Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir by Helena de Bres

Author:Helena de Bres
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Aesthetics, Philosophy, General, Literary Criticism, Writing, Nonfiction (Incl. Memoirs)
ISBN: 9780226793801
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-09-09T21:00:00+00:00

Why Write a Memoir?

Writing a good memoir is a daunting endeavor. First, there’s the difficulty of capturing an authentic interpretation of your past experience in words, in light of the dangers of self-deception, self-ignorance, memory failure, and the distortions of narrative form. Second, there’s the difficulty of balancing the commitment to telling your readers the truth with the possibly conflicting aim of producing a work with high literary value. Third, there’s the difficulty of working out how to write about your subjects without wronging them in the process and how to weigh those moral requirements against the distinct imperatives of both truth and art.

But that’s not all. As well as imposing these cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical demands, there’s the fact that writing a memoir is personally costly to the writer. Producing a memoir of any substantial length and seriousness requires expending a huge amount of time and effort, in a pursuit that many of the writer’s intimates and associates may not understand or respect. It can be emotionally exhausting during the writing phase and anxiety-inducing after publication and may damage or destroy relationships the memoirist cherishes.

William Bell Scott said in the nineteenth century that “to write one’s mental history is too difficult as well as too dreadful”: it’s “like walking into the street naked, and is only likely to frighten our neighbors.”1 Henry James wrote of his autobiographical writing: “I [. . .] had to turn nothing less than myself inside out.”2 And Melissa Febos suggests, more recently: “If it doesn’t feel at some point like peeling off your own skin, you’re probably not being honest enough.”3

Given all that, why would someone do it?

The Memoirist as Narcissist

To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster.

williAM h. gAss 4

One common answer, usually from outside the memoirist camp, is that memoirists are narcissists, who get a kick out of contemplating and displaying themselves for a public audience. William H. Gass— fiction writer, essayist, critic, and philosopher—wrote a jeremiad against memoirists on this theme in Harper’s in 1994, in the early years of today’s memoir boom. In the essay, “The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism,” Gass takes a swipe at what he presents as the infantile self-preoccupation of the contemporary personal writer:

Look, Ma, I’m breathing. See me take my initial toddle, use the potty, scratch my sister; win spin the bottle. Gee whiz, my first adultery—what a guy! That surely deserves a commemorative marker on the superhighway of my life. So now I’m writing my own sweet history.

As Gass’s title indicates, critiques of this kind often diagnose the problem of memoir as an instance of a broader social problem. Critics disagree over the causes: maybe it’s the erosion of communal bonds by urbanization and industrialization, or the destruction of the collective moral compass by atheism and postmodern nihilism, or the mainstreaming of navel-gazing via psychotherapy and self-help, or the look-at-me culture born of talk shows, reality TV, and social media. But whichever it is, the

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