The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

Notes

 Notes Chapter One 1. The short memoir or personal essay is everywhere. At Newsweek , the weekly column My Turn is a personal narrative: the magazine receives fifteen hundred unsolicited pieces every week. At the New Yorker the short memoir is labeled Personal History. Most daily newspapers or their Sunday sections publish personal writing: for example, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday Magazine includes My Word, a 900-word back-page memoir piece. Personal essays are found at the New York Times: in the Sunday Style section called Modern Love and in the New York Times Magazine called Lives. Alice Sebold’s Lucky began as a personal narrative in the New York Times Magazine: an editor read it and insisted she write the book, a not uncommon way in which full-length memoir is initiated . I have written of the testimonial works of James Baldwin: they are now in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, 1998. Among the best memoiristic essay collections I know are those by Meghan Daum, My Misspent Youth (2001); Leonard Kriegel, Flying Solo: Reimagining Manhood, Courage, and Loss (1998); Phillip Lopate, Portrait of My Body (1996); and Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982). The following short memoir anthologies are essential: The Beholder’s Eye: A Collection of America’s Finest Personal Journalism, edited by Walt Harrington (2005); In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones (1999); The Norton Book of American Autobiography, larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:47 AM Page 193 edited by Jay Parini (1999); The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate (1994); California Childhood: Recollections and Stories of the Golden State, edited by Gary Soto (1988); and The Best American Essays, an annual. Some of the finer literary journals that publish personal essays and short memoir (under six thousand words) are the Sun, Fourth Genre, the Missouri Review, Witness, and the North American Review. 2. Anne Frank began her diary on her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, and stopped two years later on August 1, 1944, when she and her family were removed from the annex and freight-trained to Auschwitz . The Diary has been published (by Anne’s father and others) in a series of severely edited editions, beginning in 1947. My article “‘In Spite of Everything’: The Definitive Indefinite Anne Frank,” Antioch Review 58, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 40–54, describes why Anne’s revelations were censored and what the book says now after those revelations were restored. 3. Here’s a list of good books that analyze the memoir universe: by era (memoir is the trend, autobiography, the tradition); by technique (narration, characterization, description, plot); by subject (illness, loss, family, romance, person, place, event, feminist, and so on); by traditional form (letter, diary, journal, travel essay, reflective essay, personal narrative, memoir). Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story (2000) is a brilliant essay about short and long memoir forms; she is a superb close reader of memoir style. Jill Ker Conway’s When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998) takes the reader from St. Augustine and Rousseau to Jan Morris and Bruce McCall. Surveying how autobiography is shaped by culture, Conway is insightful on the “agency” difference between men and women: memoirs by men feature their built-in agency while memoirs by women depict women acquiring agency. Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (1991) showcases she who first dared to merge literary criticism, women’s studies, and personal narrative. Philippe  Notes larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:47 AM Page 194 Lejeune’s difficult but rewarding On Autobiography (1989) applies the structuralist’s spade to mostly French autobiographers. William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1987) includes essays about craft and impetus by memoirists, biographers, and a few autobiographical novelists. Robert Lyons’s Autobiography : A Reader for Writers (1984) is the finest set of analytical introductions to the traditional autobiographical forms ever written. Lyons is the most astute thinker about the formal elements of autobiography I’ve read; it’s a literary crime that his anthology remains out of print. Roy Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960) takes apart traditional autobiography and emphasizes that in writing their story writers “struggle with the truth,” the struggle being the point, not the arrival at the truth. Other joys include Maureen Murdock, Unreliable...