Looking @ Memoirs

Pictured from top left clockwise: Stephanie Elizondo Griest, William Giraldi, Neal Pollack and Mike Steinberg

 Writing memoirs is the art of living backwards, says writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

She's 34 years old, and has already written two: "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing and Havana," and "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines."

"Your life is material, it's not your life. It's what you use to write," says Michael Steinberg. He's written one memoir, "Still Pitching," and is working on a second.

.. Michael Steinberg Author: "Still Pitching" and, with Robert Root, Jr., "The Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction" and "Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching." >>Recommended memoirs: "A Romantic Education" by Patricia Hampl and "Fierce Attachments" by Vivian Gornick "These set the curve for the kind of memoir that I think is good literary work. Patricia Hampl Steinberg is such a smart writer about memoir, what memoir is. Because that's her form, she's able to do things with it that many people can't. And Vivian Gornick's 'Fierce Attachments' is a great book. It's a mother-daughter story that it takes place in Brooklyn. Gornick is a very, very edgy writer. Hampl is not. Hampl is a more romantic writer, but not romantic-light. And Gornick's written a book called 'The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative,' which I think is the best story on nonfiction, especially on memoir."

The two writers will be in town to teach memoir writing at this year's Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Thursday through Sunday, Nov. 6-9.

 

.. Stephanie Elizondo Griest Author: "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" and "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines" >>Recommended memoir: "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood" by Alexandra Fuller 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' is absolutely extraordinary. Fuller has a brilliant way of writing about race, Griest about different cultures, as well as about death, family, class. It covers such a wide range of human experience. It's absolutely brilliant. I've read about 80 memoirs in my life, and I think it's the best-written."

 In addition to Ms. Griest and Mr. Steinberg's seminars, Neal Pollack, author of "Alternadad," will give a class in Comic Memoir. And William Giraldi, a writing professor who teaches a course in memoir to his students at Boston University, will deliver a class in Writing About Grief.

The conference sponsored by Florida Gulf Coast University is in its third year now, but this is the first time it has presented such an abundance of memoir-writing classes. The numerous offerings reflect the growing popularity of the genre.

"I think Tom DeMarchi, the conference director, is realizing that there's a bigger demand," says Mr. Giraldi. "And there are so many different kinds of memoir writing. You want to write. Are you old enough to write your entire autobiography, from the time you were born to last year, or do you want to write a collection of personal essays that aren't necessarily linear, like Tom Lynch, or do you want to write a sort of standard, 21st century contemporary memoir? Do you want to write about grief, or do you want to write about funny stuff, like David Sedaris?

"I think the reason there are so many different memoir classes at Sanibel is that there are so many different kinds of people that the memoir form, the autobiographical form, caters to."

Anybody's genre

A few decades ago, the biography section of bookstores was stocked with books about famous people: celebrities, movie stars, historic figures. Now the shelves are full of memoirs penned by the non-famous focusing on their own lives: waiters, booksellers, schoolteachers, mothers — all people whose names weren't known before they published.

"Everyone has a story, everyone has a right to tell it, and a reason to tell it," Mr. Steinberg declares. "And that's a different impulse, I think, than where fiction and poetry come from. Memoirs are anybody's genre; you don't have to have a crazy life to write a good memoir. Actually, it's better if you don't. Because then you can reflect on what the humanness is in it."

But memoirs certainly have their share of stories about people with a

.. Neal Pollack Author, "Alternadad," "Never Mind the Pollacks" and "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature" >>Recommended memoirs: "Act One" by Moss Hart and "King of the Hill" by A.E. Hotchner "This is really going back a long way, but I love this book by a guy named Moss Hart… a Broadway playwright in Pollack Broadway's golden age. He wrote a fantastic book about getting started in the theater called 'Act One.' I just adore that book. The details are so right. It combines the end of a certain kind of immigrant life in America and is also about the birth of this glorious, artistic scene. It's very evocative. "I also like A.E. Hotchner's 'King of the Hill,' the Depression-era memoir that the Steven Soderbergh movie was made from. That's a lovely book."

