Dear Betsy:
I just read a review of a new book by Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter . My question: How many bad habits does a memoir need? Judging from the excerpt, nowadays you have to at least spice your memoir with some kind of overuse or abuse of drugs, and this is on top of what looks like overuse or abuse of video games.
Sincerely, Name Withheld
Dear Addict:
As David Carr pointed out in his review of the addict-du-jour memoir, Portrait of the Agent as a Young Addict, we love to watch car wrecks. So I suspect that as long as that is true, and I know I haven’t tired of bending my neck for even a nothing crash on the Merritt Parkway, there will always be room for narratives of self-destruction. When I think of memoirs that felt like game changers (and I am well aware that only assholes use the term ‘game changer’), I think of (in some kind of rough chronology): Anne Frank’s Diary, I Am Third, Papillon, Mommie Dearest, Sybil (not a memoir per se), The Words to Say It, Hope Against Hope, The Thief’s Journal, The Basketball Diaries, Shot in the Heart, The Kiss, Lucky, Autobiography of a Face, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, One More Theory of Happiness, Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea (okay, I haven’t read it but I love the title), and Just Kids.
In my own rich contribution to the genre, I wrote about the crossroads of bi-polar and food issues as the main course. I threw in as side dishes: promiscuity, suicide, shrink rage, prescription drug abuse, hospitalization and an abortion. It sold 16,000 copies. Hardly worth it.
What memoirs rocked your world with or without addictions?
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What do you really want out of this rodeo? Publication, money, literary acclaim, celebrity? Do you want to write every day, find words every day, that sweet spot two hours in when the blessed motherfucker starts to write itself and you are roping it? Do you want that perfect solitude when you and the keyboard are one, when your brain exists only to bring forth words? Or do you want to help others? Yourself? Make someone proud? Dad? Mom? Someone jealous? Do you seek revenge, adoration, admiration? Or something spiritual, transcendent? Do you want power, dominance, do you want to tip? Blink? Do you want pussy? Looking to get out or get in? Do you want mastery over a subject? Do you want the last word? Do you want to make people laugh? Stay up past their bedtime? Afraid to turn off the lights? Are you a healer, a preacher, a teacher, a showman, a scholar? Are you storyteller?
Away for holiday weekend. In laws, then my husband’s old friends from college newspaper. I am always a bit nostalgic around these people, that is if you can be nostalgic for something you didn’t have. In my case, that would be college friends. I did have some, but I blew through them pretty quickly mostly because I didn’t have a clue who I was, and basically walked up to people like the little bird in the P.D. Eastman 
I’ve been in therapy on and off (mostly on) for thirty-five years. None of these charlatans ever seemed to be able to remember the names of the people I spoke about. Most of the time I didn’t care. Who could expect them to remember every clown who made me feel bad?
Yesterday, I asked people what they did to escape. I think red wine was a front runner. But this remark from Shanna is the subject of today’s post, “It used to be books but I’ve hit a rough patch with reading escapism since I started writing. Which, by the way, makes me really sad.”
How is it that my brilliant 30 page screenplay outline has turned into a piece of shit, aka a turd, a poop, a dump, a steamer, a crap? How? I didn’t even touch it. I deliberately didn’t touch it. I am of the Capote school which says to put all first drafts away for a month. You all know what I’m talking about; the disease has a name: literary vertigo. One day, you’re Leo. The next day, you’re shit.
Betsy Lerner 