Danny Bonaduce, poster boy for former child stars gone wild, stares straight into the camera. “My life is a train wreck,” he says. “You’re welcome to watch.”
This was the promo for Breaking Bonaduce, a controversial reality series starring the steroid-pumped but still freckly Bonaduce, his sighing wife, Gretchen, and their VH1-appointed therapist, Dr. Garry.
Bonaduce has always made good television. Years ago he was cute little Danny Partridge, the youngest member of the 1970s Partridge Family and the one who most resembled a Cabbage Patch doll. Now, all grown up and without Shirley Jones to turn to for motherly advice, Bonaduce is a mess. His marriage is on the fritz. He’s tried to commit suicide. He has a multitude of addictions, including sex and drugs and porn. And he’s likely violent. Remember the incident years ago when he beat up a transvestite and it made the news? VH1 certainly did. Can anyone say Nielsen ratings?
The show was, predictably, a hit for VH1, which has since become king of the celebrity reality TV circus. At the end of the first season of Breaking Bonaduce, viewers who’d tuned in to watch Danny rant into his cell phone, threaten Dr. Garry, threaten to slit his own wrists, actually slit his wrists and then explain his bandages to his young daughter were rewarded with—what exactly?
The understanding that Danny Bonaduce’s life is, well, a mess.
The revelation that this often happens to former child stars.
The knowledge that this is, perhaps, sad.
End of story.
If you think Bonaduce and those like him are confined to television, that most maligned pop culture medium, just check out the memoir/biography/self-help section of your local megabookstore. You might notice some similarities.
Here’s a title that, according to a certain publishing/marketing trend, would get powerful talk show hosts’ panties in a twist: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Ex-Crackhead Cross-Dressing Male One-Legged Club-Footed Prostitute Whose Adulterous Midget Heroin-Addicted Mama Fed Him Rancid Dog Food through a Straw Then Sold Him to the CIA for One Mottled Banana and a Pack of Kool Menthols: A True Story.
Apologies to Dave Eggers, who is, as he notes in his own title, most likely a genius. But back to the point.
Memoirs and personal essay collections are everywhere these days, and despite what some critics say, this is not a bad thing. There are so many wonderful, human, funny, powerful, and true stories out there. (Try Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty, a sad and inspiring story of friendship; Greg Bottoms’s Angelhead, a haunting story about what it’s like to grow up in a family one of whose members is mentally ill; Kathy Dobie’s incisive The Only Girl in the Car, a story about a girl coming of age in a brutal small town.) But there is also a trend toward the other side of memoir, the Bonaduce side, the side that says, “My pain is greater than anyone else’s pain.” The side that says, “Look at me. I’m so crazy. No one has ever been this crazy, and no one will be this crazy ever again.” The side that says, “Look at me. Look at me.”
Come on.
Books should not be the equivalent of reality TV. Memoir writing—despite what William Grimes said in a critique for the New York Times, “We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?”—is not about navel-gazing.
(The phrase, by the way, is a contemporary take on omphaloskepsis, the practice whereby contemplative folks like monks and mystics and Grateful Dead enthusiasts gaze for days at their own navels, hoping to find, tucked in the intricate maze of their own centers, the keys to divine enlightenment and/or their cars.)
Memoir writing is not about self-obsession, even though the subject is invariably the experience of one life.
Good memoirs should do what all good art aspires to do. They should show us ourselves. This is arguably the distinction between good and bad memoir writing. Bad memoirs often offer readers the book equivalent of reality TV. They provide voyeuristic pleasure, the chance to peek into the underwear drawer of a writer who’s done more crack, made more kissy-face with his/her father/mother, punched out more cops, drunk more booze, and racked up more hours in rehab and on therapists’ couches than anyone else. Ever.
Sure, some of these memoirs are more titillating than others. Then again, some navels contain fluffier or dirtier or more interesting belly lint than others. Recently a man in Canada reported that after a camping trip and a week without a shower, he looked down to find a sapling had sprouted smack in the center of his navel. He took pictures and posted them on the Internet.
Well then.
The point is that bad memoir writing, like bad television, involves navel-gazing and nothing more. The writer is so obsessed with him/herself that there is no concern for how that self fits into the big picture. And no matter how sensational or how boring the life of the bad memoir writer may be, the reader comes away with the same thing.
Wow.
Gee.
Isn’t that something?
What kind of sapling was it anyway?
Is that so?
Wow.
A good memoir does more than that. A good memoir offers readers a human connection. A good memoir writer uses life experience, not to go more deeply into the self but to reach out to others. A good memoirist makes connections. A good memoirist’s primary goal is to show us something true about ourselves, about what it means to be human.
“I am vast,” Walt Whitman wrote. “I contain multitudes.”
We all contain multitudes. We all contain universal truths.
“We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” E. B. White’s Charlotte, the spider, spelled it out for us.
We each come to this understanding through a life filled with individual experiences. Those individual experiences are what make up a memoirist’s subject. Some of those experiences are worth writing about; others aren’t. Some people are born writers; others aren’t. These aren’t things that can or should be chosen or invented simply to fit a marketing niche. In a line meant as advice for young writers who romanticize suffering as a means to a creative life, the poet Carolyn Forche wrote: “Twenty-year-old poet / Hikmet did not choose to be Hikmet.”
Nâzim Hikmet. The great Turkish poet who wrote some of his most important poems on prison toilet paper. Hikmet. A man who spent more than twenty-six of his sixty-one years either in solitary confinement or in exile. Hikmet, the author of the great epic Human Landscapes as well as many intimate narrative poems that reflect on everything from his experiences in prison to, a month before his death, a meditation on what it means to be alive:
I mean you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you will plant olives—
Those olives, Hikmet said, would be an act of defiance. Human beings, he said, fear death, but we don’t believe it will come for us.
Hikmet did not choose to be Hikmet.
Hikmet didn’t play to cameras or to a publishing market. He didn’t invent. He didn’t overdramatize. He simply played the hand he had been dealt. He wrote from his own experience, his own center. He didn’t do this because he was obsessed with the labyrinth of his own suffering or his own navel. He did not write inward, though he had every excuse to do so. Instead he wrote outward. While in prison, he wrote poems addressed in the second person, though he may not have believed that anyone else would ever read them. He wrote poems to others who were imprisoned, either literally or figuratively. He offered advice on how to survive.
To survive, Hikmet said, we all must be connected to the world and not separate from it. We must be caught up in, and not disengaged from, what he called “the flurry of the world.”
Bonaduce is, for ratings’ sake, a flurry of his own making. He is separate from the rest of us. As it’s presented by VH1, his life is a spectacle, something to watch, not something to mirror our own. That’s what separates television and navel-gazing from real art. Individual human experience is valuable—in writing and elsewhere—only when it moves through, then transcends the self and connects to what’s human in us all.