Chapter 1
MEMOIR003UNIVERSE
As mankind “matures,” as it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of the self and others and in the publication of one’s findings, biography and autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character.
—H. G. WELLS, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934
 
I moved on to the memoir section. After browsing for a while, I knew
why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told,
so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so
many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?
I flipped through the sexual abuse memoirs, sexual conquest memoirs,
sexual inadequacy memoirs, alternative sexual memoirs, remorseful
hedonist rock star memoirs, twelve-step memoirs, memoirs about
reading (A Reading Life: Book by Book). There were five memoirs by
one author, a woman who had written a memoir about her troubled
relationship with her famous fiction-writer father; a memoir about her
troubled relationship with her children; a memoir about her troubled
relationship with the bottle; and finally a memoir about her more
loving relationship with herself. There were several memoirs about the
difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write
memoir memoirs: A Memoirist’s Guide to Writing Your Memoir and
the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was
grateful to the books for teaching me—without my even having to
read them—that there were people in the world more desperate, more
self-absorbed, more boring than I was.
—BROCK CLARKE, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England: A Novel, 2007
 
 
I probably, especially had some scorn for memoirs that were about the worst thing that ever happened to you. Then something really, really bad happened to me, and I realized that I needed to write about it.
—ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN, author of
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir,
National Public Radio interview, January 2009
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
DOG MEMOIRS WERE THE RAGE. It started with the mind-boggling success of John Grogan’s 2005 book Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog. That spurred memoirs devoted to Lava, Gus, Bob, Orson, Bodo, Sadie, Merle, Sprite, and two separate dogs named Beau (masters: Anna Quindlen and Mark Doty). Perhaps sensing that the genre was close to exhaustion, Grand Central Publishing paid a reported $1.25 million for the right to publish a book about a rescued cat who lived for nineteen years in a library in a small town in Iowa. (This was actually the second library memoir of the year, following Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library, by Don Borchert.) It was a good business move: Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World shot to the top of the bestseller lists. There followed memoirs devoted to the authors’ relationships with an owl (Wesley the Owl ) and a parrot (Alex & Me). But Marley wasn’t done yet. Hollywood’s version of his story was the number-one movie of Christmas 2008, and John Grogan himself produced three separate Marley texts for kids—Bad Dog, Marley! and Marley: A Dog Like No Other and A Very Marley Christmas.
As the first decade of the third millennium shambled to its conclusion, canine chronicles were just the tip of the autobiographical iceberg. Even after James Frey got exposed for making up large swaths of his book A Million Little Pieces: A Memoir, was dressed down on television by Oprah Winfrey, and was followed by a seemingly endless stream of memoir scandals, the genre seemed to be getting stronger. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of U.S. book sales, total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008. You certainly could not avoid memoir by turning on Oprah’s television show. Early in 2007, she chose Sidney Poitier’s autobiography, The Measure of a Man, for an Oprah’s Book Club Selection; the title went on to sell 558,000 copies for the year. One of Oprah’s previous selections, Elie Wiesel’s venerable Holocaust memoir, Night, continued to sell well—so well, in fact, that after a run of eighty consecutive weeks (bringing the total sales figure to some ten million copies), The New York Times summarily and rather unsportingly dropped the book from its bestseller list. A member of the Times Book Review staff explained to the newspaper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, “The editorial spirit of the list is to track the sales of new books. . . . We simply cannot track such books [as Night] indefinitely.”
