Conclusion: The Meaning of Memoir

The documentary aesthetic is central to our age, and it is ubiquitous in a variety of artistic and cultural forms. Nowhere is this more evident than the widespread popularity of the memoir over the past three decades. While the speculative documentaries that have emerged to address climate change and the environment attempt to broaden our frames of reference, the memoir has solidified a framework for privileging individual determination, recovery, and uplift that informs not just literature but social media posts, reality television programs, advertisements for pharmaceuticals, and so much more. As I have argued throughout this book, documentary art from the 1960s to the present has articulated the ways in which neoliberal culture and finance capitalism have isolated and limited, while also championing and privileging, individual modes of being in the world. In this conclusion, I will document how the “memoir boom” and the aesthetic uses of the memoir genre that occured in the 1990s and 2000s reflect the cultural and ontological force of neoliberal reforms. By the 1990s, the entrepreneurial idealism of free market ideology was becoming visible as a solipsistic, isolated subject position. In response to this, contemporary artists and writers reimagined how relations work between subject and system, artist and reality. It is important that this younger generation of artists is a generation for whom neoliberalism was not a series of reforms that happened during their young adulthood (as it was for documentary artists of previous decades) but instead the reality of finance capitalism into which they were born. While the memoir is a genre we might assume to be solipsistic in its focus on one individual’s story, memoirists and artists working in life narrative today move from self to structure, in modes that gesture to possibilities for subjectivity both beyond and within neoliberal culture’s limits.

An example of this younger generation’s mode of memoiristic thinking is Miranda July’s art project the Somebody messaging service app, which was launched as a way to essentially “Uber” one’s conversations. So, instead of saying something difficult to someone—such as, for example, breaking up with a boyfriend—users could post what they wished to say to the Somebody app, and then an agent in the vicinity of the person the user wished to communicate with said the message for them. One’s most intimate interactions, then, become memoir, scripts that are written out, rather than said or merely felt, and then made virtually public. The intimate becomes a transaction, while also remaining personal at the same time. “Somebody,” like all memoir today, is less a critique of the imbrication of finance capitalism into everyday life than an expression of that imbrication as a channel for feeling. What the memoir as genre does, then, under finance capitalism, is make the self visible as an object within a structure.

Indeed, as Ben Yagoda remarks in his history of the genre’s contemporary prominence, “Memoir has become the central form of 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.”1 As Yagoda notes, the “memoir boom” of the 1990s is exemplified by a handful of influential literary bestsellers, such as Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995), and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996). The boom is also notable for other bestsellers such as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993), Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survive (1993), Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (1994), and Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (1996). These works from the twentieth century were followed in the twenty-first century by bestsellers such as Augusten Burroughs’s 2002 Running with Scissors: A Memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia (2006), and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), initially sold as a memoir but relabeled a work of fiction after a prominent scandal and public dressing-down by Oprah Winfrey.2

The popular memoir has been an easy target for literary critics and cultural studies scholars, who view its vision of self-realization, its dramatization of suffering, and its emphasis on individual self-fashioning as evidence of the genre’s privileging of the entrepreneurial individual. Along with reality television and “chick lit”—two other popular media forms that resonate as similarly invested in authenticity, suffering, and redemption, and that are also often associated with female readers and viewers—the memoir is typically viewed as a mere symptom of neoliberalism. For example, Walter Benn Michaels brands the memoir an “entirely Thatcherite genre,” and Pamela Thoma has posited that the “culinary memoir,” such as Eat Pray Love or Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005), “is connected to the seemingly limitless demands for women’s flexible labor in the marketplace and at home.”3 In her study of the memoir boom, Julie Rak argues that the memoir is a unique genre precisely because memoirs are “produced, and not just written. Memoir is a creative product. . . . [It] can even be regarded as a brand produced by the publishing and book retailing industries.”4 Rak argues, too, that the memoir is an important site for the articulation of public values in our contemporary moment, and thus finds in the memoir a commodified and rigorously marketed iteration of the public discourse so central to Jürgen Habermas’s or Michael Warner’s accounts of the eighteenth century.5 Despite their various approaches to the genre, all of the above critics seem to agree that the memoir matters not as literature but as a marker of something else: public ideals of citizenship in a fully commodified and branded literary marketplace, the privileging of moral character as a justification for economic inequality, or the promotion of neoliberal models of flexible labor and conventional gender roles. The memoir is a barometer of neoliberalism’s idealization of entrepreneurial individualism, emphasis on constant production and consumption as markers of a good life, and erosion of the commons and public discourse. In short, the memoir is a neoliberal genre.

