Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

Confessions of a Navel Gazer

9 Confessions of a Navel Gazer (In which a whiny, self-promoting, and narcissistic writer of memoir rants unimaginatively about his dreary little scribblings) R O B I N H E M L E Y W H E N I W A S I N G R A D U A T E school in the 1980s my friends and I used to classify writers into two types: windows and mirrors. The mirrors were the poets, writers of reflection and meditation.The fiction writers were the windows, writers who looked out on the wide world and wrote about what they saw. Of course, the analogy was simplistic—fiction writers can be reflective and poets can write about the world outside themselves, but that was the basic dichotomy as we understood it. My grad school even broke into softball teams: the Windows versus the Mirrors. But on which team did the poor nonfiction writers play, the memoirists in particular?They could play on neither team. They weren’t even the water carriers, the bat boys and girls. That’s because memoirists as we know them today didn’t exist. 10 ◆ R O B I N H E M L E Y In fact, it was considered the height of arrogance and pomposity to suggest writing your memwahs (preferably said with a French accent) if you were not a famous general,actor, or politician.There were no schools for memoirists, no classes, no books on how to write a memoir. The lives of ordinary people as such were considered, well, ordinary.Who wanted to read about ordinariness? A well-known movie at the time, called Ordinary People, revealed shockingly that ordinary people have feelings and secrets and tragedies, too. Who would have thought?! Betraying a cultural suspicion that this could not truly be the case, Bette Davis, in reading the nominees for Best Picture that year at the Oscars, renamed the film, “Ordinary Movie.” Ordinary or not, this film from 1980 took away four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Redford), Best Actor (Timothy Hutton), and Best Adapted Screenplay.And no wonder.The most persistent and sacred of lies is that any family is perfect, and yet families go to great lengths to preserve this myth.That’s essentially what this film was about—in an affluent family,one of the sons dies in an accident and the family, especially the parents, pretends it never happened. But the son, Timothy Hutton, completely messed up as a result of his family’s dysfunction (the term was not common parlance back then), sees a psychiatrist, Judd Hirsch, who heals Timothy Hutton by urging him to speak the truth, thus allowing him to win an Oscar. Okay, not quite as simple as that. Perhaps I’m betraying my cynical Bette Davis side. As it turns out, a lot of people not only wanted to watch a movie about the large tragedies of small lives, but to read about them,too. And oddly,not as fiction.In the past,what we might call a memoir now was typically the writer of fiction’s first novel, what’s known as a roman à clef (this, preferably said in a British accent), or a thinly veiled autobiographical novel. In my parents’ day, it was great literary sport to read a novel and try to figure out who the writer was really writing about. When Thomas Wolfe wrote his famous novel, Look Homeward Angel, he literally couldn’t go home again to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Everyone knew exactly whom Confessions of a Navel Gazer ◆ 11 he was referring to and what he was writing about and they were hopping mad. About five years after publication of the novel, whenWolfe was a world-famous novelist, the only people who remained angry in Asheville were the people he hadn’t written about. ◆ W I T H T H E R I S E of the memoir over the last thirty years, writers by the scores have written about their hometowns and much more. Now there are courses for writers of memoir to take and books to read on the subject. If we ever thought before that the people around us were ordinary, we don’t think so any longer. In fact, we know that if anything, nearly everyone can tell you a story of their family brimming with secrets and skeleton-packed closets. But for every...