Nor could you escape memoirs by visiting a Starbucks. The second choice for the coffee chain’s own book program was Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which sold 116,000 copies in Starbucks stores, and a total of 458,000 for the year. The coffee chain went on to anoint more memoirs, including The House at Sugar Beach, American journalist Helene Cooper’s reminiscences of her Liberian girlhood; Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, by Norman Ollestad; Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story, by Isabel Gillies; and Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, by David Sheff. This was not to be confused with Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, written by Nic Sheff, son of David, which went on sale in the same month as his father’s book. Or with Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, in which, according to its publisher, “Robert Leleux describes his East Texas boyhood and coming of age under the tutelage of his eccentric, bewigged, flamboyant, and knowing mother.” That book could not fail to bring to mind Sean Wilsey, whose 2005 memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, focused on his eccentric mother, Pat Montandon. Two years later Montandon released her own memoir, Oh the Hell of It All, which imitated not only the title but the cover art and design of her son’s book. Susanna Sonnenberg, Lee Montgomery, and Mary Gordon also wrote memoirs about their unconventional moms, Gordon’s being a companion piece to her 1996 memoir about her troubled dad. Bernard Cooper, Lucinda Franks, Dinah Lenney, and Leslie Garis published memoirs about their difficult relationships with their fathers, and Joan Wickersham one about coming to terms with her father’s suicide, but probably the most conflicted father of the moment, memoir division, was Anatole Broyard, the late book critic of The New York Times, who had neglected in his own two memoirs, Kafka Was the Rage and Intoxicated by My Illness, to mention the facts that he was raised by mixed-race parents who were considered (by themselves and the world at large) to be black and that he had spent his adult life passing as white. This task fell to Broyard’s daughter, Bliss, who published a memoir that detailed the complicated family history of race and deception. (Not surprisingly, it fell to Bliss Broyard to write a Times review of David Matthews’s memoir about growing up with an African-American father and a schizophrenic Jewish mother.) Outselling all of these books, of course, were sportscaster Jim Nantz’s and the late Tim Russert’s memoirs about their extremely warm and fuzzy relationships with their fathers.
As ubiquitous as memoirs seem in the United States, they are—if there are degrees of ubiquity—even more so in Britain, accounting for seven of the top ten bestselling nonfiction hardcovers in both 2007 and 2008. Almost all successful U.K. memoirs fall into two categories. The first is the “misery memoir”: an account, usually by a noncelebrity, of childhood abuse or otherwise painful or difficult circumstances. The genre actually originated in the United States with such works as Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It” and its many sequels, Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, but has struck a big and highly sensitive nerve in the U.K. over the past decade. The genre has colonized substantial real estate in bookstores, with scores and scores of books, each one with a white or off-white or pale pastel cover containing a staged photograph of a little boy or girl (usually a model rather than the author when young) looking sad. British misery memoirs tend to have brief titles, like Sickened, Damaged, The Little Prisoner, Broken Wings, Ugly, and Beyond Ugly, except when they consist of complete sentences, as in the similarly titled Don’t Ever Tell; Don’t Tell Mummy; Tell Me Why, Mummy; Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes; and Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid?, a memoir by a middle-class teacher whose teenage sons became heroin addicts.
The second category is the life story of a mid-level radio disk jockey, television presenter, athlete, or comedian, or their WAGs, i.e., wives and girlfriends. Thus the top British nonfiction book of 2007 was On the Edge, by TV personality Richard Hammond, and number one in 2008 was At My Mother’s Knee . . . and Other Low Joints: The Autobiography,1 by Paul O’Grady, a comedian, followed by the memoirs of Dawn French (comedian), Julie Walters (actress), Michael Parkinson (chat-show host), Alan Carr (comedian), Cliff Richard (singer), and Fern Britton (daytime TV presenter).
While it’s true that a number of North American A- or at least B+ listers put out memoirs as the decade neared its end—including not only Sidney Poitier but also Barbara Walters, William Shatner, Carrie Fisher, Quincy Jones, Ted Turner, Hugh Hefner, Christopher Plummer, Tony Curtis, Robert Wagner, and Michael Phelps, whose book was written, typeset, bound, and on the shelves within four months after he was handed his final Olympic gold medal—the continent’s readers also were graced with many life stories of the less notable. I shudder to think what a Brit would make of an American bookstore shelf groaning with the autobiographies of Tori Spelling, her mom Candy Spelling, game-show hosts Bob Barker and Tom Bergeron, Howard Stern sidekick Artie Lange, George Hamilton, Madonna’s brother, Oprah Winfrey’s cousin, teenage singer-actress Miley Cyrus,2 fifteen-minutes-of-famester Joe the Plumber, American Idol loser Sanjaya Malakar, and 1970s and 1980s TV personalities Valerie Bertinelli, Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormick, Marie Osmond, Cloris Leachman, and Jodie Sweetin (Full House), who penned a redemptive memoir about her recovery from methamphetamine addiction.
