Well, every few years, someone comes around and feels the need to kick sand in memoir’s face. This weekend, in the NYT book review, it was the critic Neil Genzlinger. Too many memoirs, too much me, not enough art is the complaint. No one ever says: too many novels, or stop writing those dang poems. And the reason is obvious: the self is dirty. And narcy. And should be private. Genzlinger begins his article (which goes on to trash three out of four mems), “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” Shut up! He goes on, “Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped. We don’t have that many trees left.” You can read it here, but it’s so fucking nasty. And I like nasty.
Here’s the rub, with just one Google search on Genzlinger, I find a piece he wrote saying that he often reviews works about disabilities because he has a daughter with Rett syndrome. “Occasionally, I have used my experiences with my daughter as a window into a story for the paper, either about her or someone else with Rett syndrome….The first one, about a Rett family in Stirling, NJ, drew more reaction than any story I have written in my 30-some years in journalism.” Perhaps this memoir bashing will draw more. Perhaps that’s the point. Or maybe, personal writing is a powerful way of drawing people in.
I’m not standing up for memoirs because I wrote one or because I’ve worked on so many wonderful ones (The Early Arrival of Dreams and A Likely Story by Rosemary Mahoney, Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather Armstrong, The Way Home by Henry Dunow, Waiting for My Cats To Die by Stacy Horn, Goat Song by Brad Kessler, A Long Retreat by Andrew Krivak, Let Me Eat Cake by Leslie Miller, Wisenheimer by Mark Oppenheimer, The Place You Love Is Gone by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Dreaming in Hindi by Kathy Rich, Temple Stream by Bill Roorbach, The Water Giver by Joan Ryan, Before the Knife by Carolyn Slaughter, When Wanderers Cease to Roam by Princess Vivian Swift, The Sky is the LImit by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Utopia by Karen Valby, and Just Kids by Patti Smith.)
I’m just saying there’s probably one great novel for every 1,000 or 100,000. One great memoir for every 1,000 or 100,000. The stream of prose is beautiful because it is rich with voices. Are all genius, are all perfectly crafted? But for fuck’s sake, there is a value in it just as there is value in fiction, poetry, a box of recipes, a cache of letters. Each one means something whether is succeeds or fails in the marketplace. Whether it gets published or not. Of course, I’ve hated memoirs in my day and thought they sucked, and I turn them down for representation by the droves. The droves! But sometimes when you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Shut it.
What’s your favorite memoir? Give a cheer for memoir! Or not.
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2. Black Swan. Nina!
6. Tiger Mother blah blah blah.
I always thought that I would step in front of a bus, but today, dear friends, I think I just might jump from the roof of a major publisher. I know you’re not supposed to joke about THAT, but why not? Literary agent leaps to her death. Or better yet, Literary agent and beloved blogger leaps. Why is it so hard to get a fucking contract done and paid? Why isn’t everyone like so and so at such and such. My dad, who you may recall owned a lumber yard, always said that business was about collections. How could that be, I asked him, shocked that it all boiled down to chasing checks. But now that I have my own business, I see how right he was. Creative work is a cinch compared with getting laid. Er, paid. Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 83, I think. We clashed a lot, but he was a great business man. No college. Maybe a high school equivalency, maybe, but he was fair and smart and no bullshit. He got things done. He made a mean fried salami and scrambled eggs. He infused me with my love of film and television. And he was always as good as his word.
When you take a writing workshop, you are not allowed to speak when your work is being critiqued. This is the first law of the workshop. The idea behind it is simple: you can’t listen if you’re yapping. I actually think the rule of silence protects you from making an ass out of yourself. It prevents you from saying things like: what I was trying to do, what I meant was, it actually happened that way, etc. The only reason to get feedback, as far as I can tell, is to see if you got on base. Did you smack one out there? Some people at the workshop are intent on showing off, some are out to get you out of jealousy, and some are as thick as root vegetables.
Hi Besty,
I’m enough of an asshole to imagine that someday an intrepid graduate student will track me down in the Jewish Home for the Aged and want to see some of my client files. We’ll look through them together and I’ll tell unforgettable tales about publishing in the olden days. The student will marvel at the long editorial letters, the rejection letters, the christmas cards with pictures of the author’s three children in the Bahamas. Contracts, royalty statements, reviews and remainder notices will tell another tale. The ups and downs of a long publishing life.
The last time I was on an agents’ panel, a man asked how we knew which editors to send our projects to. No one had ever asked that simple question. The answer is lunch. A decade of having lunch with editors to get to know them, their taste, what they’re looking for. We’re talking a lot of sushi.
I recently had a conversation with a writer whose editor told her that her pages, while well written, lacked emotional suspense. Intensity. How do you put that in, she asked, her voice gravelly with despair. Her editor had looked under the hood and found a clean machine that had no go. How do you give an ailing manuscript the infusion it needs?
At what point do you stop saying, “Happy new year?” I always feel kind of like Eddie Haskell. Worse, is saying happy new year to Jewish colleagues at Rosh Hashana. It’s like all that brisket stinking up the room. Where am I going with this? Work protocol? Agent banter? Greasing the wheel. Sending out first project of the year. Getting back to work. Getting it up. Hey, happy new year. How was your vacation? If you consider gaining six pounds a plus, it was great.
Are you the kind of person who automatically points out a flaw once you’ve been given a compliment. For instance, a co-worker says, “I like your skirt,” and you respond by pointing out a tear or a stain. Or maybe you say you got it for a few bucks at a tag sale or on sale at Marshall’s. In that spirit, I feel like posting the two worst Amazon reviews for the Forest for the Trees. At first, I was mortifried when this sort of thing turned up. Now, I like to rub my body with it.
Betsy Lerner 