“Scarce Half Made Up”: Contemporary Memoir and Its Discontents

For two years while I was in graduate school, I taught night classes at Utah State University’s extension campus in Tooele, 60 miles west of Salt Lake City and home to the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, a U.S. Army facility that dismantles chemical weapons. My students were a diverse bunch: Mormons just back from their missions, homemakers returning to school after raising their children, young guys who had already served in the military, a man in his mid-20s with cerebral palsy who was confined to a wheelchair and brought his mother and a note taker to every class. One thing they had in common, though, was a love of parables. As we read stories by Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, they voiced their suspicion of stories that didn’t confer judgment on characters. Munro’s adulteresses, they argued, should be ostracized from their communities until they publicly admitted their wrongdoing. Carver’s alcoholics should go to rehab and then church. Gaining self-knowledge or feeling remorse wasn’t enough; the character must suffer and learn a lesson and be redeemed. I found myself frustrated by the consistency of the pattern. Did a story always have to feature one character undergoing one very specific personal trial? Did a lesson always have to be learned? Did the character always have to be healed or find redemption?

I was reminded of my students’ fondness for parables when I read the current online debate about the viability of memoir as a genre that arose after Lorrie Moore published an essay-review on this subject in the New York Review of Books. Moore asks whether memoirs of bereavement, such as Meghan O’Rourke’s recent The Long Goodbye, or Jill Bialosky’s History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, have the literary chops to justify themselves. (She views Jerry McGill’s Dear Marcus: Speaking to the Man Who Shot Me more favorably.) She suggests that the raw material of these writers’ lives might be better served by fiction, which allows for “deep imagining, revealing design, and solid construction of heroines.” Further, Moore claims that many memoirs fail to move beyond detailing the writer’s “psychic injury,” which, she laments, cannot be subjected to “objective criticism.” To attempt to criticize someone’s account of her battle with alcoholism or her mother’s death from cancer, Lorrie Moore says, “is like quarreling with a fish.” Brevity editor and nonfiction writer Dinty Moore takes issue with what he perceives to be Lorrie Moore’s preference for fiction over the “inferior genre” of memoir, and asks plaintively, “We work hard to make our memoirs compelling, artful and true. Why all the hating?”

I take issue with the idea that imagining deeply, designing elegantly, and constructing solidly are by definition more fiction’s domain than the memoir’s. The best exemplars of both genres share the ability to use language and form in ways that reinvent and invigorate their genres and illuminate human experience. A well-written memoir requires as much imagination as does a good novel, though the memoir’s clearer tether to real-life events makes it appear to require attention to just the facts, ma’am. But I don’t buy that argument. In some ways, a good memoir is especially hard to write because the writer must imaginatively reshape the raw material of his or her experience, rather than rely on the scaffold of experience to provide the story’s structure and meaning. Herein lies the problem...