U.S. memoirs are less dominant on the bestseller lists than their U.K. counterparts, but they make up for this in breadth. The American memoir is so capacious that it cannot be contained by just one category; this is the time of a million little subgenres. Even more popular than celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and eccentric-mother memoirs is the one memorably dubbed (by Sarah Goldstein) “shtick lit”: that is to say, books perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it. The progenitor was arguably Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 decided to live in a cabin he built near Walden Pond and document the experience in prose. (Fun fact: Thoreau actually spent two years in the cabin but collapsed them into one for the book, an early example of “the year of ” memoir.) There have been numerous examples over the years, including Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), for which she pretended to be insane; Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), for which he pretended to be poor; John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), for which he pretended to be black; George Plimpton’s Paper Lion (1966), for which he pretended to be a professional football player; and Norah Vincent ’s Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back (2006), for which she pretended to be a man. As these examples suggest, the projects undertaken for such books have tended to grow ever more stuntlike over time. The trend was certainly borne out by the flowering of shtick lit at decade’s end. The book that got the most attention—probably because of the excellent photo opportunity of a man wearing a robe and carrying a staff on Manhattan sidewalks—was The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Attempt to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, by A. J. Jacobs, who had previously published The Know-It-All: One’s Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, a memoir of his attempt to read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica. (Jacobs’s works partook of both popular titular conventions for such volumes: a play on the book and movie title The Year of Living Dangerously and a subtitle commencing “One Man’s/One Woman’s . . .”) About as derivative as could be was a 2008 tome titled Reading the OED [Oxford English Dictionary]: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.
Many of these books had the element of a quest, notably Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, in which she described her efforts at transcendence by, well, eating, praying, and loving in exotic locales; Nielsen BookScan has counted more than four million copies sold. There was also Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States; Nine Ways to Cross a River, in which the author, Akiko Busch, describes swimming across, yes, nine rivers; The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World; Cabin Pressure: One Man’s Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor; and books that recounted the authors’ attempts to master the games of bridge and pocket billiards. Others documented a period of time (usually a Thoreauvian year) spent under self-imposed limitations or other behavioral requirement. Thus Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life was about the effort of Barbara Kingsolver and her family to eat only home-grown or local food for a year. It was joined by:
• A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy
• Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
• Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping
• The Big Turnoff: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid
• Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone
Norah Vincent’s return to the genre brought it, full circle, back to Nellie Bly: Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin.
Julie Powell had a progression that in its typicalness was somehow archetypal: several years earlier she created a blog devoted to her attempt to spend a year cooking recipes only from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Then she published a memoir based on the blog—Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Powell then wrote another memoir, about her experience learning to be a butcher, which was scheduled to be published to coincide with the release of Nora Ephron’s movie adaptation of Julie [Amy Adams] & Julia [Meryl Streep]. Powell’s second book inevitably recalls Bill Buford’s memoir of working with chef Mario Batali, Heat. Child’s own memoir, My Life in France, was posthumously published in 2006; this was followed by a memoir from her editor, Judith Jones, and one from Child’s chef and TV producer. There was also a memoir by cookbook author Marcella Hazan, the fourth memoir by food editor and writer Ruth Reichl, and a food-related memoir by Maya Angelou. That was Angelou’s eighth memoir overall since I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings appeared in 1969. That may or may not be a record, depending on how one classifies the books Shirley MacLaine has written chronicling her past, present, and future lives, the eleventh of which came out in 2007.
Other popular autobiographical subgenres emerged for reasons similar, presumably, to the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Something was in the air. How else could one explain the popularity of the dad memoir (being, as opposed to possessing, one), seen in books titled Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America; Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad; Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table; Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska; China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood ; and Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life? Similarly, it would be hard to come up with a reason for the sudden explosion of autobiographies about autistic spectrum disorders. It just seemed to happen, with books about raising autistic children by Jenny McCarthy, Cathleen Lewis, Charlotte Moore, and Rupert Isaacson, one by Karl Taro Greenfeld about having an autistic brother, and memoirs about life with autism or Asperger’s by Daniel Tammet, husband and wife Jerry and Mary Newport, and John Elder Robison, the brother of Running with Scissors’ Augusten Burroughs. Burroughs himself published his fourth memoir, about his father, in 2008; later that year, his mother, Margaret Robison, signed a contract to write a memoir of her own. Both of these were part of the trend of memoirs by successful memoirists’ relatives, as were the memoirs written by Frank McCourt’s brothers Malachy and Alphie.