This account of the popular memoir is compelling, but the memoir’s reach into contemporary aesthetics is more diverse and complicated than the ever-growing number of bestsellers adapted into Hollywood films and tell-all chronicles of B-list celebrities would suggest. In recent years, writers as diverse and varied in their forms, themes, and affiliations as Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, Justin St. Germain, and Jesmyn Ward, to name but a celebrated few, have turned to nonfiction forms and a more material orientation toward reality that emphasize economic and political limits. By viewing the contemporary memoir as an extension of the New Journalism, I posit that the memoir genre is a literary mode for the representation of disappointments and disillusionments in the neoliberal age: the limits to economic growth, the narrowness of political engagement, the lack of upward mobility and individual wellness cast as widely available and desirable in venues like The Oprah Winfrey Show. From the New Journalism to the memoir boom, we can trace a cultural history of the documentary aesthetic that occurs in tandem with, and in response to, the uneven economic and political implementations of neoliberal reforms and the establishment of finance capitalism.

After all, if one of neoliberalism’s cultural accomplishments has been the idealization and isolation of the entrepreneurial individual as the benchmark of success, then the first-person voice in literature might rise to ubiquity as a genre convention because it is simply how our culture thinks of itself. Insofar as this mode is widespread, writers might just as well strive to articulate alternative models of subjectivity as reinforce hegemonic subjectivity through the first-person voice. The memoir and its attendant conventions need not signal one relation to the conditions that have occasioned their ubiquity. Charting the memoir’s ties to the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s helps to make visible the political possibilities of the genre, the ways in which documentary can represent central tensions of finance capitalism rather than merely smooth out those tensions with an appeal to the palliative, authorial self.

Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, and Receding Lives

In his review of Joan Didion’s critically and popularly successful 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, John Leonard links the book to Didion’s entire body of work. He reads the book as a culmination of the style, affect, and relation to events that Didion had developed in her reportage and fiction. Regarding the book’s somber subject, Leonard concludes his review with a single-sentence paragraph: “I can’t imagine dying without this book.”6 Leonard’s remarks would reflect the wider reception of Didion’s memoir as a vital work that synthesized aesthetic and self-help values. The Year of Magical Thinking was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction, named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography/Biography, and adapted into a stage play of the same name, in which Didion was played by Vanessa Redgrave. The memoir documents the death of Didion’s long-time husband John Gregory Dunne, the ultimately fatal illness of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, and the author’s process of grieving. In keeping with her earlier work’s emphasis on narrative structures and their failures, Didion tries to make sense of her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness by reading books and analyzing life as one analyzes a work of literature, only to find no sense, no possible interpretation:

I went to the UCLA Medical Center bookstore. I bought a book described on its cover as a “concise overview of neuroanatomy and of its function and clinical implications.” . . . The book was by Stephen G. Waxman, M.D., chief of neurology at Yale-New Haven, and was called Clinical Neuroanatomy. I skimmed successfully through some of the appendices, for example “Appendix A: The Neurologic Examination,” but when I began to read the text itself I could only think of a trip to Indonesia during which I had become disoriented by my inability to locate the grammar in Bahasa Indonesia, the official language used on street signs and storefronts and billboards. . . . Clinical Neuroanatomy seemed to be one more case in which I would be unable to locate the grammar.7

What the memoir makes clear is that no amount of reading, no amount of research will make sense of what happened. Instead, the memoir concludes with a memory and an embrace of that memory’s ephemerality, its detachment from any grand narrative or control: “I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of its point. The tide had to be just right. . . . Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”8 The Year of Magical Thinking and Didion’s follow-up memoir Blue Nights document fleeting moments that the author remembers, and Didion presents those moments as mattering only to her and as always at risk of being lost. As she writes at the end of Blue Nights, “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”9 Personal experience—the arbiter of truth in our neoliberal culture—turns out not to document anything of lasting significance, to have no bearing on the events that determine a life, and to be in constant danger of being further eroded, further hollowed out. For all of the memoir’s personality, the personal has no larger bearing, no larger meaning. The aesthetic function of memory in Didion’s memoirs of loss is also a dramatization of memory’s unimportance, of the personal’s negligible status under a regime for which personal initiative is purportedly all.