"crazy life." Many are written by a decidedly seedy crowd: drug addicts, strippers, prostitutes, criminals. Instead of finding fame because they discovered penicillin or climbed Mt. Everest, some memoirists are famous because of their bulimia, anorexia, drug habits or sexual addiction.

Mr. Giraldi points to the explosion of TV talk shows in the mid-90s, hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer.

"Many of these memoirs are sort of just the literary — and I use that word loosely in this case — the literary equivalent of these talk shows," he says. "People wanted sensational stories about sex and drugs and alcoholism and incest. Because Americans really like to see a success story, especially when someone is succeeding after having been a failure. We love stories of redemption, and that's partially because we're a Christian nation. So redemption is central to our whole theology.

"We like to see people who were down and out and then have risen from the ashes, almost like a phoenix… It's about the American promise. That's supposed to be what America is about."

That's just one side of memoirs, says New York literary agent Christopher Schelling, who agrees that some of the popularity of memoirs has do with our becoming a more confessional society. "At the low end of it," Mr. Schelling says, "you see it on Jerry Springer." At the higher end, he adds, "It's people being more reflective about their lives." In general, as more books were being published, "It sort of made sense to have stories out there that people relate to in that way. There's the a-ha! moment of 'Yes! that's my life too!"

Mr. Schelling says some memoirs celebrate "the return to normalcy. It's the quotidian."

Following the trend

Publishing operates largely on trends, he says, and when publishers saw that some memoirs were successful, everyone rushed to publish more memoirs.

"You look around, and everything seems to be a memoir," Mr. Schelling says. "Suddenly there are too many of them, and publishers say, 'Oh no, memoirs don't sell.' You end up going through cycles like that. Suddenly everyone has tons of these things on their list, until the market is flooded with them, nothing is selling well, and it gets blamed on the category, as opposed to: We feasted and gorged, and now we have to throw up."

But memoirs are still selling.

.. William Giraldi Professor in the Writing Program at Boston University and senior fiction editor for the journal AGNI >>Recommended memoir: "Goodbye to All That" by Robert Graves "If I had to recommend a memoir, I would really have to recommend 'Goodbye to All That,' an autobiography by Robert Graves. It's a masterpiece Giraldi of the form… really smart, beautifully written, devastatingly sad. It's one of those books that teach you how to write, which cannot be said for most memoirs, most autobiographies. We're talking about an English master here… Robert Graves is about as important as it gets. It's one of those books that's not only important and universal and devastating, but it's so beautifully written that it will actually teach you how to write better."

"I don't feel we're at the point where people are saying, 'We don't buy any more of that, those don't sell,'" he says. "I feel that that's coming, but… it's certainly not that dire. I definitely hear, 'Oh, we have a lot on our list.' A lot of them were bought, maybe it was bought from a proposal, and it's going to take a year for them to write it, and then another year before it's published, so there's still a lot in inventory. We'll be seeing a lot of them for years to come."

And some agents and publishers continue to urge their writers to create more memoirs.

Ms. Griest, who's written two already, says she's working on a new book that's about "a very massive subject. My agent wants me to turn it into a memoir."

But Ms. Griest doesn't want to.

"Part of being a writer is that people want you to write the same thing you've written, but in a different format," she says. "I'm trying to be resistant against that. I want it to be more expansive than just myself."

Mr. Pollack used to write fiction. His agent and editor urged him to put his new parenting experiences into a memoir. So he did. He's currently working on another novel, but the book they're excited about is the memoir he's also working on now: his experiences of becoming a yoga teacher in Los Angeles.

"Yes, I'm working on a novel, but those are hard to sell," he says. "A memoir with a good hook and a good point of view is just easier to get interest in."

