By: Alex Sorondo/Staff Writer
A Huffington Post article published on Feb. 16 titled “10 Secrets of Successful Memoir Writers” offered more unnecessary encouragement to the maddening trend of memoir writing currently in national focus.
It feels so unwarranted to be frustrated by the current obsession with memoirs and the rampant compulsion to write them because, at the end of the day, nobody gets hurt, and little is wasted but for the time and money of those who choose to spend them in the grottoes of ghost-written banality.
Every month, the front display at Barnes and Noble is littered with new hardback memoirs, decorated by nothing more than the face of the celebrity subject, their name always four or five times bigger than the title, which is often something like “My Life” (Bill Clinton), “Life Itself” (Roger Ebert), “My Story” (Susan Boyle) or “My Life So Far” (Jane Fonda).
Clearly, these books are being bought, otherwise they would have stopped being published long ago. The sales must quickly dissolve, though, because celebrity memoirs tend to enjoy a burst of activity before migrating shortly thereafter to the bargain section, promptly replaced at the front with others of their kind – like politicians or herpes.
Equally common, if not more so, are the memoirs that get no attention, many of them self-published, chronicling a troublesome childhood, turbulent marriage or life with a disability.
These usually have triumphant or inspirational titles like, “The Hills Had Eyes and They Watched Me Win,” or “One Leg, Twice the Fun.”
A lot of these are written with the intention of inspiring their readers, as I have yet to read the memoir in which everything ends horribly and everybody’s miserable (but there’s still time), and are therefore often shelved in the Self-Help/Inspiration section.
Surely some of them are picked up and put to good use, making a reader feel warmed and confident, if only for a while.
What bothers me, though, is the overwhelming frivolity of it, that so many of these books are being written and so few of them actually surviving, given the shortage of reviews and their quick trip to the bargain bin and, after that, obscurity, because they leave no mark on the audience. Even worse than that is the inherent narcissism of such a project when the narrative is semi-coherent, the prose is poor, the pacing is slow and the reader can see that this author clearly cannot write, cannot tell a story, probably does little reading of their own, and most likely did nothing that teaches them how to work a narrative.
Take, for example Kris Jenner’s memoir, “Kris Jenner… And All Things Kardashian.” Speaking about her parents’ divorce, Jenner writes, “It was very, very hard for me to wrap my head around my parents not living together anymore… [My father] would come to visit us and then leave again. That was really weird for me.”
So this is apparently what it’s like to see your parents get divorced: “weird” and “hard.” The problem is, I can think of at least six experiences Kris Jenner may have found “weird” and “hard,” so how do we distinguish this ostensibly formative experience of her parents’ divorce from any of those?
I’ve argued this memoir issue with friends before, and the conversation always comes down to the question of whether or not every person has a story to tell.
I do think that everybody has a story worth telling, something about their lives that we could all probably learn from. More often than not; however, their story is probably better suited for an article or an essay, not a book.
Whatever shape it takes, the most important factor is that the person in question knows how to tell the story, and I’m convinced that if you don’t read, and don’t read often, you have no business writing.
Mark Winegardner, a novelist and professor at the University, said that aspiring writers should read 200 to 300 books for every one that they plan to write. The novelist Stephen King has written, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write.”
Through poor writing, the memoirist is only aping the form and their subject. This only adds to the endless proliferation of these books which, in dealing with serious human issues through bland, cliched, uninspired writing, serve only to trivialize those issues, and to make them, in the ocean of half-hearted descriptions, all the more difficult to understand and relate to.
alex.sorondo@fiusm.com
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