MEMOIR WHORE
2005
2005
“I’m interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same.”
– David Shields
Artists are whores, the lot of us, selling a bit of our souls in every work. We like to think we might offer our takers a glimpse of eternity, which sounds narcissistic but I guess that depends on the whore in question. Even the most hermetic of painters, writers, performers and poets go a’whoring each time they bless their handlers to feed a work to the public for profit. Even the eensiest profit. Okay, less so for poets. But to say that memoir is whoring more so than any other art form is like saying the lifeblood of Picasso is absent from Guernica, or the avenues of Scorcese’s heart are not investigated by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. All of great art, in a sense, is memoir, for is it not about personal truths and the way the artist sees shaped from a life's experiences? I was recently witness to Gordon Lish going on about memoir being cheap and whorish. “Write a memoir and you’re finished!”, he railed. I wonder what Nabokov would say to that? Although he commenced writing what would become his memoir Speak, Memory, and Lolita during the same period of time, the former debuted in 1951 followed by Lolita in 1955.
The best of memoir can turn the experiences and memories of a life, and of a particular vision, into work that often takes us through a gloriously dark journey that exposes the shimmering there, for an arrival which spellbinds us all.
Academia has drained most of the fun, excitement, and electricity from literature in America. Why must there be these snarky rules concerning the way we tell our stories, this passion to dry out language like the toxic oxygen-absorbing packets found in beef jerky packets? An account of a life is either compelling and well-writ, or it is not. People crave a language of the heart. Give us more of what we need, and promote these stories so the public knows they exist on the page—stories about the people who make up the majority of this country. The workers, the dreamers, the fallen who demand their day with the beauty and heartbreak of their tales, those completely disenfranchised by the cultural hegemony (as in Gramsci, not Lenin).
Memoir is now a genre much maligned because of a few bruised apples in the bunch. I wish I could say literary hoax memoirs have no other intent than to spin a spicy misery yarn in a bid for fame, and some of them are just that, fame being the great Mesmer of our age. I venture that for some, chronicling a fictional journey through a living hell and posing it as truth may have assuaged a sense of guilt (in some cases liberal and white), or assigned a badge of honor (however counterfeit), or lent meaning to a convoluted pain one could find no other way of coping with. For example, as a child inmate of Buchenwald concentration camp, Herman Rosenblat imagined a young girl from outside the camp would come and throw food to him over the fence. As a man, he wrote a ‘memoir’ called Angel at the Fence, claiming that he serendipitously met the girl much later in life and married her. Even though Rosenblat did in truth survive Buchenwald and Theresienstadt, (although his mother did not; she was killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka) the love story of the girl-at-the-fence was a falsification, a fraud played out on Oprah, just as it similarly was with James Frey. Why couldn’t Rosenblat have written the truth, presenting the chimera of the girl as just that, and how the fiction functioned to keep him alive? Would the true story of a boy fantasizing love in a concentration camp, surviving, and consequently dreaming his wife into the role of his fantasy really have been that less poignant?
Misha deFonseca (real name, de Wael) wrote a ‘memoir’ of an imagined life as a holocaust survivor hiding from the Nazis across Europe, taking the ‘child thrown to the wolves’ trope quite literally by claiming she was looked after by a friendly wolfpack. As if this weren’t fantastical enough, de Wael’s parents were Catholic resistance fighters in Belgium during the war, not Jewish, as she’d claimed. Her father turned collaborator with the Gestapo after their arrest. Was he tortured into that collaboration? The facts aren’t known. Was de Wael haunted by her father having been a traitor? You bet. Her book was falsely presented as memoir, yet the truth of it is in the make-believe of a woman coming to terms with questions of her family’s dark past.
I think of the painter in the documentary Catfish, (spoiler alert) a fakester but ultimately one I had compassion for. You’d have to be made of steel not to feel her pathos during the denouement scene of that film. In the ‘memoir’ Love and Consequences, Margaret Seltzer falsely claimed to be both foster child and Bloods gang member. How aspirational! She grew up in Sherman Oaks, bored to death no doubt. These are women who clearly wrestled with the codex to their own pain on the page. They found another route to make sense of the senseless through forging a new life. An audience is always willing to follow when the tale is engaging.
