High Five: Contemporary Memoir

(In this issue's High Five, memorist Marion Winik discusses her favorite modern memoirs.)

All I can say about picking five is that it’s easier than picking one—but not that much easier. I decided to approach the problem by choosing five favorite subgenres of contemporary memoir and selecting a book in each. Even this was a challenge because it forced me to leave out at least one of my favorite subgenres, Food, and right now I’m listening to the extremely amusing Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain on audio, so that whole buffet table of books is on my mind. However, when I am in the middle of a book I like, I tend to like it A LOT, as with any delicious experience to which you wholly give yourself, and that makes comparisons hard. So I disqualify myself temporarily in that field and offer the following. In which I cheated anyway with a few ties and runners-up.

Subgenre: Stalker Lit

Nicholson Baker, U and I

The writings of one writer about another writer, one he or she is obsessed with, are of particular interest to me—in other words, I’m interested in the way literary obsession, or literary rivalry, shapes a life. In fact, I taught a whole class on it once at the Maryland Institute College of Art, including on the syllabus, among others, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (D.H. Lawrence) and Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World (J.D. Salinger). Nicholson Baker’s 1991 book about his idolatry of John Updike expresses in the most crystalline and comic way possible the compound of awe, envy, competitiveness, scholarship, and wishful identification of which these love affairs are made. "We are both white, Eastern American, upper-middle-class, psoriatic, and heterosexual—but so what?" he writes. "That class includes millions. I feel closer to him than to any other living writer simply because I know more about him than any other living writer, but he writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am and that’s what counts." I don’t even like John Updike, but every nook and cranny Baker illuminates is one with which I am startlingly familiar. Not just about books and authors, but about words and the process of thought itself, he is so canny and lucid, it makes you think you were wrong to feel so alone.

Subgenre: Substance Abuse and Unconventional Lifestyles

Poe Ballantine, Things I Like About America or 501 Minutes to Christ (both essay collections)

Poe Ballantine, whose personal narratives are regularly published in The Sun (the literary magazine from North Carolina, not the newspaper of Baltimore), is post-Beat in all the ways that made you love the Beats in the first place, scruffy, profound, lyrical, hilarious, precise, peripatetic and way off-the-beaten track. And a lot more disciplined than any of the original crowd as a writer and editor, which is a good thing. When I opened Things I Like About America to find a sentence that would explain what I love about him, almost every one I looked at filled the bill. "I arrived early at the coffee shop because I couldn’t stand to be anywhere other than in the bosom of salvation, which had not been Memphis, college, Old Gold cigarettes, literature, or a young woman from Spain, and therefore had to be matrimony with a somewhat plain girl I hardly knew." Like David Sedaris, he is an American outsider with insane comedic and storytelling gifts, but unlike David Sedaris, who can be a little snooty, he makes you think you were wrong to feel so alone.

Subgenre: Pomo

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

The shelf appeal of this 2000 memoir has suffered from the hype, the imitators, the academic attention, and even from its own popularity—#1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, Pulitzer Prize finalist, the works. But when I first read it, I was in full agreement with its title. It is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Although some find its self-referential devices cloying and its loquacity too much, I found them endlessly clever and amusing, while the core story—about Eggers’ attempt to raise his little brother after both their parents die in a space of six months—is profoundly and honestly told. In fact, I fell in love as early as the Copyright page, which informs us that the book was "published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, a division of a larger more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled. That said, no matter how big such companies are, or how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small and therefore hardly worth worrying about."

Subgenre: Graphic Memoir

Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
Runners-up: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

Not being a very visual person, I never liked comics as a kid and therefore have been an unlikely member of the graphic novel fan club. Among the first exceptions to my no-pictures rule was Lynda Barry, the author of the strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek. I was standing at my kitchen counter yesterday morning at some ungodly hour drinking coffee and re-reading Barry’s One Hundred Demons, a collection of autobiographical comic strips, and suddenly I was crying. It was the second time in my life a comic made me cry, and the other time was when I first read the book. What I have always loved about Barry is her perfect pitch for the pre-adolescent and adolescent voice: so exactly right, you hear the echo of the old you and all those kids you used to know, still trapped in your head after all these years. Anyone who’s thinking of writing memoir should read her for inspiration, because she makes you see how getting the language right is the key to it all. And yet it’s the illustrations, too, that make Barry so beloved—the quirky individuality and detail of her ink drawings, her way of making ugly cute. Barry softened me up for a whole slew of autobiographical comic authors, notably Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel. Persepolis tells the story of a girl growing up in Iran with amazing immediacy, heart and humor. And Fun Home is the most literary comic strip of them all, weaving references to Camus, Joyce, Proust, and Fitzgerald (among many others) into the story of Bechdel’s father’s suicide. Her drawings are simply amazing and made even an imagephobe like me look and look.

Subgenre: Motherhood

Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

This is still one of the best of what has sadly come to be called the "momoir," a moniker that vies for pathetic lack of class with "chick-lit." Single mother and recovering alcoholic Anne Lamott’s 1993 journal of the first year of her son’s life (which also turns out to be the last year of her best friend Pammy’s) is funny and honest and inspiring on both the parental and literary fronts. Lamott’s gift to us all, here as well as in her book on writing, Bird by Bird, is to admit how ridiculously fucking hard it is sometimes, and to make that admission funny, and in so doing to sign our permission slips to go forth and screw up royally and write books about it. "Last night was death. Vietnam. He was colicky from 10:00 till nearly 1:00." The subject of how close to the edge one can be driven in dealing with an unhappy infant is an incredibly important one, particularly to anyone who finds herself in just that situation. Alhough many authors since have wrangled with it, Lamott put the territory on the map. And is a leading member of what is clearly a large and voluble crowd of memoirists lining up out there to make you think you were wrong to feel so alone.