling?” (103–104). Part of the intrigue is that memoirists become other through the process of memoir writing, for we change how we perceive the past. Narratively this appears in the dance between the I-then and I-now, to use Virginia Woolf’s terms. As the narrator evolves and his/her perceptions transform, the question of emotional authenticity arises. According to Larson, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, for example, becomes more trustworthy when she openly brings this questioning of the “problem of trust” into her memoir (150).

Larson’s work proves less convincing in its clear-cut distinctions between autobiography and memoir. The lines drawn between the two seem too starkly delineated. Rather than black-and-white distinctions, variations of gray shade autobiography’s relation to authenticity and to the past. Larson’s remarks about “the interconnectedness of past and present in the act of memoir writing” (32) are just as true of autobiography.

Despite these weaknesses, The Memoir and the Memoirist remains well worth reading. Larson shines as a reader. His always lucid style, wide-ranging and perceptively analyzed examples, and thorough bibliography of memoirs make the book a valuable reference source as well as a good read. [End Page 875]

E. Nicole Meyer

E. Nicole Meyer is Professor of French, Humanistic Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies, and Acting Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Dr. Meyer is currently writing a...

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