But, Mr. Pollack says, "There's a lot of good memoir writing. It just so happens that we live in an age where memoir has become the dominant literary form. I think it's because more than anything, they're easier to market. You gotta sell books to keep a literary career going, and it's easier to get the radio and TV people interested in a 'personal story' with a hook. Say 'I have a very sophisticated novel that illuminates the human condition in untold ways,' and they'll hang up on you pretty quick.

"I think memoirs are popular because our culture and our media just respond very strongly to that personal narrative. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. Good fiction illuminates our lives and our worlds better in some ways. But it's just a fact of the marketplace."

Mr. Giraldi echoes him: "I think people have an erroneous notion that memoir is truer than fiction," he says. "They believe that because a story is true that it is, somehow, more meaningful, or more useful. And of course, that's not the case at all.

"Fiction is much truer than nonfiction. The truths that one gets from a novel are much more profound, and much truer, than the truths one may get from a memoir. And the reason has to do with imagination and poetic license. I'm talking about emotional truths here, the truth of emotions. I think in the second half of the 20th century, when electronic entertainment began to attain sovereignty over our attention, readers got to be a little duller."

No one quite agrees as to what started the memoir craze.

Mr. Giraldi points to Tobias Wolff's memoir, "This Boy's Life," which came out in the late '80s and was made into a movie.

There were memoirs prior to Wolff's, he says, "but Wolff's memoir was extremely popular. It really is the book that made Tobias Wolff famous, which is a little bit strange, because he is, and started off as, primarily a fiction writer, a writer of short fiction."

Mr. Giraldi also points to "The Liars' Club" by Mary Karr and "The Kiss" by Kathryn Harrison. These three, he says, are the staple memoirs of the past 10 to 20 years.

Mr. Steinberg has a different take.

"The first memoir that got any recognition was one called 'A Romantic Education' by Patricia Hampl," he says. "And it's a beautiful book. It did get a lot of attention, both popular and critical. It legitimized memoir, I know that much. And from there, it became sort of two tiers. The popular memoir is different than the literary memoir. The popular memoir is anybody's form; most of them turn out to be: Here's what happened to me."

'Smart things in beautiful sentences'

So what makes a good memoir?

"Voice and writing," says Mr. Schelling. "They're almost one and the same. They're certainly desperately intertwined. That, I think, is what first catches my attention… I do think it's hard to find the person who's had the most outrageous life, so I don't necessarily first look for the events, but someone writing about an experience that could be both unusual and universal."

"I focus on getting the students to develop a strong point of view," says Mr. Pollack, "and figure out exactly not only what they want to write about, but who they want to write about it as, and who they are. To me that's the primary focus, because you've got to figure out what's funny about your situation, and what your point of view about it is.

"Sometimes I think that's a mistake people make when they're writing memoirs: They blow right in and start telling the story, but the story doesn't work without a framework of understanding — who you are, and why you're telling it — rather than just spilling a torrent of words. The key is understanding who you are exactly, and explaining it exactly, and why you are the person to be telling this story at this time. And the really successful memoirs, whether artistically or commercially, or both, are the ones that do that."

Mr. Giraldi initially describes a good memoir by what it is not: "A good memoir would be a lack of narcissism, a lack of sensationalism, a lack of self-congratulation," he says.

"So if you have none of those things, what do you have instead? You have smart people saying smart things in beautiful sentences. It ultimately has to do with the words on the page. So that's the first thing: The thing needs to be written beautifully.

"And you have to be saying something important. You have to be saying something that matters."

if you go

>> What: Sanibel Island Writers Conference

>> When: Nov. 6-9

>> Where: BIG Arts, 900 Dunlop Road, Sanibel Island

>> Cost: $350

>> Information: Go to www.fgcu.edu/siwc/

>> Readings: Readings will be held from 6 - 7:30 p.m. Nov. 6-8; cost for the public to attend is $5 per night, except for Nov. 8, which is $10 and includes a concert by John K. Samson singer/songwriter of The Weakerthans. For more information, call (607) 423-2898 or go to: www. fgcu.edu/siwc/