Rich People Things by Chris Lehmann

Author:Chris Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OR Books LLC

Rich People Thing No. 17:

The Memoir

There’s a long, honorable tradition of self-narration in Western letters, stretching back to St. Augustine. But sometime in the mid-1990s, the American publishing scene was overrun with a different sort of confessional genre—the Oprah-age memoir. And where Augustine and his motley band of successors up to the modern age, from Benvenuto Cellini to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, crafted the story of their selves as edifying glimpses of some universal principle working out its implacable logic on mortal human matter, the memoirs of our past two decades were almost uniformly sagas of individual uplift. In works ranging from Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club to Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, we saw heroic narrator after heroic narrator conquering the impersonal machinations of a hostile social world.

In these stories, the finished memoir itself is a testimony to the hard work of spiritual conquest—an odd reverse-image of the Calvinist tradition of American confession, whereby the convicted sinner offers the narration of his corrupt and fallen exploits to diagram his richly deserved fate of eternal damnation. But in the secular, therapeutic redemption offered in our memoir age, the protagonists are blameless victims, initiated by rogue social forces into the rigged game of their own downfall via substance abuse, mental disturbance, or bad “magical thinking” (to borrow the title of another acclaimed recent memoir by belles-lettres essayist Joan Didion).

Most of all, the contemporary memoir is a tale of family dysfunction, where the neglect, abuse, or untimely death of parents (or parent-figures) short-circuits traditional filial attachments. Dave Eggers’s Gen X saga of self, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is perhaps the best exemplar of the form. Within its first fifty pages, both of Eggers’ parents die, leaving our narrator to light out for the West in the unencumbered literary tradition of Huck Finn. But even this self-empowered hero is still tasked with reconstituting a family life of sorts, serving as the parental guardian of his young brother Topher and inculcating him with the tribal canons of his media-saturated, wisecracking, recursively ironic generation.

The very particular family saga shared by today’s memoir genre has prompted literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels to dub it the signature storytelling form for neoliberalism, the market-centered ideology of the new global economy. That’s because, as Michaels notes, these pared-down chronicles of family life perfectly mirror Margaret Thatcher’s famed right-wing aphorism, “There is no such thing as society.”1 And while Thatcher’s free-market reign witnessed the privatization of all manner of social goods, from council flats to electric utilities, the memoir has facilitated a no-less radical privatization of the self, whereby readers vicariously see themselves as the authors of a postsocial destiny, conditioned neither by their own personal histories nor by the broader life outcomes meted out by the hierarchies of social class.

Indeed, this willed flight from the social world has played no small part in the great formal weakness of today’s memoir genre—the embarrassing propensity of certain of its practitioners to wander off into to the inviting meadows of first-person fabrication.

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