1 British celebrity memoirs are often titled or subtitled The (as opposed to An) Autobiography, the definite article conveying the obligatory nature of such a person’s writing such a book.
2 At sixteen, Cyrus became the second-youngest person to publish an autobiography (by my informal tally), trailing only 1970s child actor Mason Reese, who put one out at age nine. In 2009 came word of an autobiography by Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali, nine as well.
3 Mrs. Spears was putting the finishing touches on her book, to be called Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, when word came out that her other daughter, Jamie Lynn, sixteen and the star of a wholesome Disney Channel television series, was pregnant. Her publisher, Thomas Nelson Inc., which specializes in Christian fare, issued a press release with the heading “LYNNE SPEARS’ BOOK IS NOT A PARENTING HOW-TO/Contrary to Media Reports, Pop Culture Mom Is a Memoir—and a Warning.” In the release, the president of the company was quoted as saying, “We believe in redemption. Therefore, we are standing with Lynne and her family during this difficult time. Though the book has been delayed, we believe God is at work. The story is still being written, and we are confident in His ability to turn ashes into beauty (Isaiah 61:3).” The book was eventually published, with a different title—Through the Storm—and without cataclysmic consequences. Early in 2009, rumors swirled that Britney Spears had signed up to write a memoir of her own. Press accounts rarely noted that this would actually be her second memoir, the first having been published when she was eighteen.
4 Late in 2006, News Corporation fired Regan and canceled publication of 7, which was picked up and published by Lyons Books. The following year, Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against News Corporation. It alleged that she was smeared, defamed, and fired in part because corporation executives were trying to protect former New York City mayor and then presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, about whom they believed Regan, the onetime lover of Giuliani’s police commissioner Bernard Kerik (and publisher of his autobiography), had damaging information. The terms were undisclosed when the suit was settled in January 2008, presumably guaranteeing that the damaging information would remain forever undisclosed.
5 That did not prevent Confessions of an English Opium Eater from begetting a crop of similarly titled works: James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Confessions of a Bachelor (1828), Lady Blessington’s Confessions of an Elderly Lady and Gentleman (1838), and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), a posthumous work by Coleridge on his religious philosophy. The allure of the word persists, although in recent years the amount of irony invested in it has increased. Since 2004, one has been able to purchase, among other titles, Confessions of: an Economic Hitman, a Wall Street Analyst, a French Baker, and a Video Vixen.
6 In these early years of the word’s existence, it was, for some reason, more commonly applied to novelistic ersatz autobiographies than to real ones: Scottish novelist John Galt’s 1832 The Member: An Autobiography (1832), the pseudonymous, satirical American book A Yankee Among the Nullifiers: An Auto-biography, W. P. Scargill’s The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister (1834). The most famous nineteenth-century example came in 1847, when Charlotte Brontë titled her pseudonymous novel Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. “Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography. I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of connection.” Two years later, in 1849, Charles Dickens chose a more antique-sounding title for the serial publication of his most autobiographical work: David Copperfield, or The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to publish on any account).
7 These proportions changed over time. The most recent decade Bjorklund tabulated was the 1970s, in which she found the most commonly represented profession in autobiographies was Entertainer, with 152 of the 1,175 books, or 12.9 percent, followed by Clergy, Writer, Sports Figure, and Politician.
8 Ironically—given his effort to hide his heritage, and the racist attitudes toward both blacks and Native Americans that Beckwourth displays in the book—he has in recent decades been enshrined as a key figure in African-American history, including a juvenile biography in the Black Americans of Achievement series.
9 All of the quotations in this list, except for the last one, are taken from Diane Bjorklund’s Interpreting the Self.
10 British autobiographies, meanwhile, held fairly steady: 194 in the 1840s compared with 171 in the 1820s, according to William Matthews’s British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written Before 1951. The first decade in which American autobiographies outnumbered British ones was the 1860s, but just barely, by a count of 236 to 234. By the end of the century, the British were ahead again, with 489 in the 1890s.
11 The scholar Jennifer Fleischner has determined that the author’s actual last name was “Keckly,” but since it was given with an e on the title page of the memoir and in all subsequent references until the 2003 appearance of Fleischner’s book Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, I use the traditional spelling here.
12 In the 1970s, the last decade calculated by the scholar who took up Kaplan’s work, Mary Louise Briscoe, 1,175 autobiographies were published and the leading categories were: Entertainer (12.9 percent), Clergy/Religious (9.2 percent), Writer (8.5 percent), Sports Figure (9.8 percent), and Politician (6.3 percent).
