Embedded in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new article, “But Enough About Me” (The New Yorker) are connections between Christianity and memoir as a literary genre. The genre’s history traces back to St. Augustine’s Confessions (and, one might argue, King David in the Psalms). Mendelsohn wonders, however, what happens to memoir now that it is divorced from the Christian faith:
Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once “confession” came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest — and, maybe worse, once “redemption” came to mean nothing more than the cozy acceptance offered by other people, many of whom might well share the same secret — it was but a short step to what theTimes book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent “memoir craze”: “the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.”
In Philippians 4:8, Paul writes, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.” Mendelsohn provides a faint echo of Paul’s words as he suggests that memoirs worth reading are ones rooted in a deeper spiritual reality, or at least ones rooted in Truth with a capital T.
Posts
2 comments:
This is really interesting. I originally shopped my manuscript as pure memoir, and it was rejected by half a dozen presses that said it was well-written and compelling, but memoirs by non-famous people just don't sell well enough. The marketing folks at my current publisher (who accepted the book only after I reworked it so memoir was only a piece of it) went further, to say that the only memoirs by non-famous people that seem to sell decently have to do with drug addiction. I wonder if memoirs by non-famous drug addicts potentially do better than other memoirs because successful long-term recovery requires buying into an authentic conversion narrative that includes confession, absolution, surrender, redemption, etc. In the 12-step programs, which so many addicts name as a key part of their ongoing recovery, you don't have to convert to a specific religion, but you do have to confess your mistakes (sins), make amends, recognize your powerlessness, and hand over control to a higher power. In recovery, it is ALL those steps that are therapeutic, not just the confessing and getting it all out in the open. Maybe (if my publisher is correct in their assessment, anyway) drug addiction memoirs can do well because if they are authentic, they have to go beyond therapy to redemption. This is all just off the top of my head--but interesting to contemplate, anyway.
A lot to chew on here. Certainly can get to feeling narcissistic - the blogging and the memoir writing, the twittering the facebook updating, and all the forms of LOOK AT ME! we seem to have now.
For me, what got me writing and posting, first on www.dadtoday.com, and later compiling and self-publishing based on what felt like the best material was a personal realization about the power of story.
When I was getting ready to be a dad, all the advice and tips and tactics and how-to books we seemed to be inundated with were no help. The only help, the only thing that helped me really get inside the head space of where I was going was to hear other men tell their stories - something I don't think we ask for, or offer, often enough.
Post a Comment