Not that autobiographical one-offs have not been plenty plentiful. They’ve included memoirs about dissecting a cadaver, growing up in an immigrant Vietnamese family in Michigan, being a waitress at a fancy Manhattan restaurant, being a fan of the New York Giants football team and being a fan of the rock group Guided by Voices (those are two separate books by two separate authors), being a deaf Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, spending from 1950 and 1952 at the polio rehabilitation hospital established by Franklin Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, building public schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, being twins separated at birth and finding each other half a lifetime later, being kidnapped and held for ransom one night in 1998, being a brain scientist who suffered a stroke, being (as the memoir’s title put it) a “mean little deaf queer,” being the brother of a well-known author who committed suicide, being the addicted and troubled brother of a moderately well known deceased writer-editor, and being the son of that writer-editor’s boss, not to mention a sufferer of agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and elevator, tunnel, bridge, flying, and parking lot phobia. (The authors are, respectively, Christine Montross, Bich Minh Nguyen, Phoebe Damrosch, Roger Director, John Sellers, Josh Swiller, Susan Richards Shreve, Greg Mortenson, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, Stanley Alpert, Jill Bolte Taylor, Terry Galloway, Christopher Lukas, Steve Geng, and Allen Shawn.)
On the other hand, many memoirs were in keeping with very old traditions. The first autobiography ever written, according to some counts, was Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Since then, noteworthy spiritual autobiographies have been written by Saint Teresa of Ávila, Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and, in our own time, Denise Jackson (who is the wife of country music singer Alan Jackson but is referring to God in the title of her book, It’s All About Him), football coach Tony Dungy, former boxer George Foreman, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, Christian singer Amy Grant, and Britney Spears’s mother, Lynne Spears.3 The most successful spiritual memoir of the moment was by a preacher who says he was hit by a truck, saw heaven, and came back to life. The story of that experience, Ninety Minutes in Heaven, had sold more than 1.4 million copies as of the middle of 2009, according to BookScan. Other spiritual memoirs were Easter Everywhere, about growing up as the daugh ter of a Lutheran minister; The Water Will Hold You, about a skeptic who learns to pray; and Leaving Church, about an Episcopal priest who takes over a country church, only to find that her fantasy of running a rural parish is unrealistic. Two books by women who escaped polygamous marriages in fundamentalist Mormon sects were sort of antireligious memoirs, as was Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir, a painfully funny (or funnily painful) account of his disaffection with the Orthodox Jewish religion in which he was raised. Tagline: “That ’s so god.” On the other hand, Antony Flew published There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Mary Karr, author of the neo-memoir classic The Liars’ Club and its sequel, Cherry, told The New York Times, “I’m working on my third memoir, Lit, which concerns my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic (maybe not the Pope’s favorite, but still an on-my-knees spouter of praise and beggar for favors).” Brian Welch (a.k.a. Head), the former lead guitarist of the rock group Korn, also published his autobiography. In an interview with Newsweek, Welch explained his motivation: “I would love people to know God; I want people to know what I’ve found. It’s really personal. It’s, like, real. God is not some mean old man in the sky. He’s not far away, he’s near. He’s with us on Earth; he opens your life.”
The rock-star memoir was abundant in the late 2000s—oddly so, given the widespread belief that rock fans are not the most enthusiastic readers. Besides Head’s opus, there were entries by Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Nikki Sixx of Möt ley Crüe, AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, Eminem, and veteran producer Joe Boyd. In the rock-star muse subcategory, Pattie Boyd (who was married to both Clapton and George Harrison), Catherine James (who dated and/or married Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and other luminaries), and Johnny Cash’s first wife, Vivian, all told their stories. So did Lance Bass, formerly of the boy band ’N Sync, who has since come out as gay. “I’ve been asked too many times to write a book by the fans,” Bass commented. “And it was very, I don’t know, like, therapeutic, writing this book. Because the whole time, with ’NSync especially, it went by just so fast, it was like a blur. There was a lot of different things that I didn’t realize were going on.” Chuck Panozzo, the gay bass player for the ’70s rock band Styx, put forth a memoir as well. (Other famous or semifamous gay memoirists were actors Farley Granger and Rupert Everett; Mike Jones, the male escort who outed preacher Ted Haggard; John Amaechi, the first NBA player to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality; and Renée Richards, born Richard Raskind, who had briefly played on the women’s tennis tour after a sex-change operation and written her first autobiography back in 1986.) Looking toward the future, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones signed a $7.3 million deal to write a memoir. Much of the discussion centered on how much of his past Richards could and would remember. The publisher of Little, Brown did not meet with the guitarist but read a ten-page excerpt, and said, “Seeing what was on the page allayed any concerns.” The text, he continued, “had a clarity and vividness which I envy.”