While Didion writes about the hollowness of the personal, Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s publishing ventures are dependent on valorizing the personal and the intimate, as the aesthetic category of the “new sincerity” often invoked to discuss McSweeney’s denotes. A host of contemporary writers come to mind when one thinks of experimental riffs on the memoir—some of whom will be discussed in this chapter’s final section—but Eggers has been centrally involved not just in the writing of but also the publication of and activism surrounding contemporary literature that blurs memoir, novel, and nonfiction. After making a celebrated debut with the self-ironizing memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has continued to use the tropes of the memoir even though he no longer writes about himself or his family. His two second-hand memoirs, What Is the What (2006) and Zeitoun (2009), the former labeled a novel, the latter labeled a work of nonfiction, share a formal design that privileges the personal voice as the sole arbiter of experience, a design that conforms to the hyperindividualism of neoliberal culture, while trying to renew ethical bonds between reader, writer, and character.

What Is the What and Zeitoun both foreground their own constructedness, but What Is the What begins with a preface authored by Valentino Achak Deng, the only piece of the novel purporting to be his autobiography that is penned by him. In the preface, Deng describes the process by which the novel was researched and written:

This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation. Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel. . . . This is simply one man’s story, subjectively told.10

Deng and Eggers’s shared desire to “reach out to others” forms the basis for the text, a text that is classified as a novel because of its subjectivity, the very quality that also, of course, registers as a kind of aesthetic, if not factual, truth and authenticity. The novelized memoir, then, serves as an overtly activist form, an incitement by the author and subject to make sure that, in Deng’s words, the readers of the novel do something “to prevent the same horrors from repeating themselves.”11 The expansiveness of Deng and Eggers’s desire renders the text a kind of broad, sincere hope and faith in the potential of life narrative to produce recognition and change. As Deng narrates at the closing of the novel, “Whatever I will do, I will find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days, and every person who has entered this club [the gym where he works] during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there.”12 This ethical, mutually empowering relation among text, subject, and author marks the formal aspiration of What Is the What and, arguably, Eggers’s work more generally—the aspiration to produce a text that will function as an intimate, ethical interface, a connection that then transforms moral obligation into the pleasure of labor for the collective good.

If What Is the What is the utopian, expansive version of the memoir, then Zeitoun moves in a more cynical direction. A book that is described not as a novel but as a work of nonfiction, Zeitoun is written in the third person, and while it has the same expansiveness of possibility as What Is the What, the narrative also undercuts its own faith in the aesthetic and ethical bond generated by nonfiction narrative. Beginning with epigraphs from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—“in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime”—and Mark Twain—“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”—Zeitoun foregrounds cynicism and violence.13 The book is about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a contractor who survived Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Zeitoun works to rebuild New Orleans in its aftermath, yet ultimately, and in keeping with the book’s epigraphs, the narrator finds in Zeitoun’s survival and commitment to work something tragic and sad. Strikingly, the text concludes much like What Is the What, with the articulation of a renewed ethical commitment:

As he drives through the city by day and dreams of it at night, his mind vaults into glorious reveries—he envisions this city and this country not just as it was, but better, far better. It can be. . . . There is much work to do, and we all know what needs to be done. . . . So let us get up early and stay late, and, brick by brick and block by block, let us get that work done. If he can picture it, it can be. This has been the pattern of his life: ludicrous dreams followed by hours and days and years of work and then a reality surpassing his wildest hopes and expectations.14

Once again, the text seems to end with an aspirational commitment to a better world. But, then, Zeitoun’s final sentence is a question: “And so why should this be any different?” This closing question does not affirm Zeitoun’s faith in hard work but makes clear that his optimism, however admirable, also entails an amnesia—that Katrina and its aftermath “diminished the humanity of them all.”15 Kathy, Zeitoun’s wife, seems to cope with this through memory loss: “It’s shredded, unreliable. The wiring in her mind has been snapped in vital places.”16 Eggers’ narration of heroic, optimistic, ethical individuality falters in Zeitoun, as it becomes clear that the difference at the conclusion of the text is that Zeitoun’s work ethic is misguided, clearly unsuited and insufficient to realize his dreams of upward mobility.

