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157 Chapter 4 EXCEPTIONALLY PUBLIC: MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS I: THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD AND JAMES FREY’S A MILLION LITTLE PIECES In 2003, more than one hundred and sixty books labelled by their press as memoir, biography, or autobiography were published by Random House and HarperCollins. Some of these books sold relatively well and were rereleased as paperbacks. As is the case with the majority of books published in any given year, some titles were not successful and probably few people bought or read them. Two titles published that year stand out as exceptional in a way that leads me to reconceptualize the logic of the exception as it has been developed in auto/biography studies since the late 1980s. These two books were the English translation of the first two volumes of Marjane Satrapi ’s Persepolis and James Frey’s memoir about addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces. At first glance, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and A Million Little Pieces seem to have little to do with each other. Satrapi’s story of her childhood and teen years in Iran during the rise of fundamentalism in the 1970s is in the form of a graphic memoir—also called a graphic novel or an example of “commix”1 and has often been compared to Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (Foroohar et al. 2005; Hoashi 2007). A Million Little Pieces sold moderately well at first, but became a national bestseller when it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in 2005. Subsequently, James Frey was found to have exaggerated and fabricated elements of his life story, and after a series of nasty public confrontations he was humiliated and his publisher , Random House, issued an offer to refund the purchase amount if any reader was dissatisfied by the truthfulness of the story (Rich 2006). The popularity of both books at an important point in the recent history of the United States does in fact tie them together in ways that work CHAPTER 4 158 against the idea in auto/biography studies that marginal texts matter more than mainstream or popular ones. Until very recently, popular or mainstream texts have been regarded with suspicion in much of the scholarly work of auto/biography studies. This wariness has taken two forms: on the one hand, auto/biography scholars who have been trained in the techniques of literary analysis have sometimes equated mainstream texts with a kind of commodification that for them signals a lack of literary quality. Early autobiography critics interested in canon-building saw “memoir,” for instance, as a non-literary genre belonging to the market and subject to market forces, as opposed to autobiography, which is literary. Later critics constructed a poetics for autobiography based on aesthetic criteria similar to that applied to other literary works such as the novel or poetry, resulting in the exclusion or marginalization of works that did not meet the implicit demands of the criteria.2 On the other hand, auto/biography scholars who have critiqued these kinds of positions because they worked to exclude texts by marginalized authors have championed texts that are marginal politically but not in other ways. Arguments for the poetics of these texts are usually about bringing these texts into academic purview or the classroom because they are worth reading for ideological reasons and because they seem to exceed the generic terms of autobiography itself. This approach is evident in studies of non-canonical texts by women, Aboriginal people, or workingclass people, for instance (Kaplan 1992; Goldman 1996; Wong 1992; Stanley 2000) It is particularly pronounced in Leigh Gilmore’s use of the term “limit texts” to identify texts that challenge the limits of a genre but have a level of complexity that makes them worth reading. They are what she calls experimental texts, and she says that these kinds of texts are central to the development of autobiography itself. With this, Gilmore implies that avantgarde writing that is neither popular nor populist is what has shaped autobiography as a discourse, even when market forces are taken into account. And so, it is what she chooses to study in The Limits of Autobiography (2001, 16–17). In auto/biography studies, this kind of logic of the exceptional autobiographical text tends to govern the tendency for scholars to examine texts that are avowedly unpopular with many readers or that many readers , particularly those who read books produced by mainstream presses, would not have heard about...

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