But enough with the sympathy for the fakesters, let’s talk about the working class. Boo ya! We’re desperately out of fashion these days and have been for some time, a voice and political texture the literary elite seems to find, well, distasteful. We have Wall Street, Republican trickle-down economics and the bankers robbing us blind while the cultural cognescenti turn their noses up at us. Talk about getting shafted. Black and white writers whose work pierces straight into the heart of class and race are ignored in favor of MFA-fueled cleverly-rendered obfuscations. It’s hardly the über-educated I take umbrage with; the elitest gatekeepers of culture who deny the ‘underclass’ a voice do an egregious disservice to America. Gosh, how awful is underclass? A new term, certainly not coined by the working class it seeks to further undermine. Isn’t the point of education also a moral one? There hasn’t been such economic blight in America since the great depression, yet where are today’s working class voices, in memoir and otherwise? Our Carson McCullers, Maya Angelou, Faulkner, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Samuel Delaney, Langston Hughes, John Fante? Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite writers, dropped out of university twice. Once in a while a crucial memoir voice will sneak through, but only a few come to mind from the 1980’s on. Sapphire’s Push. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn. The Liar's Club, Mary Karr. Just Kids, by Patti Smith. Can it really be true that the stories we desperately need to approach a renewed fraternity with one another, the stories we need to hear in order to heal the country—simple, moving, brutally honest stories—are being suppressed?
As David Shields ventures, “What if America isn’t really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead, it’s the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?” I hear Shields’ book Reality Hunger is abhorred in certain literary circles. No surprise. Naked emperors prefer the chill to the truth.
On the authentic front, Mary Karr wrote one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve read to date entitled, ironically, The Liars’ Club. Karr is the real thing. When I started her Lit: A Memoir, I was a bit turned off by the self-consciousness of the writing but I stuck with it, because something in her language held me (and she never fails to hold me). I stayed on the journey and boy was it ever worth it because when I realized what she was doing halfway through the book, it blew my head off. She showed me a self-pitying self-obsessed drunk and took me into her initially reluctant sobriety. And the layers started peeling away as she got it: the what is and the why of her alcoholism, the self-consciousness falling away in her personality through the writing itself as sobriety took hold, bit by bit, with its accompanying humility.
The book is dazzling feat. Recently, Karr gave James Frey a well-deserved bash on Facebook in reaction to the NY Magazine article about his new ‘fiction factory’.
Luc Sante – who has always been his own man and fortunately, is a friend, rocks hard. Playful and beautifully written, his memoir Factory of Facts presents no less than nine different versions of one story (in the first 11 pages!), each commencing with “I was born in 1954, in Vervier, Belgium…”, concerning what happened when shortly after his birth, his father’s employer went bankrupt and the family emigrated (or didn’t) to America. An elegant, funny and evocative work, Luc presents his personal vision of how we are made by fictions as much as by facts, featuring memory as a trickster, a glimmering thing. Tumble down the rabbit hole of Luc’s blog.
Certain memoirs call to mind one of my favorite Dorothy Allison quotes (and there are so many):
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.”
There is no black and white in memoir, but there are corners. And there is the oldest profession in the world.
Eileen Myles is one of the purest art whores I know. The resistance whore of no subterfuge, grenade right there in the palm of her hand for all to see while she blows up assumptions and genres and revels in it. Her book, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is NOT a memoir she says, for “…memoir just has a kind of preciousness that I want to avoid.” It reads as real to me because I happen to see her duende dancing all over it. Inferno is a ‘novel’ because she ‘says so’, and refers to it sometimes as a ‘record’, but never as ‘memoir’. And who can blame her, with the way memoir is currently being framed? A German term for an artist’s coming-of-age – Künstlerroman – is more fitting. She likes it, she claims it for her great work about a woman becoming a poet on the streets of New York in the 1970’s. Wayne Koestenbaum says “…literary artists need to be given the liberties that have long been accorded to visual artists (ever since Duchamp).” Eileen isn’t waiting to be given anything. Writers like Luc and Eileen take all the liberties they want, and they’re the realest it ever gets. They understand they owe no one the truth per se, but to honor themselves as poets and artists, they offer up their naked duende.
When I first read Lorca’s essay on the duende, all of my being stood doe-still, breathless. All I’d felt but could not articulate about the power of certain works of art is there, in Lorca’s own imp of the perverse. The duende is an inspired poetic reasoning of why one person is capable of extraordinary art where another is not. When an artist allows it to enter through their emotional wounds and to dance in their blood, it comes out to play in the work; this is duende, and the artist has to be strong enough, soft enough to both conjure and allow it to have its way. The duende is the heightened state of emotion, the authentic moment, the fairy or goblin-like creature that bestows soul by holding up the merciless mirror. The love affair that every great artist must have is a pas de deux with the duende. Lorca had it, as did Maria Callas. As much as some people may currently despise him, Mel Gibson has it. Madonna does not, although she’s one helluva showgirl. If I’m going to weigh, to judge, duende is my forever measure of art. Classless. Mystical. Ugly beautiful.
