Shall We Consider Memoir?

In which we look at certain types of memoirs that might have been considered for the National Book Award, if they had been published as Fiction

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Mary Karr has often been sited as the reason for the revival of memoir. In 1995, her first memoir, The Liars Club, was published to great acclaim, winning several major awards and staying on the NYT bestseller list for over a year. She went on to publish two follow-ups, Cherry and Lit, both of which were praised by critics, and she is now considered one of the greatest memoirists of all time. Yet, despite all of this praise, Karr—who teaches memoir at Syracuse University—has often said that memoir is considered a trashy form in the literary community. She’s fought hard in her career to guide the conversation about memoir into a new and more highly regarded direction. Today, I want to consider memoir, if she’s right about how it’s looked at by the literary world, and if it’s true that the novel reigns supreme.

While the general public tends to obsess over the genre, many critics seem to discuss memoir with the same attitude that an art critic would a child’s crayon drawing hanging on their parents refrigerator. Karr has often said her favorite thing about memoir is the fact that anyone who has lived a life could have something to say about it—but I think this is also one of the reasons the genre is often derided. There’s this idea that memoirs take less creative gasoline, because the writer isn’t creating an entire world from thin air. Even “autobiographical novels” get shade thrown their way. But the reality is, authors are always pulling from their own lived experience when rendering a fictional world. Many authors talk about how their work is an exploration of their own obsessions, and so in some ways I feel like a lot of fiction, even as far away as it is, could be considered a self portrait in abstraction.

Some critics have pointed out that certain memoirs, if published at an earlier time, would have likely been converted to fiction—and been better for it. When making this point, they talk about great works that have elements of autobiography, using examples like The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grass Harp, and more recently, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Shuggie Bain. The idea here is that these works manage to take the most compelling elements of a writer’s life and transpose them onto a fictional framework that betters allows for the ideas and themes to be explored. I hear what they’re saying—there’s an essay by Alexander Chee where he discusses writing his first novel, Edinburgh, and how at first that work started out as more of a straightforward autobiographical novel, and he breaks down why that didn’t work and the changes he had to make. And I do think the work is better for it. Edinburgh is a truly brilliant novel. He utilizes a structure that I don’t think would work if he’d been held to the situational truth of his life. But his essay collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, is equally brilliant. They’re just two different mediums, offering two different frameworks, and I don’t think one way is any better or worse than the other.

Part of why I find the critical reception so frustrating at times is that the arguments made against memoir could also be said of fiction. People refer to it as naval-gazing, but part of that comes from them knowing it’s a memoir. When a character focuses on themselves and reflect on their experiences, the author is praised for accurately capturing human experience. I’m always thinking about authors who wrote fiction for years before finally shifting to memoir, and how it changed the dynamic of how people considered their previous work. Karr writes about how Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss, was lacerated by critics upon its release, because it was about Harrison’s incestuous relationship with her father—but much of her work leading up to this explored similar things. Many reviews of her fiction praised how she approached taboo subjects. I truly think if she’d published her memoir as fiction, without even changing anything, it would’ve been considered a major achievement, because it would’ve been easier to swallow that way. As human beings, we’re sometimes only capable of handling variations of the truth, but never the truth directly.

Another interesting thing that happens when people read memoir—this is more specific to general readers—is that the criticism is sometimes aimed at the writer’s life and their person, rather than the work itself. It’s like memoir is evaluated with a different set of criteria. I think part of this comes from the confessional quality of most of these works, because when we read someone’s diary, we aren’t thinking about how they play with structure or if the sentences are lively—we’re often just digging for information. But these works have artistic merit, and are often approached by writers who want the work to be judged as such.

Before we continue, it’s only fair that I address the fact that I’m biased in this whole situation. I’ve spent the better part of a decade working on my own memoir, and it’s only because of this that I’m asking all of you to take a deeper look.