Like What Is the What, Zeitoun begins with a caveat: “This book does not attempt to be an all-encompassing book about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina. It is only an account of one family’s experiences before and after the storm.”17 Eggers’s prefacing in both texts diffuses what Kenneth Goldsmith has described as the deeply uninteresting question of authenticity that plagues literature and, especially, the memoir today, mainly by making authenticity a function of form.18 Eggers’s memoirs call attention to their constructedness, thereby making clear that a text cannot conform to reality in an easy, mimetic relationship. Despite this careful prefacing, Zeitoun, like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius before it, became the subject of some controversy in 2012 when, contrary to Eggers’s depiction of him as a loving husband, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was arrested for assaulting his wife (he was acquitted in 2013). Moreover, the formal caveats and explanations at the beginning of both texts serve to formalize the ethical commitment of the text. For that is, after all, what Eggers’s texts hinge upon: the incitement of ethical action on the part of the reader. This is, arguably, the goal of much “historiographical metafiction,” but Eggers’ difference lies in his laying bare the neoliberal impetus of such a formal imperative. Rather than provoking some vague sense of victimhood, historical tragedy, or imperative that human rights violations happen “never again,” What Is the What and Zeitoun force the reader to exit through the gift shop, as it were. The final pages of each text contain information about charities to support, making the ethical cast of the memoir and witnessing overtly economic rather than merely emotional.

Eggers’s two second-hand memoirs are compelling for the way that they lay bare the instrumentality of literature in the service of ethics, and thus they implicitly brand a wide swath of contemporary literature a kind of literature of bad faith, insofar as it elicits a similar ethical response but without a proper channel for individual investment or expenditure. His novel A Hologram for the King (2012) is fiction, yet written in a way that is informed by corporate tell-alls such as Michael Lewis’s memoir Liar’s Poker (1989). The novel meditates on the question of what might be done to restore a sense of productivity, belonging, even dignity to white collar workers increasingly downtrodden and exploited during the economic “downturn” of 2008. Pico Iyer, in the New York Times Book Review, celebrated Hologram as a kind of “‘Death of a Globalized Salesman,’ alight with all of Arthur Miller’s compassion and humanism,” and one can see how this is an easy position to take on a novel that is preoccupied with its central character.19 The generically yet symbolically named “Alan Clay” signifies both middle-manager whiteness and the malleability that is expected in today’s economy from any worker. The novel does indeed dwell on Alan’s failing prospects, as when he worries about having enough money to pay his daughter’s college tuition: “Had he planned better, had he not been so incompetent, he would have whatever she needed. He had twenty years to save $200k. How hard was that? It was ten thousand a year. Much less assuming any interest on the money. . . . He thought he could make the $200k at will, in any given year. How could he have predicted the world losing interest in people like him?”20 What this passage points to, though, is less the novel’s fixation on eulogizing or even romanticizing the corporate employee than its insistence that the individual’s voice, privileged by the literary form of the memoir and the regime of neoliberalism, no longer functions as a site of aspiration. The novel concludes with Alan in the empty King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, a pet project of the Arab nation’s ruler but one never fully realized. Alan is there, initially, to sell hologram technology to the king, but his U.S.-based company loses out to a Chinese firm. Alan decides to stay in the built but unpopulated city, and the novel’s titular technology, the hologram, functions both as a plot point and as a figure for the forms of spectral presence that the memoir and Eggers’s literary aesthetic attempt to generate. At the novel’s conclusion, Alan gambles on his future usefulness to the king, the king who has never appeared. “He had to hope for amnesia,” the narrator remarks, both his own amnesia and that of his potential audience. Amnesia would mean that Alan’s own failure in the global economy would result not in disillusionment but in a renewed effort to become a properly entrepreneurial individual. Amnesia allows for the renewed production of personhood, a personhood that looks much more like a hologram than a flesh-and-blood agent. Alan’s hologram serves as a figure for Eggers’s own aesthetic project—the production of a spectral presence that promises a better world but one that, it turns out, cannot be articulated or even thought through the compromised, aspirational individual.