Even more and even more unaccountably numerous than rock-star memoirs were ones by politicians, and Richards’s fee was in keeping with what heavy-hitting statesmen have been getting. The all-time record is generally agreed to be the $10 million Bill Clinton received for My Life, and for a time second place was held by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, who got $8.5 million for The Age of Turbulence, published in 2007. He was nudged into third by Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, who agreed to write his autobiography for a reported advance of around $9 million. (Spookily, the same week as the announcement, Simon & Schuster published The Ghost by Robert Harris, a thriller about a Blair-like former British prime minister who sells his memoirs for $10 million.) Senator Edward Kennedy announced the sale of his own book the following month but couldn’t quite match the advance: his reported figure was $8 million. Fetching even more modest prices were such Bush administration figures as Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, and the former president himself, all of whom inked pacts shortly before or after the administration got out of Dodge.
Autobiographies were also issued by a long list of not-quite-as-eminent political figures, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, venerable speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen, former CIA chief George Tenet, Elizabeth Edwards (wife of John), Democratic operatives Robert Shrum and Terry McAuliffe, and former congressman Tom DeLay. During the 2008 presidential campaign, old autobiographies by candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, and John McCain were dusted off; when it was over, losing vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin signed a memoir deal. There were a couple of intriguing pairs of dueling political memoirs. How did Dina Matos McGreevey respond to The Confession, the memoir of her ex-husband, former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey? With her own memoir, of course. When the book was announced, Mrs. McGreevey said in a statement, “I’ve had a lot of requests for interviews and appearances, but thought it best for my daughter and myself to stay out of the public maelstrom.” That would seem to be a (reasonable) reason not to write a memoir. Her reasons for going ahead and writing one anyway came across as a tiny bit sketchy: “But two years have passed and still I am the subject of much speculation as to the nature of my relationship with my husband. Enough is enough.” Meanwhile, Valerie Plame Wilson’s Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House could be purchased as a matched set with The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, by Robert Novak, the columnist who blew her cover. (In a publishing first, Plame’s book arrived in stores with substantial portions redacted, or blacked out, by her former employer, the CIA. Some of the redactions were puzzling. An article in The New York Times quoted a line in which she describes her first CIA training class: “It looked like I was the [BLACK INK] by far.” Logic, and eyeballing the width of the splotch, tells me the word the vigilant censors have kept from me has got to be “youngest.”)
The eminent authors Robert Stone, Julian Barnes, Alexander Waugh, Günter Grass, Bill Bryson, Lisa Alther, Paule Marshall, Reynolds Price, Donald Hall, and Larry McMurtry wrote books about their lives, but that was about it for that venerable genre, the literary memoir. One big reason for the paucity, it seems clear, is the current expectation that ambitious writers issue forth a memoir or memoirs early in their careers, possibly before even producing a novel or collection of poetry. Bryson, whose book focused on his childhood in 1950s Des Moines and sold less well in the United States than in Britain, his adopted home, was also part of another, even smaller group—memoirs by quote-unquote normal, reasonably content people. Mildred Armstrong Kalish and Harry Bernstein (respectively, an Iowan in her eighties and a ninety-six-year-old native of northern England currently living in New Jersey and working on volume two of his memoirs) had the temerity to come out with thoughtful and beautifully written books about their nontraumatic childhoods long, long ago.
All the memoirs I’ve mentioned have one thing in common: they were evaluated, accepted, physically produced, and marketed by a publishing house. This apparatus was capable of putting into print many hundreds if not thousands of memoirs a year. But that still left legions of unpublished aspiring memoirists, and subsidiary enterprises sprang up to serve their needs. For some years, as Brock Clarke’s narrator observes, how-to-do-it memoir-writing guides have been almost as plentiful as memoirs themselves. Moreover, every community college and writers’ workshop in the land offered well-attended memoir-writing classes. And for anyone who didn’t want to leave the comfort of home, there were websites like memoirsbyme.com (“A site dedicated to delivering the message that Everyone has a story to tell and telling those stories!”) or writemymemoirs.com, which claimed that its “FREE, innovative software helps you write one memoir or event at a time. It then helps keep you on track by dividing life’s memoirs into sections, so it’s easier to remember key moments and ideas, and then put together your autobiography.” Better-heeled aspirants could engage the services of modernmemoirs.com, which, for a fee (not specified on the site), will interview them, transcribe and edit the interviews, and bind the end product into a book. (This is clearly a full-service organization. The website points out, for example, “Other family members often want to review the manuscript. Modern Memoirs supports the family in working through possible differences of opinion.”)
