Monday Mix: Memoir

--by Hanje Richards

From Wikipedia: “A memoir is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography — although the terms “memoir” and “autobiography” are almost interchangeable in modern parlance. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below. The author of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist.

Memoirs are structured differently from formal autobiographies which tend to encompass the writer's entire life span, focusing on the development of his or her personality. The chronological scope of a memoir is determined by the work's context and is therefore more focused and flexible than the traditional arc of birth to childhood to old age as found in an autobiography.

Memoirs tended to be written by politicians or people in court society, later joined by military leaders and businessmen, and often dealt exclusively with the writers’ career rather than their private life. Historically, memoirs have dealt with public, rather than personal, matters. Many older memoirs contain little or no information about the writer, and are almost entirely concerned with other people. Modern expectations have changed this, even for heads of government. Like most autobiographies, memoirs are generally written from the first person point of view.”

Gore Vidal gave a personal definition: “A memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” It is more about what can be gleaned from a section of one's life than about the outcome of the life as a whole.

For some examples of excellent memoirs, try any one of these titles from the Copper Queen Library’s collection.

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Around the House and In the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement (Dominique Browning) - “My story,” writes Dominique Browning, the editor in chief of House & Garden, “is about the way a house can express loss, and then bereavement, and then, finally, the rebuilding of a life.” Around the House and in the Garden is a moving narrative, culled from Browning's much-loved monthly editorial column, about the solace and sense of self that can be found through tending to one's home. From building a high stone wall in the garden to learning that every kitchen deserves a good kitchen couch, Browning reminds us that making a home is more than just a materialistic endeavor — it is a way for us to comfort and reinvent ourselves, to “have the final word about what goes where... what feels comfortable, what is life enhancing... and gives us strength to go out and embrace the world.”

Books: A Memoir (Larry McMurtry) - McMurtry recounts his life as both a reader and a writer, how the countless books he has read worked to form his literary tastes, while giving us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare volumes. Books: A Memoir is like the best kind of diary — full of McMurtry's wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, engaging gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and the author himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like McMurtry, erudite, life loving, and filled with excellent stories.

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Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant: A Memoir (Daniel Tammet) - A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today — guided by the owner himself. Daniel Tammet is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head. He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers.
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Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir (Julia Cameron) - From her early career as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and her marriage to Martin Scorsese, to her tortured experiences with alcohol and Hollywood, Julia Cameron reflects in this engaging memoir on the experiences in her life that have fueled her own art as well as her ability to help others realize their creative dreams. She also describes the fascinating circumstances that led her to emerge as a central figure in the creative recovery movement — a movement that she inaugurated and defined with the publication of her seminal work, The Artist's Way.

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The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (John Irving) - Tales of encounters with writers (John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut) are intertwined with those about his wrestling teammates and coaches. With humor and compassion, Irving details the few truly important lessons he learned about writing... And in beefing up his narrative with anecdotes that are every bit as hilarious as the antics in his novels, Irving combines the lessons of both obsessions (wrestling and writing)... into a somber reflection on the importance of living well.

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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: Memoir (Bill Bryson) - For most of his adult life, Bryson has made his home in the U.K; yet, he actually entered the world in 1951 as part of America's postwar baby boom and spent his formative years in Des Moines, Iowa. Bryson wistfully recounts a childhood of innocence and optimism, a magical point in time when a distinct sense of regional and community identity briefly — but blissfully — coexisted with fledgling technology and modern convenience.

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Missing Men: A Memoir (Joyce Johnson) - A memoir that tells her mother’s story as well as her own, Johnson constructs an equally unique self-portrait as she examines, from a woman’s perspective, the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness. Telling a story that has “shaped itself around absences,” Missing Men presents us with the arc and flavor of a unique New York life — from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child to her fateful encounters with the two fatherless artists she marries. Joyce Johnson’s voice has never been more compelling.
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The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life - His Own (David Carr) - Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for The New York Times. Built on sixty videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, The Night of the Gun is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past. Carr's investigation of his own history reveals that his odyssey through addiction, recovery, cancer, and life as a single parent was far more harrowing — and, in the end, more miraculous — than he allowed himself to remember. Over the course of the book, he digs his way through a past that continues to evolve as he reports it.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nafisi) - Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely — their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

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Running With Scissors: A Memoir (Augusten Burroughs) - The true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances…

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Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven (Susan Jane Gilman) - Armed only with the collected works of Nietzsche, an astrological love guide, and an arsenal of bravado, two friends plunged into the dusty streets of Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, they quickly found themselves in over their heads. As they ventured off the map deep into Chinese territory, they were stripped of everything familiar and forced to confront their limitations amid culture shock and government surveillance. What began as a journey full of humor, eroticism, and enlightenment grew increasingly sinister — becoming a real-life international thriller that transformed them forever.

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The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living With the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science: A Memoir (Jill Price) - The author has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called “hyperthymestic syndrome” — the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major world event or cultural happening that took place, as long as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward and forward, through the years; not only does she make no effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them.