On Memoir and Money
The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.I was excited to find out recently that a panel on memoir organized by UNL grad students Madeline Wiseman and Kelly Gray Carlisle has been accepted for next year's AWP conference in Chicago. Madeline, Kelly, Sue Silverman, Lucy Ferriss, Karen McElmurray, and I will be having a conversation about memoir, truth, lies, and the workings of memory.
~Kurt Vonnegut
Here's the description Kelly and Madeline wrote:
Czeslaw Milosz said, “It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Our panel investigates the role of factual accuracy in memoir, why memoirists invent to improve the facts, and the difficulty in telling traumatic memory. What if research reveals conflicting truths? What is the cost of invention to the story? How do the psychological and physiological workings of memory, the act of writing, and the influence of the world outside the writer hinder or enrich the truth?But what's on my mind right now is, How can a professor of memoir encourage student writers to be sincere and honest when wildly successful examples of cynical, dishonest memoir writers are flourishing?
Yesterday, I read Walter Kirn's evisceration of James Frey's new novel in the New York Times Book Review; you'll remember Frey as the falsifying memoirist upbraided by Oprah on national TV. Regarding his new novel, Frey told one journalist, "“I know I’m going to be slaughtered" by the critics (and Kirn didn't pull any punches), "but so be it. I’m much more concerned with what the people who spend their money on my book think of it, rather than the people in the ivory towers of the intelligentsia.”
And that really gets at the heart of the matter. Spinning the concept of honesty, of fidelity to facts, as a luxury of the academic elite, Frey spun his life into a tale of sensationalism and played a public hungry for gore. He cares about the people who spend money on him, and the payoff has been huge. Raised wealthy, Frey now owns not only a 3-bedroom condo in Soho, but a one-bedroom ($985,000) apartment next to it, along with a beach house in Amagansett. His new novel was purchased by HarperCollins for an estimated $1.5 million.
Frey told Vanity Fair about being affirmed by Norman Mailer. The two self-styled bad boys
talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”Um. Or not. To me, it sounds like Norman Mailer's definition is by definition corrupt.
But how to encourage students to pursue genuine, honest, even un-sexy questions in their memoir writing, when the alternative is so lucrative? Why grow your soul, in Vonnegut's words, when you can tour like a rock star?
"Where any view of Money exists," wrote the poet William Blake, "Art cannot be carried on, but War only."
Any view. So if you're a writer, stop thinking about the monetary payoff. The true payoff comes in doing the work, and what you learn there.
You can write for money, too. Sure. We all have to pay the bills. Just don't lie to yourself (or the world) about which master you're serving when you pick up your pen.
Faye said:
I had an interesting experience recently. I was starting to work on an essay, and I was trying to recall a detail about the day I had first arrived in London as a student at the age of 19. I happen to have diaries that I have written for much of my life, and I have a diary detailing that year I spent abroad. I quickly found the detail I was looking for (where I stayed that first night), but then I started reading more. I was surprised to realize that what I remembered about London and what was written in my diary were different. As a matter of fact, I hadn't remembered most of the events I had written in my diary so many years ago, and reading about them now changed the way I felt about and remembered some aspects of that year. The interesting thing is that if I did not have that diary, I would never have remembered these incidents, and the only record of that time would have been what was in my mind. It brings up the realization that even when I think I am being completely honest and faithful to what I remember in my life, I might not be getting things right. Thankfully I do have many diaries, but of course there are many things, sometimes years, that I did not record. So it will be an interesting process to figure out how to write about certain times and things in my life.
Some things I thought might be intersting to write about are less powerful or interesting when I discover that the reality doesn't match my memory. But I can't see just making it up or writing what isn't accurate to make it more interesting.
For me, still as somewhat of a beginner, what I'm realizing is that the facts are what they are, but what I make of them is where I can "play." In other words, I might have stayed at the International Student House in London that first night, and that's that. But how I felt about staying there, or what it meant in the bigger picture of what I'm getting at in my writing, if anything at all...those are the things I can work with. To mimic Vivian Gornick, the situation is what it is...the story is mine. And I can't think of anything much more sacred than one's story...so it's important to be honest and draw it from what really happened. Maybe writers have to have faith that their experience of things and their minds are what are unique and interesting. Which brings up a lot of questions about Lauren Slater's "Lying"...but I'd better stop here!
I'll be away for a while after this, but I look forward to reading your blog and more comments from others.
July 10, 2008 4:18 PMxxxicana said:
Hey, Joy, Carleen here. As you know I am working on a bio and I find myself facing similar issues your post raises. In my case, the protagonists were, by their own admissions, mythomaniacs. Frida and Diego embellished, embroidered, and fabricated many aspects of their lives. It is difficult to get to the "truth" with such uncooperative characters! This is an issue I will take up in an academic article -- how should the biographer choose from alternative accounts of a person's life? I am also finding that memory is a tricky thing -- people filter experiences through their individual and cultural worldviews. In the case of Frida, her niece denies that Frida had an active sexual life with women partners. Isolde Kahlo wrote her memories from the vantage point of a 75 year old, devout Catholic woman that idolized her aunt. Do I pick and choose from Isolde's memories or discount them entirely? Am I off topic? I hope not! I do see parallels to your work on memoir and my struggles with writing the past - whether as archaeologist or biographer. It is easy to romanticize the past, tempting to fall into the trap of sensationalism for personal gain (whether that be monetary or not). Thanks for your post and Faye's . . . and making me go "hmmmm."
July 11, 2008 1:35 AM