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What we call "trauma memoirs" have been the subject of much recent discussion and heated debate as Oprah Winfrey first defended and then apologized for her defense of James Frey's fictionalized memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Frey fabricated experiences and tried to pass them off as fact, an indefensible position. How much do -- or should -- readers care about all this? For our discussion, see the OnCraft column in this issue. In this review of four memoirs, we simply focus on the literary merits of the books. Books discussed in this article Checking In The Kiss Fat Girl: A True Story A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survive Truth is stranger than fiction. There. No need to explain any further the rampant interest in the modern memoir, and in particular trauma memoirs. Hollywood has nothing on authors who recall from personal experience stories of incest, child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling problems, encounters with disease and death and disaster. The prevalence of memoir could easily be dismissed as the contribution of the U.S. publishing world to a western obsession with sordid or sensational subjects, reality television, confessional talk shows and star worship. But that would be too easy. That explanation is one of convenience, where reader interest is reduced to voyeurism. One question to ask would be: What do readers get from reading memoir in general? Memoir can add to remembrance of historical events in ways that academic books and biography cannot. Speak, Memory, novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s extraordinary memoir, provides a poetic personal account of his childhood in Russia and his adult life as an exile after the 1918 Bolshevik uprising in Russia. Nabokov’s book makes concrete a memory of Russia that is unique from his family’s place of personal power. But more important, Speak, Memory taps into the best of memoir as a category of good literature. Nabokov’s book, and all good memoir, is recognized for its artistic value, and its attention to craft, as it explores universal themes of individual and self, individual and family, and individual and society. Although memoir can be traced as far back as A.D. 397, when St. Augustine published his story of religious inspiration, modern memoirists trace their lineage to the two volumes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions, published nearly 1400 years later. Rousseau explored self-observation in a way previously ignored. He gave weight to the thoughts of common people and their inner struggle. French novelist Romain Rolland once said of Rousseau: "He opened into literature the riches of the subconscious, the secret movements of being, hitherto ignored and repressed." Rousseau’s memoir goes beyond mere confession. More recently, trauma memoirists draw from the groundwork laid by, among others, Primo Levi and Frank Conroy. Levi published Survival in Auschwitz a little more than a decade after his release from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II. He “set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose,” says author Philip Roth. On the first page alone Levi begins to bring clarity to a senseless world through connections with philosophy and universal human goals of dignity and self-preservation in the face of wretched circumstance. Conroy, however, molded the fate of more recent family-focused memoir with Stop Time, published in 1967. Much in the way that Ernest Hemingway changed forever storytelling with plain language, Conroy explores in unvarnished, spare tones his vagabond childhood. The book became an instant American classic. In Conroy, we find the reason to read well-written memoir for the attention to storytelling, superbly crafted in structure and style. It endures because it is literature in the way British novelist and critic Rebecca West has defined it: “an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.” The contribution memoirs make to literature, then, should be judged no differently than other forms of writing. An analysis of experience, a synthesis of findings, and attention to good writing make both good literature and good memoir. Unfortunately, today American readers are forced to wade through many poorly written, superficial trauma memoirs that attempt to pass themselves off as something deeper. A Child Called ‘It’ is an enormously popular example of this kind of mediocrity. There appears to be no limit to the extent readers are jerked around as David Pelzer pounds out a story of his early childhood filled with child abuse and neglect. Plot lines pop up without warning; character traits, without rhyme or reason. One hundred pages can pass with scant mention of the author’s spiritual life, and then suddenly, a pronouncement: the author has given up on God. A retrospective hunt for evidence of any previous show of faith is as useless as a hunt for craft in this book. The writing is overwrought and without reflection or nuance. In “It,” there is no distinction between the boy in the story and the grownup writing it. In other words, the book provides neither perspective nor wisdom. By the end, a lurid sheen overshadows the book, and readers are as much repulsed by the mother’s aberrant behavior as they are by the mawkish narrative and the insipid and simplistic characterizations. The value of a well-written trauma memoir is the truths revealed from the author’s (often brutal) self-reflection that eschews a victim’s stance in favor of reflection. The writer recognizes the narrator is as much a part of the plot as are the other characters. Emily Colas in Just Checking certainly makes herself complicit in the failure of her marriage and the direction her life took as she struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Colas is clever in her use of quirky vignettes to mirror her own idiosyncratic thought process, a complete contrast with Pelzer’s consistently overemotional tone. But her unwavering use of humor keeps her at the same safe distance from both a deeper look at an unnerving condition and a more rigorous attention to craft. There marks the divide between Pelzer and Colas on one side and Kathryn Harrison and Judith Moore on the other. Harrison in The Kiss writes about her incestuous relationship with her father. Moore in Fat Girl tells about her childhood as an obese child and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and society. As emotional as both of these latter stories are, they are presented as neither tabloid accounts nor stand-up comedy. Both Moore and Harrison write cool and direct, intense and lyrical, as they tap into the detail and the revelations that illuminate adult brutishness. Here is Moore writing about her emotional eating after having been with an abusive grandmother: “Lord knows, I chowed down on Grammy’s cooking....I got my elbows up on the kitchen table and I fed my face. I ate and ate and ate. I started for my father, whom I would never once see for many years, and my mother who came to visit for Christmas and soon again was gone. When I asked Grammy, ‘When is Mama coming?,’ if she answered me at all, she said, equably, ‘I don’t know,’ or, angrily, ‘If she gets married again, her new husband may not want you.’ “I was young. I did not know what would come to me, I did not know what rules would be violated, what laws ignored. Already my heart was broken and I did not know it.” Both Harrison and Moore are complicit characters in their own stories, where Pelzer and Colas are not. At the moment Harrison receives her first kiss, she describes a wall that goes up, separating her new and her old life: “In years to come, I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain.” What binds all these “I” stories of personal trauma is the secret, the dark and untold tale that can often be the centerpiece of a family. In A Child Called It, it is years of behind-closed-doors abuse. In Just Checking, Colas broods inwardly and lies to her husband and friends as she hides her obsessive compulsive disorder. In The Kiss, no one dared speak what they knew: Harrison was sleeping with her father. During holidays with her grandparents and mother: “As if by agreement, we never mention my father; we pretend that he doesn’t exist. But we mourn for me, the lost child, the child snatched away by the lost father. We weep extravagantly at any opportunity: over fictive deaths on television, distant accidents in the newspaper. We cry over the tiny losses of flat tires, broken radios, spilled milk.” In Fat Girl, Moore is poked and prodded, slapped, beaten and vilified for her obesity by her mother, grandmother, and classmates. But, predictably, “I told no one. I did not say one word about my chafed thighs, about Rodney and his friends. The fatness was my problem.” Moore learns as best as she can to operate inside a system that cannot sustain her. Instead she nourishes herself in an accessible, tangible way — she eats. At the beginning of his book, The Periodic Table, Primo Levi sets the tone with a Yiddish Proverb: “Troubles overcome are good to tell.” In trauma memoirs, people tell their troubles; maybe they are even compelled to tell them. But while good trauma memoir endures for its connection to the ideals of good literature, bad trauma memoir lasts as long as a speed-read on the beach. TRACY ILENE MILLER, a second-year student in the University of Oregon’s Literary Nonfiction program, is a freelance writer who writes about American culture, lifestyle and business. |
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