An Autobiography Manqué

Page 9 March–April 2009 An Autobiography Manqué David Lazar Teresa Miller sets up certain formal expectations of her memoir, Means of Transit, with her subtitle, “A Slightly Embellished Memoir.” I must admit my expectations were more tarnished than embellished by the subtitle since the question of embellishment has raised my hackles higher than the hair on the back of my neck. I’m fond of formal play, hybridity, invention, experimentation, as part of a text’s presentation of its…textuality. But playing fast and loose with the past—memory is unreliable, why bother? There’s enough to sort through in its distortions without adding distortions—leaves me cold-hearted as a reader: If you’re going to tell me in the subtitle, you’d better tell me in the text. I wonder where the credible voice of narrative authenticity is “embellishing” or struggling to understand based on what she more and less remembers. But I approach memoirs essayistically—such is my critical lot. Autobiographical writers—memoirists and essayists—continue to struggle with the issues of facticity and artifice (Montaigne, for example, says, “I desire therein to be seen in my own genuine, simple, ordinary manner, without study or artifice: for it is myself that I portray”).Any bit of dialogue is a suspension of disbelief about the nature of memory and its textual rendering. So, Miller unnecessarily weighs her book with an apparatus that it doesn’t overtly speak to, unless of course the subtitle refers to the occasional interruptions of the book by short italicized sections that range from folklore, to pieces of local history (the book centers on the writer’s life in Tahlequah, Oklahoma) and scattered memories. The subtitle—and I don’t mean to sound like a critic with a bone, for I think it’s critically relevant— is especially troubling to me because central to the memoir is a section dealing with the violently drawnout harassment by an ex-student. There have been many important autobiographies in the last thirty years by men and women, but crucially by women, centering on traumatic experience. Miller writes of her experience, “I was emotionally traumatized” by the harassment, which despite the close cooperation of the police, went on for twenty years and ended with finality only when her tormentor killed his own mother. Subjection and repressed experience, the complexity of female subjectivity and phallocentric language —there has been an outpouring of theoretical work on women and autobiography recently. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998) is still the best theoretical resource. In it, Janice Haaken writes tellingly in “The Recovery of Memory, Fantasy, and Desire in Women’s Trauma Stories: Feminist Approaches to Sexual Abuse and Psychotherapy” that “Within feminism, trauma stories also have become a unifying vehicle for expressing female disturbances within a narrative that wards off exploration of potentially disunifying differences.” Miller’s memoir holds the inner life before us like a cave she isn’t sure she wants to enter. In other words, Teresa Miller doesn’t use the narrative to explore much as a vehicle for one of life’s self-aware interrogatory dark occasions. It’s a bad thing that happened that she tells in chronological sequence. A man, a former student, shadowed her, then killed his own mother. Miller began life early on with her own mother’s death. Nowhere is there a register, even less a frisson from this connection. Thus, I found the suggestion of embellishment in a memoir with harassment at its narrative center somewhat irresponsible. We need to have a sense of the awful truth. Miller’s memoir is actually an autobiography manqué. It begins with birth and takes us up to the present, and it just covers too much ground for a book that comes in at 180 pages, much of which, in the second half, talks tiresomely of Miller’s role in directing the Writing Out Loud program in Oklahoma. Many of the stories of meeting famous writers read like generic stories of meeting famous writers, and Miller doles out her praise too promiscuously or expectedly: Joy Harjo “was one of the most eloquent writers I’d ever met”; “I...