13 Two years after Grant ’s death, Julia Grant embarked on her own memoirs. She started, she told an interviewer, “more to gratify my children’s wishes than my own. Soon I became an inveterate scribbler. I preferred writing to eating or driving or seeing friends. The children said I had found a fad at last. But it wasn’t a fad; it was joy. I was living again, with the aid of my fancy and my pen, the life that had been so sweet to me.” She completed the manuscript in 1892 but never published it, for reasons that are not clear, though in one letter she blamed unnamed “critics” who pronounced it “too near, too close to the private life of the Genl for the public, and I thought this was just what they wanted.” The manuscript stayed in the Grant family until it was finally published in 1975. The first First Lady whose memoirs saw the light of print was Helen Herron Taft, wife of William Howard Taft, whose Recollections of Full Years came out in 1914.
14 For years, Barnum took the strangest and most audacious of the unsolicited letters he continually received from people who wanted him to display them or their possessions, and forwarded them to Twain, who planned to turn them into a piece of comic writing. After one shipment, Twain wrote Barnum to thank him for “the admirable lot of letters. Headless mice, four-legged hens, human-handed sacred bulls, ‘professional’ Gypsies, ditto ‘Sacasians,’ deformed human beings anxious to trade on their horrors, school-teachers who can’t spell—it is a perfect feast of queer literature.” To Barnum’s dismay, Twain never did anything with the letters.
15 Twain would also embark on a mock memoir based on the life of his feckless brother Orion, and complete some one hundred pages before abandoning the project.
16 In 1892, Symonds proposed to Havelock Ellis a book on homosexuality, a subject that he felt was “fearfully mishandled by pathologists and psychiatrical [sic] professors, who know nothing whatsoever about its real nature.” They decided to collaborate, but Symonds died before the project took final shape. In Ellis’s 1897 book Sexual Inversion, the anonymous “Case XVII,” described as “one of the leaders of English literature,” is Symonds. After Symonds’s death in 1893, the manuscript of his autobiography became the possession of his literary executor, Horatio Brown. Brown died in 1926, bequeathing the autobiography to the London Library, with instructions that nothing be published for fifty years. The manuscript, in a green cloth box, was opened for the first time in 1949, when Symonds’s daughter requested permission to read it. Five years later the library decided to make the manuscript available to “bona fide scholars.” But by then so much time had passed that no scholar was even aware of the existence of the manuscript, and it remained unexamined. Not until the 1980s did the critic Phyllis Grosskurth stumble upon it, and she edited an edition published in 1984.
17 Four years earlier, Beers had suffered a relapse, of depression and paranoia, and committed himself to a Rhode Island hospital, where he died.
18 Gale and Wylie were popular novelists at the time.
19 The quotation is as written by Rogers, who was notoriously loose with his capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The Front Page was a Broadway newspaper drama with salty language.
20 Freud added: “Incidentally, it is American naivete on the part of your publisher to expect a hitherto decent person to commit to so base a deed for $5,000. For me temptation might begin at a hundred times that sum, but even then it would be turned down after half an hour.”
21 Miller’s book, which was banned in the United States for its alleged obscenity until 1961, was audacious not only in its sexual content but in its blending of fact and fiction: although the narrator is “Henry Miller” and many of the episodes are taken from Miller’s life, the book was conceived and presented as a novel. Similar strategies were taken up thirty or more years later by such writers as Frederick Exley, Philip Roth, and Paul Theroux.
22 Thus a humorous item that appeared in The New Yorker in 1927: “We are told of a gentleman who, at a recent bachelor dinner, suspected himself of intemperance and slipped off to a guest room. Reaching the chamber he hit upon a plan to test his condition. He would, he said to himself, pick up a magazine, open it and read the first paragraph he saw. If it made sense all was well. If not, a nap. Friends found him sound asleep a few minutes later, a near-by periodical opened to a poem by Gertrude Stein.”
23 Contemporary critics charged, and Chaplin biographers confirm, that the book was shot through with misstatements and errors, including the patently false claim that he was born “in a small town in France.” Chagrined by the reaction, Chaplin ordered the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, to destroy all available copies. Harry M. Geduld, who edited an edition of the book in 1985, reported that he knew of only four extant copies, one of them in the Library of Congress.
24 Barkley and footballer Terrell Owens, a couple of years later, both protested that they had been “misquoted” in their autobiographies. General Omar Bradley was unable to complain about the auto biography published under his name, because his ghostwriter wrote it after Bradley’s death.
