Who am I…to write a memoir? 5: You self-aggrandizer!

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

“Whoring!  Grandiosity!  Self-promotion!”  More hisses from the tree branches.  But is that what this is, this memoir writing, this offering up of our trembling selves?  Most literary memoirs are discrete, modest.  They have no grand slanders or salacious gossip to reveal.  They are hard-working books, endeavoring to crack life.

How many literary memoirists make a bundle or wind up in Hollywood, consultants to movies of their own childhoods?  That question should stop the arrows mid-stream.  I think, rather, that most literary memoirists are working dawn to dusk with tiny nets, trying to separate the fishes from the weeds in the murk.

Jamison declares her first psychotic mania a fizzy chaos, “a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness.”  She goes on to describe the follow-up stage of her bi-polar illness:

Then the bottom began to fall out of my life and my mind.  My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous.  I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all of what I had just read.  For several weeks, I drank Vodka in my orange juice before setting off for school in the mornings, and I thought obsessively about killing myself.

This kind of writing is not self-aggrandizement but courage.

Who am I…to write a memoir? 4: You naval-gazer!

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

“Solipcism!” someone yells at the memoirist from behind a tree.  Solipsism is the theory that only the self exists and to be called solipsistic is to be accused of seeing things through the too-narrow focus of the self.

Here I sit at my desk, examining my fingernails, my moles, my split ends—And what’s that little pimple on my chin?–because I am more interesting than anyone else.  You may accuse me of being this way, of gazing at my own navel or thinking only of myself, but I say it really isn’t the case.  The last person I really want to write about is myself, but I just can’t help it.  I’m all I’ve got.  My inside information into the human condition can only come from me.

It is true that one can decide to write about other people’s lives, to shine a light on others as an ethnographer does, or to write fiction, but those are other tasks.  At its best, memoir provides an arc of light from a single person out toward the majesty and hugeness of the world.

Farman-Farmaian writes this of the self-contained universe inside her father’s walled compound in Iran.  Her father had nine wives and thirty children:

Everyone there was linked with everyone else, for “family” in our small universe meant not only our father and mothers and brothers and sisters and other relatives who lived in and around the compound, but all the other people inside our walls: our nannies, our lalehs or male caretakers, the cooks, guards, porters, stewards, secretaries, artisans, old military pensioners, and everyone else my father supported.  They and we all belonged to him, and were fed, protected, and cared for by him.  This supreme bond with our benefactor, which Iranians call “the bond of bread and salt,” gave us all an indissoluble connection.  No one in the compound, from the most decrepit ex-sergeant to the youngest school-child, ever forgot this allegiance for a single moment.  I seemed myself to remember it almost hourly.

Farman-Farmaian is not naval-gazing, but transporting us to a vanished time, a world we’d otherwise never know.

Who am I…to write a memoir? 3: You narcissist!

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

“Narcissism!” we memoir-writers hear someone shout in our heads.  But why should sharing one’s perspectives be seen as conceit?  What nobler effort could there be than to attempt to shed some light on the frightening, generous ways of the world, even if it’s a ha’ penny’s worth?  We all read memoirs—all books, in fact—to discover pieces of ourselves on the page, to feel less alone.  To comfort a stranger, rather than to flaunt oneself: this is the memoirist’s highest hope. Whatever one writes about with honesty will surely have been felt by at least one person before—and perhaps that someone’s heart will ping on reading it described by another.  We write, admittedly, to clarify and give heft to our own inner joys and sorrows, but also we offer these in-the-buff experiences to others so that they might see their own feelings more clearly.  As W.H. Auden wrote, “Art is not magic, ie., a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.”  In other words, art’s aim is to give the reader him or herself.

Nabokov writes of his first love:

I cannot remember the way Tamara and I parted.  There is possibly another reason, too, for this blurring.  We had parted too many times before.  During that last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately go back for another farewell.

To read of Nabokov’s youthful ardor is to give us our own.

Truth: this is the job of the memoirist.  Naked truth, as naked as we can make it.  The literary memoir offers the reader a mirror: not one that woos by enhancement or adornment, but which reflects with rare and precious, shimmering truth.  The job of memoir and all good literature is not to glaze or make up or cloak but to reveal the skin of a thing.  And perhaps bare truth—stepping into the clearing—is a greater wonder, a greater gift, a greater mystery than mystery.

And furthermore, isn’t the greatest gift one may give, the gift of oneself, or one’s honest truth, one’s story?  Each person’s iris is unique–to the extent that the eye is now used as a fail-safe identification method at airports. Like her iris, each person’s memoir is a rarity: a particular mix of time, place, and individual, a particular irreplicable perspective.  This endlessly fascinating kaleidoscope of human experience, I submit, is one of the most satisfying curiosities, one of the greatest treasures of life.  Don’t we all want to hear about different lives?  What is more delicious than a real-life story?  This is not narcissism, but an act of generosity.  This is how it’s been for me.  Does any of  it ring a bell in you?  And so a conversation begins.

Who am I…to write a memoir? 2: A Caveat: Fine versus cheap memoirs

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Who am I to...write a memoir?

Before I plunge into deep waters to make the case for the legitimacy of memoir-writing, I must make one caveat: I am considering here fine literary memoirs.  There are memoirs that merit the accusations of narcissism, solipsism, and all the rest.  It is true that some scribblers do gain through exposé.  There are celebrities who sell their memoirs on the basis of their good looks and politicians who sell millions by way of notoriety.  The worst memoir can be self-aggrandizing, self-centered, and illicit–there are good memoirs and bad ones, like there are good and bad novels–but many memoirs are elegant literary jewels.

