Big-name authors dissect the self-exposure craze but reveal little themselves
NEW YORK CITY --
When The New York Times Magazine's special issue on "The Age of the Literary Memoir" began landing with a muffled thwack on doorsteps a few months ago, you could almost hear a collective groan passing over Manhattan. This sound was in part the anguished keening of writers whose work had been excluded, but primarily it was the distracted muttering of those chagrined to see the Times celebrating a narcissistic trend that might better be labeled The Age of Premature Ejaculation -- an age in which publishers are rushing to pry easily promotable, warts-and-all "memoirs" from the hands of writers too young to have actually lived all that much.
For every volatile and striking autobiography (Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"), and even for every moderately engaging one (Carolyn Knapp's "Drinking: A Love Story"), there have been dozens of underripe and overrated memoirs by young writers without terribly much to say. Thus the multiple, thin recountings of growing up in the 'burbs (David Beers' "Blue Sky Dream"), or of having been a little too promiscuous, or of minor scrapes with law enforcement (Peter Alson's "Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie"). Why the sudden overload? Maybe it's that, as the Times put it, "Fiction isn't delivering the news -- memoir is." But very likely it's also that, as one literary agent told a Newsday reporter recently, "a (memoirist) can go on 'Oprah' or be interviewed about his or her story. It's easier to promote books when there's a person involved ... it's part of the cult of personality."
Thursday night at The New School in Greenwich Village, James Atlas -- the bow-tied, chipmunk-like Times editor who cobbled together the "Age of the Literary Memoir" issue -- gathered a group of autobiographically-inclined writers to talk about what panelist Susan Cheever called the impulse to "glorify the almighty me." Among the others persuaded to attend (and to jostle for the too-few on-stage microphones) were Joyce Carol Oates, the critic Luc Sante, and Phyllis Rose, the author most notably of "Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages." While demonstrating ample dismay at the trend toward the whipper-snapper autobiography, the panel seemed hell-bent on demonstrating that the young have no monopoly on rambling self-revelation.
This was profoundly evident in the readings from these writers' works-in-progress. The charming and regal Phyllis Rose intoned from her not-quite-as-charming (and alarmingly titled) "The Year of Reading Proust" -- a book that seems to be largely about the dinner parties Rose has ruined with incessant anecdotes from the sensualistic French writer. Joyce Carol Oates, the one talented novelist in attendance, provided a stream of dithering non-sequiturs about the rural schoolhouse she attended in upstate New York. Oates also lectured as if she'd taken a page from the Al Gore School of Rhetorical Condescension. "Anybody remember spelling bees?" she asked at one point. Upon mentioning the word outhouses, Oates paused to clarify that these were "outdoor bathrooms." Everyone nodded.
Luc Sante -- goateed and balding; he has Trotsky's nostril-flaring intensity -- fared better with an excerpt from his forthcoming "The Factory of Facts," a memoir about growing up in America after having been raised to speak French. Sante and his lower middle-class family pined for "real bread, real cheese, real beer," and always longed to return home. For Sante, French will always be the language of the soul, while English is the more aggressive "language of the world."
The freshest slice of experience came from Susan Cheever, who donned her reading glasses to recall life in a family where "all the martinis in the world were not enough to blot out the pain." (Gin-soaked olives, Cheever said, were "my first childhood treat.") She also recalled -- with more rueful humor than bitterness -- her three failed marriages, her crushes on preppy boys with plummy accents, and how Ralph Ellison helped her convince her father to let her, as a young woman, spend time alone with her boyfriends.
Cheever sparkled, too, in the (very brief) Q&A that followed the readings. Trying to explain the glut of tell-all memoirs, she noted that "we live at a level of intimacy that wasn't imagined even 15 years ago." Cheever recalled that when Saul Bellow's novel "The Dean's December" was first published in 1982, "people were horrified to think it might be about Princeton -- that this great work of fiction might somehow be reducible to gossip. That wasn't done at our house. Fiction was fiction with a capital F."
The talk about "The Dean's December" seemed to prod awake James Atlas, who has been (famously) at work on a biography of Bellow since he was in short pants. "Now this is getting interesting," Atlas enthused.
Oates was the only voice on the panel who felt that writers are being pushed to publish their memoirs at too early an age. "We can't all be Anne Frank," Oates said. "We need to have lived, to have had profound adventures. How many of these memoirs will survive?" Rose disagreed, positing that it's the art that matters and that "one doesn't need to have had a terrible childhood" or some other awful experience to write a strong book. This issue, like most of the others, evaporated quickly. The evening ended so abruptly that the elderly women sitting behind me speculated that the panelists were scrambling to make their 10 p.m. dinner reservations.
"I'm hungry, too," one of these women said. She was clutching a copy of Oates' new novel, "We Were the Mulvaneys." She quickly added, in a whisper: "Where do you think Joyce is going to have dinner?"
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