The Shaped Life

Page 7 March–April 2009 The Shaped Life Robert Lunday Memoirs continue to fill the bookshelves, but few works of memoir criticism have followed. Patricia Hampl’s 1999 collection of essays, I Could Tell You Stories, was, until 2008, the most significant contribution. More recently, Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist (2007) updated and deepened our understanding of memoir from the vantage of both reader and writer. Although some academic theorists of autobiography have recently turned their attentions to memoir, the most significant new critical writing is from memoirists themselves, as we see in the three works—two anthologies, one monograph—under review here. Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May’s Tell Me True arose from “a spirited series of public readings and panel discussions” at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Each essay begins with an excerpt from the author’s previously published memoir (or in May’s own contribution, a work of history based on life-writing). The editors establish their main concern in their introduction: memoir and history are “two goalposts” at opposing ends, sharing the turf of memory. In a postmodern environment, they claim, the space between public and private has narrowed: history is sometimes “public memoir” and memoir “personal history.” Most of the essays in Tell Me True reinforce these points effectively. But each contributor searches through her own challenges as a memoirist in finding the right balance between historical fact and emotional truth, which deepens the reader’s insight into the challenge of writing and reading memoir. Self and community, individual and ethnic identity are topics as important in the articles in Tell Me True as they are in the self-and-family stories. D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996), speaks in “Public Policy/Private Lives” of his efforts to provide an alternative view (a “counternarrative ” as Cheri Register describes Waldie’s purpose in her own essay “Memoir Matters”) of his hometown, Los Angeles, one to “bleed through the clichés,” as he himself later puts it. Behind the cinema and pop-culture illusions, Waldie draws forth a privately narrated public reality of a city that “claims someone’s allegiance, answers someone’s longing, and persists in someone’s memory.” Annette Kobak, whose Joe’s War: My Father, Decoded (2004) recounts the history of her Czech Polish father’s service with the Allies in World War II, describes in her essay “Whose War?” the difficult crossingsofthelargerdocumentaryhistorythatleaves out so much of the private, still-living memories her father shares with her in interviews. “It could be,” Kobak notes, “that the important, oxygenating task of memoir is to keep faith with the individual, the paradoxical, the unsystematic.” She astutely defines the tension between fact and feeling, which each of the authors in this collection is troubled by. The most entertaining piece is by Carlos Eire (Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, 2003), who insists on the personal dimension of history, attacking with a still-fresh anger the “Big Lie” of the Cuban Revolution that upended his childhood. Perhaps one of the most important insights he gains from those who responded to his memoir is what his fellow Cubans have said: “Thank you for telling my story”—not “your story” or even “our story,” he wryly observes, deploying, instead, the collective personal, as we might call it. David Lazar’s Truth in Nonfiction is a more wide-ranging collection, focused on the broader generic field of nonfiction, though memoir looms large. Nonfiction, this anthology argues, defies not only genre but medium: and thus, herein, we have representatives of literary essay, historical essay, journal entry, journalism, aphorism, avant-gardism, documentary film, photography, dance, theater, poetry, allegory, even fairy tale. Memoir is the art of finding life’s patterns. In his introduction, Lazar offers this formulation : “Nonfiction blends fact and artifice in an attempt to arrive at truth, or truths”; and, with a nod to Emily Dickinson, he asserts that truth must be told slant. Truth told slant, we see as the varied selections in this anthology unfold, is the essence of the writer’s craft while misunderstandings of truth, accuracy, fact, and feeling have to do with...