Memoir: A Great Way to Piss Off Your Friends and Alienate Your Family

I just finished reading Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, The Chronology of Water. My 15-year-old son asked me what it was about, and I began with, “It's about this woman who was sexually abused by her father as a kid, and her mother was an alcoholic --” only to have him cut me off with a wave of the hand, “Yeah, yeah, they're all like that. And then the kid grows up to either become a drug addict, at least until they get religion and clean up their act, or they end up in a psychiatric hospital, or they become an artist or something.”

What could I say in response but, “Um, yeah, kind of all of the above – except, in this particular case, the bit about a religious conversion.”

I'm not sure there's a memoir out there that isn't a cliché. The bildungsroman follows familiar contours: there are only so many ways of growing up and becoming an adult, ya know? The best we can do is tell the same old story without telling it the same old way, which Yuknavitch certainly accomplishes, with beautiful, scrape-your-eyeballs aplomb.

It isn't easy to write the real stuff of our lives, though. No matter how many models are already out there, writing memoir feels like a leap in the dark. It's a scary undertaking.

I suspect that people who've gone through some kind of abuse or trauma or tragedy – and who therefore have a marketable story – often struggle with the feeling that they might be prostituting themselves, putting their pain on display for a profit. It's empowering to turn something negative into something positive, no doubt, but I'm guessing there's also something about turning that kind of trick that just feels...ick. Why do I think this? Because those of us without the skeleton of a cash cow in our closets feel this way – it's just that we're not likely to be paid as well for selling out.

The problem with writing memoir is that truth-telling, for those of us who have basically healthy relationships with the people in our lives, often feels like betrayal.

I wasn't abused as a child. My parents weren't alcoholics. I didn't have to deal with a debilitating illness. There were no natural disasters in my immediate environment. Nobody close to me died until I was in my 20's, with the exception of a kid I sort of knew in high school who shot himself, a kid who had as little to complain about as I did.

What do those of us who were lucky, are lucky, and hope to stay lucky have to write about?

Plenty, actually. And it's not always pretty.

Let me give you an example. In the last essay I wrote, I included a little description of a distant relative of mine – the brother of my step-great-grandmother, to be exact – that didn't exactly put him in the most flattering light. Judging by the way he dominated a conversation, he fancied himself a commentator on the History Channel or something, and he was (to paraphrase what I said in my essay) one of the least sexy men alive. A nice man and a fine person, to be sure, but I used to look at him and wonder how on earth he'd ever persuaded someone to marry him.

I had good reasons, artistically speaking, for including this unflattering portrait of a man who is mercifully no longer alive to feel slighted by what I said about him.

Sigh.

Sometimes I feel like I should wait until everyone I know is dead before assaying to write anything remotely memoir-ish. Reminds me of a joke I once heard, about a couple in their 90's who go to consult a lawyer about getting a divorce, and the astonished attorney asks them, “Why now, after all these years together?”, and they say, “We wanted to wait until the children were dead.”