I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Sometimes when I work on my Things Men Gave Me stories I have an urge to simplify, to draw out themes that are easily understandable and relatable, to turn what was a complicated interaction of two or more people into something more legible.
But I don’t think this serves me or any potential readers.
My least favorite kind of memoir to read is the recovery memoir whose story reduces to “I was an alcoholic / addict and then I found a twelve step program, and I recovered. Let go and let god!” To me, this is far too simplistic of a reading of both substance use and the process of putting such substance use into an acceptable place in one’s life.
I have not read Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir All the Way to the River, but the few reviews and synopses I’ve read suggest that it suffers from exactly this simplification. From Danielle McClellan’s review on Goodreads:
Despite Gilbert’s skillful writing, the narrative is uneven–thoughtful, beautifully written passages give way to long sections of hyper-analysis and over-explanation. I am also wary of vague, platitudinous recovery language that can give the impression of communicating more than it actually is. It is almost as though the writer doesn’t quite trust the reader with her story alone, and must also explain in great detail how the story should be interpreted.
“Vague, platitudinous recovery language” doesn’t enlighten a reader about the human condition. We’ve all seen it before. Yes: you realized you weren’t in control. Yes: you inventoried your history of wrongs against other people. Yes: you approached them to apologize. And now, knowing you are an alcoholic/addict, you will never use substances again, you will always have the problem of being such a person, but thank god you can always go to a meeting for support (and platitudes).
That’s so tired to me.
In their book Giving An Account of Oneself, philosopher Judith Butler writes that we are opaque to ourselves, and this has implications for memoir writing. Butler writes:
When we claim to know and to present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are. We cannot reasonably expect anything different from others in return. To acknowledge one’s own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgment is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to experience the very limits of knowing. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves.
I realize that my urge to tie up each story I write in a just-so explanation and interpretation of the events as I remember them doesn’t serve my goal of showing what love and life is like after divorce at midlife. I want to take the dual perspective of retrospection and reflection suggested by essay expert Phillip Lopate, but too much simplistic reflection might overwrite the real truths in the story that I can’t see and I can’t explain but would only be gleaned partially by a reader who is not myself.
I’m thinking more and more about how roundabout and inefficient writing such as Murakami identifies in novel writing is what is needed in memoir too, to communicate complicated truths that can’t be communicated in any way other than sharing complicated happenings?