I haven’t much compassion for James Frey, not that I don’t relate to the journey of addiction and recovery. The problem is that beneath his ‘memoir’, I see a guy with not much recovery at all, still wanting desperately to be a badass. Did he really compare himself to Rimbaud? I must admit I’m irked that he’s from my hometown (because we Clevelandaise generally skew toward the dirty truth), and by him claiming that all memoirists are liars, paraphrasing David Shields without his wisdom or insights. Lately he’s in the news for exploiting young writers, now jumping on the YA wagon as a pickpocket no less. Very fashionable indeed.
At least JT Leroy (whoever they were) had literary talent, pulled off their fraud with panache and then faded away sheepishly, not wishing to cause any further harm. Frey is an ever-ready bunny; he just keeps on hopping across your desktop, annoying the hell out of you with his reprehensible antics until all you can visualize are a million smashed bunny bits.
I do believe memoir should be as real as the events that shape us, not the fantasies, unless they are named as such. But to those who want to hijack us into the idea that memoir must abide by some academically manufactured governance based on recent frauds, don’t dare think you’ll ever confine our written memories to a merciless dry-hump on your pages. And don't even dream that working-class voices will remain fettered. Life is poetry, and as Dorothy Allison says, “We are made by heartbreak.” The heartbreak of this country will not be ignored forever, unless we are all, over and under-class, truly determined to destroy ourselves.
I’m still moved by ‘misery lit’, as long as the writer tears a bit of the sky open enough to glimpse the eternity within us all... and a way to conjure that light inward in order to present it beautifully. The most soulful stories are those penned from hard-earned corners, which all the MFA’s in the world can’t buy a piece of. Leave the real working men and women, who know the duende of truth is far sexier than a pack of lies, to do the righteous work needed in these times. And to the gatekeepers; open the windows so we can be heard. You just might find there’s plenty in it for you, too.
I close with a thought from a great American writer. She never attended a university. In fact, her formal education ended at 14.
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
—Doris Lessing
– David Shields
Artists are whores, the lot of us, selling a bit of our souls in every work. We like to think we might offer our takers a glimpse of eternity, which sounds narcissistic but I guess that depends on the whore in question. Even the most hermetic of painters, writers, performers and poets go a’whoring each time they bless their handlers to feed a work to the public for profit. Even the eensiest profit. Okay, less so for poets. But to say that memoir is whoring more so than any other art form is like saying the lifeblood of Picasso is absent from Guernica, or the avenues of Scorcese’s heart are not investigated by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. All of great art, in a sense, is memoir, for is it not about personal truths and the way the artist sees shaped from a life's experiences? I was recently witness to Gordon Lish going on about memoir being cheap and whorish. “Write a memoir and you’re finished!”, he railed. I wonder what Nabokov would say to that? Although he commenced writing what would become his memoir Speak, Memory, and Lolita during the same period of time, the former debuted in 1951 followed by Lolita in 1955.
The best of memoir can turn the experiences and memories of a life, and of a particular vision, into work that often takes us through a gloriously dark journey that exposes the shimmering there, for an arrival which spellbinds us all.
Academia has drained most of the fun, excitement, and electricity from literature in America. Why must there be these snarky rules concerning the way we tell our stories, this passion to dry out language like the toxic oxygen-absorbing packets found in beef jerky packets? An account of a life is either compelling and well-writ, or it is not. People crave a language of the heart. Give us more of what we need, and promote these stories so the public knows they exist on the page—stories about the people who make up the majority of this country. The workers, the dreamers, the fallen who demand their day with the beauty and heartbreak of their tales, those completely disenfranchised by the cultural hegemony (as in Gramsci, not Lenin).