Memoir and Mediation

Perhaps in no other subgenre of the memoir is attention to mediation more visible than in the comics or graphic memoir.21 Pioneered by comics artists like Justin Green and R. Crumb in the 1960s and 1970s, and made canonical by Art Spiegelman with the publication of Maus in the 1980s and 1990s, the comics memoir remained a prominent genre into the 2000s. For example, Alison Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic details through drawings of family snapshots, diary entries, recollections, and works of literature Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted father. At the core of the text is Bechdel’s belief that her father committed suicide, though she acknowledges that “there’s no proof, actually, that my father killed himself.”22 Like Bechdel’s supposition about her father’s death, Fun Home’s drawn photographs, diary entries, literary references, and dramatic retellings make her mediation of events and family apparent on the page.

Similarly, Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 work of prose and comics The Diary of a Teenage Girl consists, in part, of the diary that Gloeckner “kept as a teenager,” though she has changed the diarist’s name to Minnie Goetze and calls the work a novel: “Although I am the source of Minnie, she cannot be me—for the book to have real meaning, she must be all girls, anyone. This is not history or documentary or a confession, and memories will be altered or sacrificed, for factual truth has little significance in the pursuit of emotional truth.”23 The text itself also questions its own meaningfulness, as Minnie writes in a diary entry: “Would you or would you not consider this journal a creative endeavor? (Obviously, you must be reading what I write.) I ask this question because it seems to everyone else that I haven’t been doing jack shit lately in the way of independent, self-broadening projects.”24 She goes on to ask, “Perhaps, you say, I’d be better off typing randomly at the keyboard, perhaps a jumble of letters resembling alphabet soup would be more interesting to behold?,” followed by twelve lines of just that, random letters, symbols, and numbers strung together by hitting a keyboard. The opposition established between random letters and meaningful words serves as a commentary on the diary form itself and on The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s status as a crafted work of literature. A diary, for Gloeckner, has only particular, individualized meaning, while a work of literature or art has a general, perhaps even universal meaning. So, by transforming her diary into a “novel,” she lays claim to meaning, makes what were otherwise meaningless marks into meaningful words. It is important, though, that the diary form is retained in this transition as the form through which Minnie’s character is expressed, as the diary form connotes authenticity and intimacy even if it has been called fiction.

Like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, many texts that are written in the genre of the memoir are called works of fiction by their authors and publishers. In Gloeckner’s case, calling the work a novel rather than autobiography gives it an artistic and literary meaning that transcends and moves beyond frequent “descriptions of [her] book as being about ‘trauma’ or ‘the sexuality of the female adolescent.’”25 Or laying claim to the category of fiction can be a strategy to avoid lawsuits and the kind of outrage that resulted in James Frey’s “public stoning” (to use the phrase Frey himself used, and which artist Ed Ruscha used in a commission for Frey, after the A Million Little Pieces scandal).26 Or it can just be a way to acknowledge that memory is always incomplete and that any memoir contains some degree of fabrication. Less practically, and perhaps more meaningfully, drawing attention to these limits may make visible a condition of subjecthood today.

Contemporary artists and writers employ the memoir to represent the often hidden reality of limits in our contemporary moment—limits to memory, limits to sympathy, for sure, but also limits to economic growth, limits to upward mobility, limits to individual desire and initiative. In many works of contemporary literature that either are explicitly memoirs or use the genre of the memoir while labeling themselves fiction, disconnection and irony become figures for literature’s relationship to the reader and, more broadly, for individuals’ connection to each other in the age of neoliberalism. Like Eggers in What Is the What, the great theorist of autobiography Philippe Lejenue and the great champion of literary identification Oprah Winfrey find in the memoir a marker of authenticity and the chance for the reader’s self-realization through intimate contact with an other—that is, they offer an ethical account of the memoir. Contrary to this dominant understanding of the memoir, many contemporary writers seem to seize on the memoir to dramatize the inability to even formulate an ethical bond with others.27 These works represent human relations—including relations between the reader and the writer—as impersonal and structural rather than as personal and ethical, and as limited by material realities often thought to be fluid by free market ideology.