Nabokov’s Speak Memory, for instance, written before he became famous, is the memoir of a boy growing up in great privilege in Russia—obsessed with butterflies.  Through his associative reports on his passion the reader becomes willing to follow anywhere the track of this brilliant mind.

By reading another book, Sattareh Farman-Farmaian’s Daughter of Persia, written by the woman who started the first school of social work in Iran, we experience what it is to grow up in the harem of a benevolent, Muslim patriarch, and thereby gain comprehension of what it means to live in an entirely different social structure that offers, at its best, a deep security unknown in the west.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s The Unquiet Mind, another beautifully-composed memoir, offers a lens into the devastating cruelties and seductive exhilarations of bi-polar illness, a high-profile book that has transformed our understanding of madness.

All three of these memoirs are transformative; they turn turmoil to treasure. By using a magnifying glass to look within, the authors illuminate ways of living and thinking about life in its varied facets and grandeur.  These books are the kinds of memoir I aspire to.  Through beautiful language and precise description of individual experience, they stretch us on many different levels.

Nevertheless, every memoirist, even the one with the most refined sensibility and motive hurls at herself, or is hurled the accusations: “Narcissism! Naval-gazing!  Self-aggrandizement!”

What of Spying? Two Books, Two Faces of Espionage

I have been thinking a lot about espionage lately—its noble aspect and also the messiness of an enterprise based on secrecy, manipulation, and deception.

Spying, by nature, has these two faces.  To look at the first, its noblest mien: espionage is an attempt to gather information about the actions of other countries, and particularly bad actors in the world; to stop aggressions, if possible; to undermine or change inhumane regimes; and to support democracy, and protect the lives of ordinary people, around the world.  All of these objectives may be criticized, but the CIA was created in the wake of Hitler’s devastation, and under that light in particular, espionage might be seen as not only necessary but among the higher callings.

To look at its other face, there is an inherent murkiness, ambiguity, and morally-troubling side to spying.  The disasters and long-term ripple effects from its mis- or faulty-use are legion: Iran, Chile, Vietnam, to name three.  Back to the other face again, the CIA contributed to the ending of Osama Bin Laden.  If one tries to reckon with espionage, the two faces of the spy service swing in and out of relief…

A pair of books into which I have dipped have, for me, shed clear light on these two faces of intelligence work.

I will begin with the volume that shines a startling and penetrating—not to say dismaying—beam on the series of mistakes, havoc-wreaking, and deaths-of-thousands that can result from espionage mis-handled, mis-used, and gone rogue.  I cannot recommend enough Curveball by the Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Bob Drogin.  Drogin was assigned to the intelligence beat for his paper before 9/11, and was central to the investigation of, and reporting on, the WMD search preceding and following the start of the war in Iraq.  The book follows, beat by beat, the series of mis-steps by American spies, the State Department, and the executive branch, that followed the claim by an Iraqi con man-asylum seeker in Hamburg that Iraq had, hidden in its outlands, a series of mobile bio weapons labs—the faulty intelligence upon which the war in Iraq was based, and which Secretary of State Colin Powell called up as key evidence, in his fateful speech to the United Nations on February the 5th, 2003.  It is a crystalline example of an instance in which, as Drogin puts it, “The defector didn’t con the spies so much as they conned themselves.”  He sums up this story of disastrous espionage:  “[Curveball’s] marginal story took on an importance it did not deserve.  Senior intelligence officials irresponsibly hyped his claims and accepted unconfirmed reports.  They cast aside contradictory evidence, brushed aside clear warnings, and ignored a rising clamor of skeptics.  Time and again, bureaucratic rivalries, tawdry ambitions, and spineless leadership proved more important than professional integrity.”

New York Times reporter Benjamin Weiser, has written a book that presents the other face of espionage.  His fascinating book illuminates spy-craft at its finest.  Here again is a story of an informant and CIA operatives, but this round, all the actors concerned are models of nobility, rigor, and integrity.  A Secret Life is an account of the life of a Polish colonel who, out of a deep love for Poland and a drive to help his country free itself from Soviet domination, volunteered to secretly supply the Americans with information pertaining to Soviet weapons and military planning.  The reams of documents he handed over in the course of nine years, at great personal risk, contributed to the freeing of the nations of Eastern Europe.  The commitment, consideration, loyalty—and perhaps even love—that undergirded the relationship between the agent and his CIA handlers are deeply moving, and remind the reader of what under-cover, inter-cultural alliances can accomplish at their best.

Espionage has two faces, dark and light—and most spying is probably a mix of the two.  A look at these two starkly contrasting books sheds brilliant light on its grey world.

For Writers: How to Open a Memoir

How to begin a memoir is always a puzzle.  I have written a brief piece on this subject, which Patrick Ross has just posted on his blog, “The Artist’s Road: Creativity, Writing, and an Art Committed Life.”  Patrick is a wonderful writer, and his blog is packed with musings on the writer’s craft, and on how to live a life centered on creativity.  I am honored to be hosted on his rich and popular blog.

My piece on openings—meant to aid the struggling memoirist—begins:

To open.  To open a question. To open the curiosity.  To open the emotions.  To open up.   To open in. To  open out toward the world.

These are the basic purposes a writer may wish to achieve with the opening of a memoir.   Here are some other objectives a memoirist might keep in mind while creating an opening to his or her story:

-To strike a keynote.

-To “hang the guns on the wall” for the story.

-To set a course…

For more, please go to Patrick’s February 28^th blog entry: http://artistsroad.wordpress.com/