Modern Memoirs notes, “Our books are usually hard covered, with pages folded into signatures and sewn together in a process known as Smythe-sewing.” But that seemed quaintly old-school at a time when hundreds of thousands of personal (as opposed to political or topical) bloggers—their ranks growing daily—displayed an urge, or need, to put their lives before the world. In this they resembled traditional memoirists. In truth, blogs, in their free-form dailyness and openness to random details, bear a closer resemblance to journals or diaries than to memoirs, which require a certain Wordsworthian recollected-in-tranquillity element, as well as endorsement by a gatekeeping publisher. An online magazine called Smith (www.smithmag.net) tried to combine the two models, offering a rich and sometimes bewildering assortment of short memoirs, some of them solicited, approved, and edited (as in a traditional publishing operation), some of them merely submitted and automatically published (as in an online forum). The most successful of its many projects was “Six-Word Memoirs,” which inspired tens of thousands of entries, the best of them collected in a book with a six-word memoir for a title: Not Quite What I Was Planning. It included some entries by well-known memoirists—“Me see world! Me write stories!” (Elizabeth Gilbert), “He wore dresses. This caused messes” (Josh Kilmer-Purcell), Mario Batali (“Brought it to a boil, often”), Joan Rivers (“Liars, hysterectomy didn’t improve sex life!”), and “Eight thousand orgasms. Only one baby” (Neal Pollack)—as well as the winner of a nationwide contest, Abigail Moor-house, whose life was summed up by “Barrister, barista, what’s the diff, Mom?” The book was so successful that it spawned a sequel, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak. Another online micro-memoir project that led (at current count) to four books was PostSecret (postsecret.blogspot .com), in which people are invited to mail a postcard containing an anonymous secret or secret confession. The results are irresistible, in part because of the emotional and thematic range typified by the following entries. One: “When I see someone with something cute, I tell them I have something just like it and ask where they got theirs from. Then I go and actually get it.” Two: “Today I realized I could no longer remember what you were like when you still loved me.” As of 2009, the site had been visited more than 210 million times.
The brilliance of memoirs, short and long, did not really matter: all of them were eclipsed by smoke from the seemingly endless series of bombshells over fraudulent lives. The run started in January 2006, with two separate detonations. One of them, about James Frey and A Million Little Pieces, was universally reported and discussed, undoubtedly because Frey had been Oprah-anointed. The other one flew under the radar. It had to do with an individual known as Nasdijj, who in 2000 published The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams: A Memoir. It was praised in the Times Book Review because it “reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.” The scholarly journal Studies in American Indian Literatures was equally enthusiastic and offered this description:
Nasdijj (Athabaskan for “to become again”) has lived in many worlds: the world of mixed race (Navajo and Caucasian), fetal alcohol syndrome (his mother drank heavily while pregnant), migrant camps (he was the child of migrant workers), homeless (living for a while in his truck and a tent), the Tenderloin District of San Francisco (at the request of two Sioux mothers, he goes to find their sons who have become heroin addicts and male prostitutes), and American Indian reservations (living on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona).
In 2002, Nasdijj responded to a survey in which prominent writers were asked to describe their literary lineage: “My literary lineage is Athabaskan. I hear Changing Woman in my head. I listen to trees, rocks, deserts, crows, and the tongues of wind. I am Navajo and the European things you relate so closely to often simply seem alien and remote. I do not know them. What I know is the poetry of peyote, the songs of drums, and the dancing of the boy twins, Tobajishinchini and Neyaniinezghanii—Child Born for Water and Monster Slayer. They are warriors who sing everything I put on paper.”
His second book, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, was one of five winners of the 2004 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for writers of color. He published yet another memoir, Geronimo’s Bones. Then a writer for LA Weekly, following up on the suspicions of Native American writers Irvin Morris and Sherman Alexie, published an article revealing that “Nasdijj” was actually Timothy Barrus, a white North Carolina man whose literary output under his own name consisted of works of gay fiction and erotica.