These contemporary memoiristic works often stage human relations in repetitive, rule-bound, and ultimately irresolute scenes, dramatizing the lack of closure, the inability to realize something about the self, and the incapacity for subjects to identify with one another in our neoliberal era. Moreover, these scenes of disidentification and irresolution depend on descriptions of material limits, juxtaposing the fluidity and flexibility of the neoliberal subject with the structures of inequality that facilitate and constrict what counts as human action and thought. For example, in the concluding chapter of Sheila Heti’s 2012 How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, the narrator, named Sheila, watches two of her friends play squash. The two friends, Margaux and Sholem, are both painters, and they have decided to let a squash game decide which one of them won the “Ugly Painting Competition” that the friends had decided to hold. Sheila is “really eager to know who would win,” so she comes along.28 At the squash court, the game begins:

The game went very slowly at first, then grew more and more focused. Soon Margaux and Sholem were running back and forth, breathing very heavily. They smacked the ball against the wall, dodged into each other’s part of the court, and slammed against the back wall, groaning. They nodded briefly when the other made a good move. They rubbed sweat from their brows and hit the ball too high. They ran forward and bent low, and at one point Sholem threw himself to the ground. Margaux followed the rolling ball, walking very slowly, and tossed it to Sholem to serve. He smacked it high in the air and ran to the edge of the court and missed.29

After this goes on for “about half an hour,” Sheila and her friends realize that they don’t know the score. They focus their attention on the game,

but none of us could hear anything from below except for explosions of laughter, moans, and cursing, and Sholem saying, “Fuck! I hate this fucking game!”

We remained very still, and we watched. Then finally Jon said, in his sweetly caustic drawl, “I don’t think they even know the rules. I think they’re just slamming the ball around.”

And so they were.30

The semblance of a game that is merely the pained exertions of two artists is a fitting representation of the “new sincerity” aesthetic often associated with the McSweeney’s school and our memoir culture more broadly. Artists are expected to suffer for us. Yet Heti’s novel represents this game as a process, even though it doesn’t make sense as a means of judging a painting contest. A game without rules that is nonetheless played as if it has rules comes to look more like art and less like competition. The circumscription of the scene—the court, the rackets, the ball, the walls, the players—frames the game, like a painting, photograph, or play, as an aesthetic pursuit. Concluding with this game still in progress, Heti’s memoiristic novel arrives not at a unified self but instead at a recognition of how external forces determine the self.

A related sense of directionless action, of a structured activity that, in fact, has no meaning and no endpoint, occurs in the opening chapter of Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei, narrated by Paul, a New York–based, Taiwanese-American writer who, at one point in the novel, gives a public reading where he reads one of Tao Lin’s own poems, making the connection between author and narrator explicit. On an airplane going to Taipei, Paul thinks about Taipei as an alternative to life in America:

On the plane, after a cup of black coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or “otherworld,” outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing—or been melded, Paul vaguely imagined, about an hour later, facedown on his arms on his dining tray, into a door-knocker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.31

As with the squash match that closes Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Lin’s image of a child at the door knocker finds in the self only repetition within confining limitations, limits that are recognized by the participant and the narrator but unable to be transcended. Here, the memoiristic allows for the recognition of a narrow frame, the way in which the effusive self is circumscribed by the promise of unlimited play.

In Maggie Nelson’s 2009 book Bluets, a collection of 240 prose pieces about the color blue written in the first person, the color blue and other colors become shorthand, a way of describing complex structures that pull us away from the world rather than attaching our language to it: “Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess ‘color.’ You might even say it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we ‘get around’ in the world. Some might call it the source of our suffering.”32 Bluets dwells on how, as Nelson articulates it in an essay, “the most seemingly immaterial forces are, in fact, material.”33 This material basis for our perceptions, for our livelihoods, for our literary and aesthetic pleasures, when acknowledged, places the reader in a new awareness of her surroundings, a new space to contemplate the stubborn materiality of our world, often characterized as fluid, networked, immaterial.