25 MacDonald went on to write three additional memoirs, including The Plague and I (1948), about her tuberculosis (the dust jacket trumpeted “The New Adventures of This Witty and Irrepressible Author”), and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s book series, before her death in 1958 at age fifty.
26 In 1955, Goodwin embarked on an acting career. The Internet Movie Database lists sixteen films and television episodes in which she appeared between then and her death in 1961. Some of her roles, according to IMDb, were: “Sarah (Irene’s maid)”; “Dr. Byrne’s Maid”; “Louann, the maid”; “Maid”; “Annie, Alice’s Maid”; and “Housekeeper.”
27 Frank was the master of this category, subsequently collaborating on the tell-all memoirs of Diana Barrymore, the alcoholic and drug-addicted daughter of John; Sheilah Graham, the final mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was and is famously famous for being famous.
28 Another much-talked-about book of the period was Soul on Ice (1968), by the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. It had pieces of autobiography, but was more in the nature of a political statement than a memoir.
29 The phrase was taken from Raymond Chandler, metaphorically referring to his detective hero Philip Marlowe: “Down these mean streets a knight must go.” Mean Streets later became the title of Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough 1973 film.
30 In 1983, the Showtime television network aired Out of the Ashes, based on Perl’s memoir of being forced to assist Josef Mengele, and her subsequent struggle to be granted permanent residence in the United States.
31 Some critics, including Bruno Bettelheim, Lawrence Langer, and Cynthia Ozick, have disagreed, charging that, as presented and understood, the Anne Frank story is a sanitized and sentimental tale that deflects attention from the truth and magnitude of the Holocaust. The view has some justice when it comes to the play and movie, which at several points endeavored to make the story less “Jewish” and more “universal.” Thus Anne wrote: “Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now?” In the play, she says, “We ’re not the only people that ’ve had to suffer. . . . There’ve always been people that’ve had to. . . . Sometimes one race . . . sometimes another . . . and yet . . .” The playwrights (and later screenwriters) Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich end the work with a scene in which Otto Frank is reading the diaries for the first time and comes across one of Anne’s least perceptive and least supportable comments (the audience hears her offstage voice): “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” The curtain line is Otto’s: “She puts me to shame.” But no one can deny that the story in all its iterations brought truths about the Holocaust to tens of millions of people.
32 My admittedly unscientific investigations have unearthed just one use, pre-Wolff, of A Memoir as the subtitle of an autobiography: Gypsy, published in 1957, by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
33 Pelzer has been charged with pumping up those numbers by buying mass quantities of his works from
amazon.com and other booksellers that report sales to the
Times list, then peddling them at his talks. It is a slightly sketchy practice, but it doesn’t change the fact that people bought all those books. Doubts have also been raised about the truth of his accounts of the events of his early childhood—which are extremely detailed—though not about the fact that he
was abused. Since the only two characters in most of the scenes are Pelzer and his mother, and she died in 1992, a year before the publication of
A Child Called “It,” these doubts will never be resolved. (Pelzer’s father, depicted as a weak and helpless bystander, died in 1980.) The fact that Pelzer’s website continues to describe him as a “Pulitzer Prize nominee” even though numerous journalists have pointed out that that is a meaningless designation does not instill trust.
34 The libel suit against Betty MacDonald described in the previous chapter was one of the few such actions against a memoir author, which is puzzling, given how frequently journalists have been sued. A suit against Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of Cross Creek (1942), is the only one I am aware of for invasion of privacy. Even though the Rawlings suit ended with the Florida Supreme Court ruling (somewhat halfheartedly) in favor of the plaintiff, it’s not surprising that few have followed her lead: a lawsuit from a person who felt violated by the airing of his or her dirty laundry would entail public proceedings, drawing even more unwanted attention.
35 Roth and Bloom married in 1991 and divorced in 1995. The following year, she published a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, that accused Roth of being a self-absorbed misogynist who forced her to make her own daughter move out of the house. Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, which features a neurotic, vengeful ex-wife, Eve Frame, seemed refreshingly old-fashioned—fiction being the traditional way of settling scores.
36 The last painting to have had a significant effect on public opinion may have been Norman Rockwell’s 1964 The Problem We All Live With, a depiction (photographic in style) of a little black girl on her way to integrate a New Orleans school, surrounded by a quartet of safety officers.
37 I will share, in passing, my rule of thumb on this: The less dialogue a memoir contains, the better it is. In Frank McCourt’s books, dialogue is given without quotation marks. I like the technique, which is also used by such novelists as Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy; it emphasizes that these could not be and are not supposed to be the exact words said at the time. But it makes the books a little less readable, and I would not be surprised if McCourt had to fight for it with his publisher.