A Million Little Pieces was originally published in 2003. It got some respectful reviews and some dismissive ones, and showed up on the Times nonfiction bestseller list for a total of one week, in sixteenth and last place. But in the fall of 2005, Oprah struck. After a period in which she chose for her book club only classic literature, like East of Eden and Anna Karenina, she returned to contemporary works, and made Frey’s memoir her first selection. “I’m going bold, people, bold, bold, bold,” she told her audience. “It’s bold. It’s bold and it’s great. It’s kept me up nights. It’s great, great, great, great. I promise, I promise, I promise.” The book shot to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for fifteen consecutive weeks.
Then, early in 2006, the Smoking Gun website published an extensive investigation demonstrating that in the book, Frey “wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.’ ” Oprah defended Frey on Larry King Live. Then she invited him again onto her show and hung him out to dry. “I feel that you betrayed millions of readers,” she said. A Million Little Pieces and its sequel, another memoir called My Friend Leonard, kept selling, even as various lawsuits were filed against Frey and his publisher, Random House. By late 2007, these had been combined into one action and settled. A federal judge announced that the 1,729 readers who had come forward to say they had bought the book with an expectation that it was factual would be reimbursed for the purchase price—a total of $27,348. Another $783,000 was paid out in legal fees. And Random House agreed to include a warning in the book that not all portions of it may be accurate. A lawyer for the plaintiffs noted that Frey had received a total of more than $4.4 million in royalties. It was not clear whether the payments would come out of his deep pockets or Random House’s.
The doubts raised about Frey spread to other writers and other books. In August 2007, a settlement of an undisclosed amount was reached in the $2 million defamation lawsuit filed against the author Augusten Burroughs by the Turcotte family, who were depicted (under another name) in his memoir Running with Scissors. According to an Associated Press account, “Events in the book which the suit claimed were false include the Tur cottes’ condoning sexual affairs between children and adults, Turcotte’s wife eating dog food and the family using an electroshock machine it stored under the stairs. The lawsuit claims the book also falsely portrays a home in unbelievable squalor.” In an article about the case for Vanity Fair, journalist H. G. Bissinger said that in interviews with the six Turcotte children, they stated that what was kept under the stairs was not an electroshock machine but, rather, an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner with a missing wheel. Burroughs would speak to Bissinger only generally, saying: “This is my story. It’s not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story, and they may remember things differently and they may choose to not remember certain things, but I will never forget what happened to me, ever, and I have the scars from it and I wanted to rip those scars off of me.” The financial terms of the settlement were not revealed, but Burroughs and the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, publicly agreed to call the volume a “book” instead of a “memoir” in the author’s note (although the word “memoir” will still appear on the cover and elsewhere), and to change the acknowledgments in future editions to say that the Turcotte family’s memories of events he describes are “different from my own,” and to express regret for “any unintentional harm” to them. In a statement, the family said, “We have always maintained the book is fictionalized and defamatory. This settlement is the most powerful vindication of those sentiments that we can imagine.” In his own statement, Burroughs called the settlement “not only a personal victory but a victory for all memoirists. I still maintain that the book is an entirely accurate memoir, and that it was not fictionalized or sensationalized in any way.”
Even when they weren’t aired in lawsuits or courtrooms, Frey-like issues kept popping up. The Australian and The Village Voice raised doubts about the accuracy of episodes in the critically lauded Starbucks selection A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah. (The author stuck to his guns.) In an article for The New Republic, Alex Heard conducted a factual investigation into the work of David Sedaris, and found numerous examples of gross exaggerations and outright fabrications. It was an odd exercise. True, Sedaris’s books and articles were about the events and relationships of his life—and that was a big reason why people wanted to read them—but wasn’t Sedaris a humorist, in the tradition of James Thurber and Mark Twain, where substantial exaggeration was not only permitted but required? Heard anticipated the objection. There would be no problem, he said, if Sedaris’s publishers hadn’t classified his books as nonfiction, the Library of Congress hadn’t categorized them as such, and The New York Times hadn’t listed them on its nonfiction bestseller list. The call-number argument made a certain amount of sense, but it seemed somehow limited and limiting.
