On two memoirs
that deal very differently, but equally impressively, with tragic losses.
Memoir, or as it’s often called within
scholarly conversations “life writing (although the concept includes
biographical as well as autobiographical works),” is a pretty complex and
fraught literary genre. Even leaving aside the questions of veracity and
authenticity that have been raised by numerous recent memoirs (most
particularly James
Frye’s A Million Little Pieces [2003]
and the Oprah-related scandal it produced), the basic facts of any memoir
are plenty complex enough: a person looking back at his or her life and trying
to write about some of its events and themes for outside audiences, with
various private and public motives, with all of the choices that go into any
written work, with all that is potentially left out, and so on. Yet as long as
we recognize all those factors, and thus treat
memoirs as fundamentally creative works, the genre can also provide
powerful and inspiring stories, narratives of individuals dealing with and
working through (in many cases) difficult and adverse situations.
Moreover, memoirs
can highlight in their style and tone, as much as in their content and themes,
the hugely varied and equally effective ways in which we can respond to such
situations. To that end, I would point to two recent, justly celebrated
memoirs, one by an already prominent writer and one that established its author
on the literary scene, but both dealing centrally with tragic losses and the
authors’ responses to them. Joan
Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
(2005) details the author’s many stages and extremes in the year after the unexpected
death of her husband of forty years, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, a
period during which their daughter was also gravely ill. Dave Eggers’ A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) traces the
author’s many years of stewardship over his younger brother, an effort that
Eggers undertook after their parents’ unexpected deaths within 32 days of one
another (Eggers was 21 and his brother 8
at the time). Both number among the most compelling American memoirs I’ve read,
and certainly among the most vital contributions to the genre in the early 21st
century.
Yet despite those
many parallels, the two books could not be more different in their predominant
styles and tones. Those differences are due in no small measure to their
authors’ distinct voices: Didion has throughout her career written complex
psychological, fragmented, and often stream of consciousness novels
and non-fiction,
and adopts similar perspectives and themes for her memoir; whereas Eggers has
become known as a founder of McSweeney’s, the editor of the Best American Non-Required
Reading series, and other counter-cultural and satirical works, and
brings that persona to both of his roles (as author and as main character) in
his memoir. But I would also argue that the books’ differences reflect two
distinct, if perhaps complementary, ways to write and work through loss and
adversity: in Didion’s case, to allow each and every part of the experience its
time and space, to engage with every emotion and response without judgment or
fear (or at least not self-consciousness), and to chart that process in
writing; and in Eggers’ case, to emphasize self-consciously the hyperbole
itself, the extremes of adversity and of heroism in combating them, to find the
humor but also certainly the pathos within those extremes, and to tell that
story with charisma for his audience. Each, again, works very well on its own
terms; together they offer a multi-part map to dealing with, and writing about,
the worst of what people can experience.
Next inspiring
response to adversity tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Powerful responses to adversity you’d highlight?
10/25 Memory Day
nominees: A tie between two
pioneering 20th century Americans who took
America and the world
to entirely new places
and ideas,
Richard Byrd and Henry Steele Commager.
No comments:
Post a Comment