Anyway, moving on. I do think any one of Karr’s memoirs would have been longlisted for the National Book Award, had they been published as fiction. If you’ve read her work you’ll know why, but if not, trust me, she is one of the best living writers out there. The Liars Club is one of the most perfectly constructed books. I studied it for an entire year, back in 2020, because I just had to know how it worked.

The opening chapter mirrors the structure for the entire book, starting with this vague memory of a traumatic event, her mother and the mystery around her, and ending with her father and his Liars Club friends. She is able to establish her adult voice while weaving in and out of her child mind, bringing us in and out of time in fascinating ways. She has such a strong command of language. She’s a poet, and I think it’s clear in both her unparalleled sentences, and in how she chooses to structure the work. Many fiction writers talk about reading poetry to think about structure and I think Karr is able to utilize her skills here in ways we just don’t see that often. This book also reminds me of books like Swamplandia!, The Goldfinch and White Oleander, how they’re all about absent mothers and these wild sweeping stories with a strong sense of place. I can’t help it, these are just a personal favorite.

Another memoir that I think would’ve had a real chance at being longlisted is In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. The structure of this one was just so inventive—the book is about this abusive relationship between Machado and an ex-girlfriend, and she offers so many different lenses with which to view her experience. I thought it was so smart to “look at a relationship-gone-wrong from every angle” by pulling from different narrative frameworks. It also manages to capture the feeling of being in one of these relationships that I don’t think we see represented as accurately in other places. Just really well done.

If we’re gonna look at smaller scale memoir, I’d consider Girl, Interrupted to be a real option here. It’s less than 200 pages, but her work shifted the conversation in how we talk about mental health and womanhood. It’s funny and surprising and well written. I think if we were gonna compare it to previous NBA longlisted books (specifically in regards to scale) I’d say this would be like Abundance, A Children’s Bible, The Need, The Boatbuilder, and any of those other books that maybe aren’t sweeping sagas but are little jewels that stay with us long after we’ve read them.

The Light Years is another one that I absolutely adored. It’s about art, drugs and the 60’s. It’s well written and queer, and actually feels a lot like The Goldfinch if The Goldfinch had been edited down. It’s one of those that I feel like most people who read it would love it, and it’s hard to explain but it just captured so much of what I recognized from my own experience in a way that I hadn’t seen before. It’s always lovely when that happens.

I think Fairest by Meredith Talusan could have had a shot—I do think this is one case where it really does read more as memoir. Like, it feels like a memoir more than some others. I think that’s partly because Talusan has created a distinct voice for her nonfiction that’s separate from her fiction. But I think that she beautifully melds together so many elements—she writes about the intersections of identity in a way that I think many still struggle with. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, just that most writers have been taught to cut so much of themselves out of the equation and Talusan is hellbent on holding it all here. I found it beautiful.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel—would be a short story collection. Chee is just one of the greatest writers, I don’t know what else to tell you. I loved every single piece in this collection and found it all so captivating. all hits no skips, as they say.

I think these memoirs (and essay collections) are all similar in that they have a strong narrative and read more like fiction that the memoirs that traditionally win the National Book Award. Most of those books tend to read more like general nonfiction—meaning, they feel more academic, in a way. The Yellow House which won a few years ago, isn’t just a story of one person and their journey; it takes the history of an entire family and uses it to explore greater social issues and how their own history plays into the overall historical context of America. It’s brilliant, but I do think it’s more journalistic, maybe? It’s just a different mode of writing, I think.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t always know where to situate memoir in the literary landscape. Which is part of why these books sometimes get overlooked. I also think that some of these more confessional memoirs, or the coming-of-age memoirs are disregarded because they aren’t approached in a way that’s as journalistic. Maybe that’s what they mean by “naval gazing”—that these people aren’t coming at it from a consideration of what’s happening around them, but how what’s happening around them has shaped who they are.

This is something that continues to intrigue me and that I hope to discuss more as time goes on. If you have any thoughts about memoir, about how people engage with it, about the different ways people write memoir, let me know! My ideas about these subjects always shift and change the more that I learn about them.