This emphasis on material limits—a squash court, a door knock never to be answered, the shimmering relations that we reduce to the idea of “blue”—is the political accomplishment of nonfiction prose under neoliberalism. The juxtaposition of idealism and the self with material limits functions as an aesthetically inflected ideology critique, a bringing back from the flows of the free market into the stubborn material realities of finance capitalism and the limits neoliberal legislation and priorities place on individuals.

And, in the case of Jessamyn Lovell’s photography project Dear Erin Hart, emphasizing the porous yet also rigid limits of the self is one way of thinking of subjecthood as an object within a structure. In Dear Erin Hart, Lovell explains that her identity was stolen—she found out about the identity theft when she received a court summons from San Francisco. A resident of New Mexico, Lovell had her wallet stolen from a photo gallery in San Francisco, and subsequently her driver’s license and name had been used when a woman actually named Erin Hart had been arrested. After flying to San Francisco to clear her name, Lovell then gets angry and “decide[s] to track [Erin Hart] down and at least see who she was.”34 This proves harder than she imagines, as she gets three different mug shots of Hart. She eventually hires a private investigator to help her, and she returns to San Francisco and surreptitiously photographs Hart on the day she is released from prison, as Hart goes to a convenience store to buy cigarettes, shoplifts from a Goodwill clothing store, and then goes into a motel (fig. 21). Lovell returns a year later, only to find Hart’s current address to be a strange, boarded-up mansion. Going through her photographs of the mansion, she finds a photo that she thinks might be of Hart, “after a year of ‘living hard.’”35 The project concludes with a sealed envelope, left at the San Francisco gallery where Lovell’s photos and wall texts were installed, addressed to Hart (fig. 22). Hart was invited to the show yet did not appear. After the show closed, Lovell gave the letter to Hart’s parole officer, who “confirmed giving Erin Hart a condensed version of what I had written.” Lovell’s project begins with anger. It is a kind of revenge, as she reclaims her identity by infringing on the privacy of another. Yet the project changes over time, as Lovell begins to identify with Hart (they are both from working-class backgrounds, they have both struggled with money). Lovell’s identification with Hart can only go so far, though, as she never encounters or speaks to her. The sealed letter is never opened by Hart, the intimate connection is never established. Instead, Lovell can only view Hart from the distance of a private investigator—Hart is an object in motion, her feelings, thoughts, history, and future only a projection. What is felt as deeply personal to Lovell—her identity was stolen—also has nothing to do with the personal at all. And Lovell’s photographs balance this tension, as in the mug shot of Hart fixed to an envelope. The photograph is at once vibrant and colorful yet also a photograph of a photograph, attached to a folder containing documents the viewer isn’t allowed to read. The photograph discloses only the limits of Lovell’s, and our own, ability to know who Hart is—a person who is only visible within structures that handle subjects as objects, but an object with whom Lovell can’t help but imagine herself as being in an intimate relation.

Documentary’s Promise

A striking example of how documentary can represent this pull between self and object, feeling and structure, is in a work of nonfiction reportage. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family is painstakingly researched narrative journalism about a poor family in the Bronx. At the end of Random Family, a mother and her daughters visit the daughters’ father, Cesar, who is going to be in jail for a long time still:

Toward the end of the visit, Nautica begged Cesar to give her a pony ride, as he had when she was little, where he bounced her like a piece of popcorn on his knees. He did—for a good ten minutes. Then he held her lengthwise like a barbell and pushed her into the air. Mercedes watched, her awe and longing clear. When Cesar began to spin Nautica around, Mercedes couldn’t contain her desire. “Can you do that to me?” she asked breathlessly.

She caught herself as quickly, and her expression turned stony. The hope became a dare. Since she was a baby, no one had been able, or willing, to carry her. She weighed 130 pounds now.

