“The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again” (Book Review)
[This review is part of the Spotlight Series]
As I am one of the people who has had, as Birkerts writes, the “urge to capture and memorialize personal experience”, this short, nicely written text was an extremely helpful, heartening read. I had been working on a memoir of my own while I was reading it, an ambitious, consuming task which I now take less lightly since reading Birkerts’ book.
The title should give a clue to the sort of book this is, a kind of un-manual–it is not “how to write your memoir” or “how to sell your memoir in 30 days or less”–which dwells on the craft of writing and the specific challenges of memoir-writing. One cannot, as he emphasizes again and again, just recount the events chronologically. Even the most delicious scandal needs a frame.
Birkerts draws from a variety of classic memoirs, grouped by subgenre (for example, the coming of age memoir and the trauma narrative), looks closely at each one, and tries to figure out why it works. One of the delights of Birkerts’ method is that it shows how polymorphous the genre is. Oh, that’s how you write a memoir, I thought, when I finished up the section including Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabakov and Annie Dillard, but then there is Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, which breaks all of the rules of the genre and succeeds anyway:
The eloquence of the understated should not be disregarded, the more so as one of the besotting temptations of the genre is filling in, telling more than is necessary. (94)
How to tell: the question vexes and makes the memoir even more difficult than fiction in many ways. It is hard to have the perspective on yourself that is required. What all memoirs have in common, and what makes them compelling to write as well as to read, is that they delve into memory, sort through life experience to make sense of it, and do so in a unique position towards the past. The narrator must look back, sometimes narrating from the point of view of the naive past self and sometimes from the evaluating present. What is important in memoir is the necessity of dwelling on the self.
I loved the book. I’ll read it again. I’m reading Mary Karr now, whose first memoir is analysed here, and I’ll be reading several of the other texts he deals with, possibly all. It was written as part of a series edited by Charles Baxter and published by Graywolf Press which includes titles such as Amy Bloom’s The Art of Endings and Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, all of which I think I’ll be reading as well, though perhaps not during this ever-shorter life.
Oh I’m so glad you enjoyed your Graywolf Press book! It sounds like a great resource! I too have been writing my memoirs, but haven’t finished yet. This sounds like something I should definitely read prior to completion! Thank you for the great review!
Yes, I loved Birkerts’ book, too – enlightening for both writers and readers of memoir – and I enjoyed your thoughtful review. But I did wonder: if we start with the presumption that our life is a narrative, are we more likely to find patterns or meaning in it that are not there, especially if we are wielding the dual point of view of both ‘naïve past’ and ‘evaluating present’? Perhaps we need to be aware of how random chance and meaningful connections intertwine in our lives. But I am grateful to Birkerts – he launched me into a memoir-reading binge, and gave me a totally different perspective on one of my writing projects – the story of a friend’s life.