And then, just as it seemed that any possible deception in a memoir had been exposed, came three more autobiographical bombshells. Misha Defonseca, the Belgian-born author of the 1997 Holocaust memoir Misha, which told of how she trekked across Europe as a small girl, living part of the time with wolves, confessed that she had actually spent the war safely in Brussels and that she is not even Jewish. (In a statement she said, “Ever since I remember, I felt Jewish.”) The next revelation came less than a week later, and had to do with the acclaimed new memoir Love and Consequences (“human and deeply affecting”—The New York Times), author Margaret B. Jones’s story of growing up in South Central Los Angeles, a half-white, half-Native American girl living in an African-American foster home and running drugs for the Bloods. “Margaret B. Jones” was revealed to be Margaret Seltzer, a one-hundred-percent Caucasian woman who grew up with her biological family in well-to-do Sherman Oaks, California.
Would it ever stop? No. In December 2008, The New Republic trained its eye on another Holocaust tale, a forthcoming memoir by a concentration camp survivor named Herman Rosenblat. It told of how, when he was at Buchenwald, a little girl had thrown him apples over the fence. He met the girl years later, on a blind date in New York. She became his wife. Before becoming a memoir, Rosenblat’s heartwarming story was featured in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, as the basis for a children’s book, and, naturally, on The Oprah Winfrey Show. But The New Republic presented a compelling collection of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the story was hooey. Days later, Rosenblat acknowledged that the apple-tossing little girl was indeed a complete fiction.
The larger point that was emerging was that the stories in memoirs weren’t just stories. They were commodities, containing within them impossibly tangled issues of ownership, propriety, and truth. As if in recognition of this conundrum, new hybrid forms began to appear. Dave Eggers, who had written one of the most popular, influential, and smart recent memoirs, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was collaborating on a book with Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “lost boys” of Sudan—young refugee victims of the civil wars of recent decades—when it became clear that some of Valentino’s memories were too cloudy to be included in a book shelved in the Memoir section of the library. So the two decided that Eggers would take Valentino’s voice and the stories he had shared with him, add material that Eggers extrapolated from further research and his own imagination, and publish the result as a novel. New York Times reporter David Carr took a different tack. He wanted to write a memoir about his Freyesque past as a crack addict but felt hampered by the fact that he could remember almost none of it. So he embarked on his own story as if it involved someone else—interviewing everyone concerned, poring over court records and old clippings—and emerged with an “investigative memoir” called The Night of the Gun. Former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre—collaborating with sportswriter Tom Ver ducci and following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar, Pope Pius II, and Henry Adams—published a memoir in the third person.
Probably the most bizarre hybrid was a memoir in the conditional mood—O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It (If I Had Done It would have shown better grammar, but that’s neither here nor there)—in which he recounts the manner in which he would have killed his wife, if he had done so, which he didn’t, or so he seems to be saying. The book was to have been published by Judith Regan at HarperCollins, who had made her name in the 1980s and 1990s acquiring and editing outrageous celebrity autobiographies by the likes of Drew Barrymore, Kathie Lee Gifford, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, wrestlers Mick Foley and The Rock, steroidal baseball player Jose Canseco, and porn actress Jenna Jameson. In 2007, her New York Times bestsellers included autobiographies by guitarist Brian “Head” Welch and tennis player James Blake, one of the PostSecret collections, and her biggest-selling book of all, Neil Strauss’s The Game, a memoir about “penetrating the secret world of pickup artists.” The announcement of If I Did It, late in 2006, prompted widespread public outcries, and Regan’s employer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, canceled publication. (It was later picked up by a small press and sold more than 100,000 copies, with the proceeds benefiting the family of Ron Gold-man, Simpson’s other murder victim.) A few weeks later, word came out that ReganBooks was going to publish 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, Peter Golenbock’s “inventive memoir” (as he described it in an author’s note) of the late baseball player, narrated in an attempt to replicate the ballplayer’s voice. Mantle himself had been a superstar autobiographer: he participated in the writing—or at least approved the publication—of six separate memoirs, many of them covering the same episodes; after his death, his widow and sons published two more. But none of them included a sex scene between Mantle and Marilyn Monroe, as Golenbock’s book did, for the simple reason that such a coupling never occurred.4
Autobiographically speaking, there has never been a time like it. Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged. The sheer volume of memoirs is unprecedented; the way the books were trailed by an unceasing stream of contention, doubt, hype, and accusations is distressing. Yet every single one of the books, and every piece of the debate about them, had a historical precedent. How did we come to this pass? The only way to answer that question is to go back a couple of thousand years and tell the story from the beginning.