Cesar placed Nautica down and squatted before Mercedes. Drawing out the moment, he rubbed his chin. Then, very seriously, he examined his big hands. He measured the width of his grip below Mercedes’s knees. Mercedes had braced herself for rejection; then, the next thing she knew, she was up in the air. She went rigid with excitement and terror. “No, Daddy!” she shrieked giddily.

He adjusted her on his shoulders. She clutched his hair and dug her legs into his armpits. Then he paraded his daughter around the honor room and into the regular visiting area, where they took another lap past the inmates, who smiled and nodded as Cesar introduced his oldest girl. He pushed out the door to the enclosed cement courtyard. An April wind had whipped up, and everything was flying, so he quickly ducked back inside, exaggerating the drop as they went over the threshold.

“Daddyyy!” Mercedes squealed, nearly losing her balance. She regained it as he steadied. He headed back to their table, where Nautica grinned and Coco gazed up at them, like a little girl in awe of a Christmas tree. Mercedes was trying not to smile but she couldn’t help it. “I’m going to fall! Daddy! I’m too heavy!” she said urgently.

“Relax, I ain’t going to drop you, don’t worry,” Cesar assured her. He’s been lifting weights almost daily for the last five years. To himself, he said, “Listen, you light as a feather to me.”36

The lyricism of the passage and its use of dialogue, free indirect discourse, and explication all contribute to a heart-warming effect. It is hard for a book to make me cry, but this one does it every time. My response, though, has less to do with what is on the page than with the looming reality that the book sets up prior to this scene: Cesar is going to drop his daughter, figuratively. He is in prison, and even if he gets out, there is little for him in the world that awaits outside, a world of poverty, limited opportunities, and broken social services. The affective reach of this passage is not personal but structural. I cry not for Cesar but because of the limits that Cesar has no choice but to inhabit, that we all have no choice but to inhabit in one way or another.

In a 2013 interview marking the ten-year anniversary of Random Family’s publication, LeBlanc reflected on the book’s reception: “I often felt disturbed that readers were surprised by the experiences of the people in the book. Many are shocked, I think, to discover that people in poverty have complicated, meaningful lives—in other words, that the people in the book are, in fact, human beings.”37 This humanity is a function not of identification and recognition but of the cruel distance between self and structure, made visible in documentary art today. In Justin St. Germain’s 2013 memoir Son of a Gun, about the murder of his mother by his stepfather, he writes about watching his mother watch herself on television. A neighbor was murdered by her husband, and St. Germain’s mother was interviewed by the local news. St. Germain remarks, “She’d never been on TV before, and she asked us if that was how she really looked, if that was her real voice. She didn’t recognize herself.”38 This passage is a metatextual moment, a reference to St. Germain’s own representation of his mother’s murder and his awareness that his mother might not find herself recognizable in the pages of this book about her. Articulating a similar idea in her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped, a chronicle and memorial of the many young African American men the author knew who died young, Jesmyn Ward writes: “There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”39 At once a reference to institutionalized racism, crime, and drug abuse stemming from a lack of opportunities and to the erosion of public education and other services, Ward’s sentence, like St. Germain’s passage above, stages the major accomplishment of the documentary aesthetic—the representation of finance capitalism’s structures and their reorganization of our everyday lives.

In her landmark 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit encapsulates the role that documentary art can have today. About the ways in which men assume mastery over women, Solnit’s essay begins by recounting a party in Aspen, where a man described Solnit’s own book to her as a book she “should have known.” Solnit explains the man’s error, but he “beg[ins] holding forth again” regardless. Solnit remarks that she “like[s] incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.”40 Making these subtle forces visible and recognizing their ubiquity in our lives, from structural racism and police violence to patriarchal privilege and sexual assault, have led to some of the most powerful social movements of today. These movements rely on documentary arts, from memoir and video to testimony and structural analysis, as they launch both critiques of finance capitalism’s exploitation of subjects and visions of what renewed collective lives might be beyond exploitation. Documentary art at its best estranges us from ourselves and makes visible the structures that produce our subjectivities, the rules which bind us to a way of life that is in constant crisis and to which alternatives are emerging.