The New Criterion

Though Kingsley Amis’s novel Difficulties with Girls was published in 1988, it contains a passage that might as well have been cocked at the “fake memoir” epidemic of the decade just concluded. Amis’s hero, Patrick Standish, who works for a British publishing house, has been asked his opinion of a manuscript bearing the portentous title Blood in the Tigris:

“I have to say bluntly at the outset that I found this book something of a disappointment after Dreamtime Children of Ayers Rock” (outdid even that hotchpotch of illiterate fabrication)… . “Now nobody’s asking for strict historical truth” (more than a faint concern for probability) “but here and there” (throughout) “the author seems to be writing pure fantasy” (at a level to defeat comparison).

One is tempted to marvel at Amis’s prescience, but, as Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History demonstrates, authors, editors, and publishers have been trafficking in maudlin, brutal, sensationalistic schlock since, if not quite time immemorial, at least several hundred years before that infamous fabricator James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) submitted to verbal bastinado on “Oprah” for his crimes against literature and the public trust.

Of course, memoir is a great deal older than that. Yagoda begins with Julius Caesar’s third-person Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50 B.C.), then moves on to the fifth-century Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, then identifies the first and arguably most miserable “misery memoir,” the twelfth-century Historia Calamitatum of Peter Abelard, a French monk whose calamitates included being relieved of “those parts of his body” he’d used to consummate an illicit romance. A million little pieces? One or two will do.

The fifteenth century produced The Book of Margery Kempe, to which “the honor of being the first English autobiography is usually given.” The Renaissance, Yagoda tells us, gazed upon the first glass mirrors; it also saw a proliferation of memoirs, with notable examples issuing from Pope Pius II, the Florentine goldsmith and wild child Benvenuto Cellini, and the Milanese scientist Girolamo Cardano. The seventeenth century positively glowed with spiritual autobiographies; writers flagellating themselves as the “chief of sinners” were as numerous as splinters of the True Cross.

In 1719, the first fake memoir to achieve a kind of bestseller status was published in London: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner … Written by Himself. Yagoda resists playing this gotcha for laughs, regarding it as a significant “turning point in the history of attitudes toward truth.” He goes on to say:

While some readers realized Crusoe was fiction, others believed it to be true. The evidence for this is a pamphlet produced by the prominent author Charles Gildon. “Robinson Crusoe Examin’d and Criticis’d” explicitly called Defoe a liar—and thus was the first recorded instance of an attack on a fake memoir. But Defoe … merely recognized … that human beings respond powerfully to narratives that are (or make credible claims to be) true.

But why? Is identification with a story necessary to its enjoyment? This would seem to be true of the next subgenre Yagoda discusses, the Indian captivity narrative. Readers eager for a peep at the savages and “man-eaters” of the New World had plenty of luridly titled and illustrated materials from which to choose. As mere stories, these would have been plenty titillating; as “true relations,” pulsating with “It could happen to you!” subtext, they were publishing gold.

It’s telling, though, that Yagoda can’t help smirking at the popularity of these books. “Today,” he writes, “vivid traces of the genre can be seen in a wide range of autobiographies by white Americans held against their will by scary, usually darker skinned people.” Silly white people! Yagoda is discussing hostile natives, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Midnight Express; does he believe Stockholm syndrome is the only enlightened response to being held against one’s will? What points does he score by noting that “the UFO abduction tale is certainly a related narrative form, and it can’t be a coincidence that the aliens featured in them usually have … gray skin”?

The thing is that, although Yagoda is generally dispassionate, bordering on academic, the reader never forgets that memoir noawadays is the whipping boy of literature, written by narcissists to be read by numbskulls. Memoir is treated like some uppity version of reality TV: hoi polloi enjoy it unironically, failing to see it as, at best, contrived and mercenary and, at worst, fraudulent; those who know better enjoy the frisson of superiority it so reliably provides. (Prick the critic who gleefully savages the narcissism of memoir-writing and you just might find a latent narcissist delighting in his own humility and reserve.)

What about that other perennial complaint, that memoir-writing and -reading are symptoms of our “therapeutic” culture? This is a fine way for the critic to suggest, since he’ll never have an opportunity to say it outright, that he is either too well- adjusted or too stoic to sympathize with the need for therapy. But is the problem that “misery” memoirs are therapeutic or that they are insufficiently so—that they are too pat, too shallow, to provide real succor, wisdom, or lasting transformation?

In other words, by blasting the confessional mode as such, rather than treating it as something that can be done very well or very poorly, critics run the risk of scaring off newcomers who could do great things with the form. Memoir belongs with fiction and painting, not Tijuana bibles and macramé.

This is not to say that Yagoda is disrespectful or dismissive of memoir. His chronicle is clear and comprehensive, so it’s inevitable that a great deal of forgettable or regrettable books make appearances. But thanks to the chicanery, exploitation, and self-promotion that go hand in hand with many of today’s blockbuster memoirs, it’s all but impossible not to laugh first and ask questions later, and one senses that impulse even in a writer as sober and diligent as Yagoda.

So why does a lousy memoir arouse so much greater disdain than a bad novel, of which there are presumably many more? (Disdain, that is, from the critics—it seems there’s no memoir so bad that it can’t sell a few million copies. Some believe this speaks to a great national penchant for voyeurism and excitement; chances are it speaks to something more mundane: bad taste. Bad novels sell the most copies, too.)

When “lousy” means “untrue,” the answer is obvious. Nobody likes being taken for a ride, whether it’s by Daniel Defoe or Daniel James, the “seventy-three-year-old onetime blacklisted screenwriter who grew up in Kansas City and graduated from Yale in 1933” and then, in 1983, published an “autobiographical” novel as “Danny Santiago” about living in the Los Angeles barrio. The difference between Defoe and today’s hucksters, when all is said and done, is that his book was good enough to stand on its own. He invented a marketing gimmick he didn’t need. James Frey and his ilk are nothing but marketing gimmick.

Even though they get the most press, only a relatively small number of memoirs are out-and-out fakes. Usually “lousy” just means “lousy”—mawkish, self-pitying, platitudinous, unreflective, opportunistic, and, above all, badly written. One likes to think the contempt in which serious readers hold such books transcends gripes about banality, narcissism, or even mediocre prose, all of which can be found in abundance in the fiction section. They are reacting violently to something that is, unlike a bad novel, not only a waste of time but also a waste of life—and frequently a calculated one, which may be the greatest sin of all.