Memoir is now a genre much maligned because of a few bruised apples in the bunch. I wish I could say literary hoax memoirs have no other intent than to spin a spicy misery yarn in a bid for fame, and some of them are just that, fame being the great Mesmer of our age. I venture that for some, chronicling a fictional journey through a living hell and posing it as truth may have assuaged a sense of guilt (in some cases liberal and white), or assigned a badge of honor (however counterfeit), or lent meaning to a convoluted pain one could find no other way of coping with. For example, as a child inmate of Buchenwald concentration camp, Herman Rosenblat imagined a young girl from outside the camp would come and throw food to him over the fence. As a man, he wrote a ‘memoir’ called Angel at the Fence, claiming that he serendipitously met the girl much later in life and married her. Even though Rosenblat did in truth survive Buchenwald and Theresienstadt, (although his mother did not; she was killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka) the love story of the girl-at-the-fence was a falsification, a fraud played out on Oprah, just as it similarly was with James Frey. Why couldn’t Rosenblat have written the truth, presenting the chimera of the girl as just that, and how the fiction functioned to keep him alive? Would the true story of a boy fantasizing love in a concentration camp, surviving, and consequently dreaming his wife into the role of his fantasy really have been that less poignant?
Misha deFonseca (real name, de Wael) wrote a ‘memoir’ of an imagined life as a holocaust survivor hiding from the Nazis across Europe, taking the ‘child thrown to the wolves’ trope quite literally by claiming she was looked after by a friendly wolfpack. As if this weren’t fantastical enough, de Wael’s parents were Catholic resistance fighters in Belgium during the war, not Jewish, as she’d claimed. Her father turned collaborator with the Gestapo after their arrest. Was he tortured into that collaboration? The facts aren’t known. Was de Wael haunted by her father having been a traitor? You bet. Her book was falsely presented as memoir, yet the truth of it is in the make-believe of a woman coming to terms with questions of her family’s dark past.
I think of the painter in the documentary Catfish, (spoiler alert) a fakester but ultimately one I had compassion for. You’d have to be made of steel not to feel her pathos during the denouement scene of that film. In the ‘memoir’ Love and Consequences, Margaret Seltzer falsely claimed to be both foster child and Bloods gang member. How aspirational! She grew up in Sherman Oaks, bored to death no doubt. These are women who clearly wrestled with the codex to their own pain on the page. They found another route to make sense of the senseless through forging a new life. An audience is always willing to follow when the tale is engaging.
But enough with the sympathy for the fakesters, let’s talk about the working class. Boo ya! We’re desperately out of fashion these days and have been for some time, a voice and political texture the literary elite seems to find, well, distasteful. We have Wall Street, Republican trickle-down economics and the bankers robbing us blind while the cultural cognescenti turn their noses up at us. Talk about getting shafted. Black and white writers whose work pierces straight into the heart of class and race are ignored in favor of MFA-fueled cleverly-rendered obfuscations. It’s hardly the über-educated I take umbrage with; the elitest gatekeepers of culture who deny the ‘underclass’ a voice do an egregious disservice to America. Gosh, how awful is underclass? A new term, certainly not coined by the working class it seeks to further undermine. Isn’t the point of education also a moral one? There hasn’t been such economic blight in America since the great depression, yet where are today’s working class voices, in memoir and otherwise? Our Carson McCullers, Maya Angelou, Faulkner, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Samuel Delaney, Langston Hughes, John Fante? Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite writers, dropped out of university twice. Once in a while a crucial memoir voice will sneak through, but only a few come to mind from the 1980’s on. Sapphire’s Push. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn. The Liar's Club, Mary Karr. Just Kids, by Patti Smith. Can it really be true that the stories we desperately need to approach a renewed fraternity with one another, the stories we need to hear in order to heal the country—simple, moving, brutally honest stories—are being suppressed?
As David Shields ventures, “What if America isn’t really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead, it’s the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?” I hear Shields’ book Reality Hunger is abhorred in certain literary circles. No surprise. Naked emperors prefer the chill to the truth.
On the authentic front, Mary Karr wrote one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve read to date entitled, ironically, The Liars’ Club. Karr is the real thing. When I started her Lit: A Memoir, I was a bit turned off by the self-consciousness of the writing but I stuck with it, because something in her language held me (and she never fails to hold me). I stayed on the journey and boy was it ever worth it because when I realized what she was doing halfway through the book, it blew my head off. She showed me a self-pitying self-obsessed drunk and took me into her initially reluctant sobriety. And the layers started peeling away as she got it: the what is and the why of her alcoholism, the self-consciousness falling away in her personality through the writing itself as sobriety took hold, bit by bit, with its accompanying humility.
The book is dazzling feat. Recently, Karr gave James Frey a well-deserved bash on Facebook in reaction to the NY Magazine article about his new ‘fiction factory’.
