The Family
Sideshow
When I set out on a book tour
to promote the memoir about my less than perfect Texas clan, I did so
with soul-sucking dread. Surely we'd be held up as grotesques, my beloveds
and I, real moral circus freaks. Instead I shoved into bookstores where
sometimes hundreds of people stood claiming to identify with my story,
which fact stunned me. Maybe these people's family lives differed in terms
of surface pyrotechnics – houses set fire to and fortunes squandered.
But the feelings didn't. After eight weeks of travel, I ginned up this
working definition for a dysfunctional family: any family with more than
one person in it.
Maybe coming-of-age memoirs
are being bought and read by the boatload precisely because they offer
some window into other people's whacked-out families, with which nearly
everyone born in the fractured baby-boom era can identify. They also guarantee
a central character emotionally engaged in a family narrative. Any writer's
voice – even an omniscient, third-person narrator's in fiction –
serves as a character in the text. But in memoir, the alleged "truth"
of a given voice makes it somehow more emotionally compelling. It announces
itself as real. Because family memoir lodges us in a writer's personal
history, we can almost see the voice being shaped by factors of geography,
socio-economics, psychology. Like a ghost that assembles itself from mist,
so the writer's self seems to appear from her voice. Believe this, the
autobiographer says, it's real. If metafiction has been working double-overtime
to explode the lie that fiction is true, memoir somewhat reestablishes
the reader's dream.
Of course, most readers doubt
the absolute veracity of a memoir's reconstructed dialogue and so forth.
Tobias Wolff noted in a recent lecture at Syracuse University that all
memory involves imagination and vice-versa. Some memoirs also clearly
wander into the realm of the fantastic to construct what read like family
myths – Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, for instance.
There the author steals her Chinese mother's method of "talking-story"
to meld her own somewhat conflicting Chinese and American selves.
Still, we presume that the
truth's skeleton underlay Hong Kingston's tale. So the character speaking
to us from those events also feels, in some way, like a more real escort
through the drama than a fictional narrator's. However "real"
Ishmael may seem in Moby Dick, Mary McCarthy offers me as a reader
what feels like greater intimacy with a living character in Memories of
a Catholic Girlhood.
Don't get me wrong. Greater
intimacy with a narrator isn't always what a reader wants: I haven't given
up reading novels. But in the cocooned isolation we occupy at this millennium's
end, a friendly voice on a page has value.
A child's voice or perspective
can also open the often firmly locked door to a reader's own memories
of youth. When I read in Harry Crews's A Childhood how that backwoods
Georgia boy made up stories about models in the Sears catalog, I identified
with it wholesale, even though I grew up far from the savage poverty Crews
lays out:
"Nearly everybody I
knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an eye clouded
with blindness from a glancing fence staple.... I knew that under those
[Sears models'] fancy clothes, there had to be swellings and boils of
one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world."
Anybody would twig to some
universal truth about the childhood Crews describes here, I think. We
all lose our innocence in part by coming to marvel at the rift between
one's private life – family fights, say – and the glossy families
sold by the media. Crews's voice conjures that innocence for us, the time
when a family universe was still so colossal that you could project that
reality onto the lives of strangers. Crews's private experience ultimately
overrode the lie of the Sears catalog. The stories he made up with his
friend gave him, he later wrote, "an overwhelming sense of well-being
and profound power."
Crews's survival is also encouraging,
a testimony of sorts. In a class on memoir I taught at Syracuse University
last year, my students puzzled me at the term's end by praising the genre's
sense of hope. Of the dark and dire stories we'd read – mental institutions
for Susanna Kaysen and rape for Maya Angelou – hope didn't seem the
leading emotion (except perhaps in Henry Louis Gates's Colored People).
"They lived to write books," one student said. "They grew
up and got away from their parents," said another. The fact that
the writers outlived their troubled pasts, walked out of them into adulthood,
ultimately served as empowering for that class of readers.
Not everyone's so wowed by
what memoir offers up. William Gass took a hard swipe at the whole genre
in Harper's last May ("Autobiography in the Age of Narcissism")
primarily scolding the genre's lack of truth. "The autobiographer
is likely to treat records with less respect than he should.... Autobiographers
flush before examining their stools."
For "truth" Gass
favors history without bothering to note – as Tobias Wolff did in
the aforementioned lecture – that historians are no more neutral
toward their subjects than memoirists are. Nor can such primary sources
as letters and diaries be construed as "objective." Gass also
neglected history's glaring failures. My high school history text cheerfully
described the westward migration without a glance at the native peoples
whose bones got plowed under in the process.
Gass also praised fiction for
veracity because it doesn't announce itself as true. I could borrow that
same reasoning to defend memoir for its blatant subjectivity. In our time
we've watched most great sources of "objective" truth –
churches and scientific studies and presidents among them – topple
in terms of their moral authority. So any pose of authority can seem the
ultimate fakery. In this way, Michael Herr's psychedelic memoir of Vietnam,
Dispatches, seems way more authentic to me in describing that war
than the Defense Department's records "objectively" assembled
under Robert McNamara.
In our loneliness for some
sense that we're behaving well inside our very isolated families, personal
experience has assumed some new power. Just as the novel form once took
up experiences of urban, industrialized society that weren't being handled
in epic poems or epistles, so memoir – reliant on a single, intensely
personal voice for its unifying glue – wrestles subjects in a way
that readers of late find compelling. The good ones I've read confirm
my experience in a flawed family. They reassure me the way belonging to
a community reassures you.
My bookstore chats did the
same. On the road, I came to believe – despite the dire edicts from
Newt Gingrich and the media about the moral, drug-besotted quagmire into
which we've all sunk – that our families are working, albeit in new
forms. People have gone on birthing babies and burying their dead and
loving those with whom they shared troubled patches of history. We do
this partly by telling stories – fictional and non-fictional ones
– in voices that neither deny family struggles nor make demons of
our beloveds.
