BETWEEN THE LINES

Book Talk by Joe Neri


Of Memoirs and Memories

Memoirs have always been very popular books. Unlike a biography, which is written by someone other than the subject of the book, a memoir is an autobiography, a personal account of a personal life by the same person that lived that life.

Memoir is French for memory, and memories are not impeccable. Quite the contrary, human memories are full of lapses, gaps and selectivity. Just because the author of a memoir writes that something happened in a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that it did indeed happen that way.

Memoirs are not a perfect history of someone’s life. The task of that recording is best left to biographers, who do the necessary and tedious research to make sure that all the facts are true and accurate. Rather, memoirs are more like creative nonfiction, in which the author is not only allowed but expected to tell us what happened strictly from his or her prejudiced point of view.

I think that is exactly what makes memoirs so appealing to many readers. They don’t want to read a linear history of the author’s life; they want to read what aspects of that life the author thinks important enough to write about.

Of course, such creativity can go too far. The numerous embellishments and in-accuracies in James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES ultimately brought disgrace upon the author and forced the publisher to offer refunds to people who bough the book.

One of the best memoirs in recent years was Barack Obama ‘s DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, which offered insights into the author as a man, a human being, long before he became a politician.

Some of my favorite modern memoirs, classic in my opinion, are RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs, TEACHER MAN by Frank McCourt, NAKED by David Sedaris, A YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion, THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls, and of course, FEAR AND LOATHING in Las Vegas by the late Hunter Thompson.

None of these books are year-by-year chronologies. Rather, each author has expertly written about some aspect of or some time in their respective lives that would prove to be interesting to people other than themselves. I believe that is the essence of what makes a good memoir, as opposed to a laboriously boring exercise in the minutia of one’s life. Or, as Bob Seger once sang, knowing “what to leave in, what to leave out.”