Luc Sante – who has always been his own man and fortunately, is a friend, rocks hard. Playful and beautifully written, his memoir Factory of Facts presents no less than nine different versions of one story (in the first 11 pages!), each commencing with “I was born in 1954, in Vervier, Belgium…”, concerning what happened when shortly after his birth, his father’s employer went bankrupt and the family emigrated (or didn’t) to America. An elegant, funny and evocative work, Luc presents his personal vision of how we are made by fictions as much as by facts, featuring memory as a trickster, a glimmering thing. Tumble down the rabbit hole of Luc’s blog.
Certain memoirs call to mind one of my favorite Dorothy Allison quotes (and there are so many):
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.”
There is no black and white in memoir, but there are corners. And there is the oldest profession in the world.
Eileen Myles is one of the purest art whores I know. The resistance whore of no subterfuge, grenade right there in the palm of her hand for all to see while she blows up assumptions and genres and revels in it. Her book, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is NOT a memoir she says, for “…memoir just has a kind of preciousness that I want to avoid.” It reads as real to me because I happen to see her duende dancing all over it. Inferno is a ‘novel’ because she ‘says so’, and refers to it sometimes as a ‘record’, but never as ‘memoir’. And who can blame her, with the way memoir is currently being framed? A German term for an artist’s coming-of-age – Künstlerroman – is more fitting. She likes it, she claims it for her great work about a woman becoming a poet on the streets of New York in the 1970’s. Wayne Koestenbaum says “…literary artists need to be given the liberties that have long been accorded to visual artists (ever since Duchamp).” Eileen isn’t waiting to be given anything. Writers like Luc and Eileen take all the liberties they want, and they’re the realest it ever gets. They understand they owe no one the truth per se, but to honor themselves as poets and artists, they offer up their naked duende.
When I first read Lorca’s essay on the duende, all of my being stood doe-still, breathless. All I’d felt but could not articulate about the power of certain works of art is there, in Lorca’s own imp of the perverse. The duende is an inspired poetic reasoning of why one person is capable of extraordinary art where another is not. When an artist allows it to enter through their emotional wounds and to dance in their blood, it comes out to play in the work; this is duende, and the artist has to be strong enough, soft enough to both conjure and allow it to have its way. The duende is the heightened state of emotion, the authentic moment, the fairy or goblin-like creature that bestows soul by holding up the merciless mirror. The love affair that every great artist must have is a pas de deux with the duende. Lorca had it, as did Maria Callas. As much as some people may currently despise him, Mel Gibson has it. Madonna does not, although she’s one helluva showgirl. If I’m going to weigh, to judge, duende is my forever measure of art. Classless. Mystical. Ugly beautiful.
I haven’t much compassion for James Frey, not that I don’t relate to the journey of addiction and recovery. The problem is that beneath his ‘memoir’, I see a guy with not much recovery at all, still wanting desperately to be a badass. Did he really compare himself to Rimbaud? I must admit I’m irked that he’s from my hometown (because we Clevelandaise generally skew toward the dirty truth), and by him claiming that all memoirists are liars, paraphrasing David Shields without his wisdom or insights. Lately he’s in the news for exploiting young writers, now jumping on the YA wagon as a pickpocket no less. Very fashionable indeed.
At least JT Leroy (whoever they were) had literary talent, pulled off their fraud with panache and then faded away sheepishly, not wishing to cause any further harm. Frey is an ever-ready bunny; he just keeps on hopping across your desktop, annoying the hell out of you with his reprehensible antics until all you can visualize are a million smashed bunny bits.
I do believe memoir should be as real as the events that shape us, not the fantasies, unless they are named as such. But to those who want to hijack us into the idea that memoir must abide by some academically manufactured governance based on recent frauds, don’t dare think you’ll ever confine our written memories to a merciless dry-hump on your pages. And don't even dream that working-class voices will remain fettered. Life is poetry, and as Dorothy Allison says, “We are made by heartbreak.” The heartbreak of this country will not be ignored forever, unless we are all, over and under-class, truly determined to destroy ourselves.
I’m still moved by ‘misery lit’, as long as the writer tears a bit of the sky open enough to glimpse the eternity within us all... and a way to conjure that light inward in order to present it beautifully. The most soulful stories are those penned from hard-earned corners, which all the MFA’s in the world can’t buy a piece of. Leave the real working men and women, who know the duende of truth is far sexier than a pack of lies, to do the righteous work needed in these times. And to the gatekeepers; open the windows so we can be heard. You just might find there’s plenty in it for you, too.
I close with a thought from a great American writer. She never attended a university. In fact, her formal education ended at 14.
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
—Doris Lessing
