Memoir Round-Up: The Picks for June

SHIFTING THE BLAME is not a reason to write memoir. There. I’ve said it. And I’ve said it, oh, maybe a bazillion times in my classes. And if I had to draw a wide, red line between those memoirs worth reading and those for which there is no godly (or ungodly) reason to exist, it would be that. Shifting the blame to others is not a reason to write, nor one to publish.

And yet it is a theme that pervades many memoirs now on the market.

So what is a good theme from which to write? Exploring decisions made along the way to some change in your life works well, especially if you can reveal the universal in your personal process of making choices. Show us the transcendence. Instead of lumping all the blame on others, and then taking heroic heaps of credit for how you’ve changed, give some thought to your own role in your decisions.

By this standard, I will not read most of the memoir that is out each year. In fact, I’ll read very little of the books that are published in the genre, though I will read hundreds of pages written by my students, most of which will never be published, and will never be heard on the radio, though all of those writers will teach me something about how someone got somewhere, or got out of something, or that argues in favor of having a good cat, or starting a garden, or engaging in some form of salvation along what I call the “salvation option ruler.”

Which will I not read? Here’s a very short list. Bristol Palin’s new memoir would be first. And while I have no problem with rock and roll memoirs – I loved those by Patti Smith and Keith Richards – I will not read Steven Tyler’s since, from what I read in the press, I will learn nothing of substance. I may pick up Along Cherry Tree Lane, (Hal Leonard, 2011) the just-released memoir by legendary record producer Milt Okun. For a delightful review, please read this one on the fine site, BookHounds.

Books I am reading this month include Molly Birnbaum’s Season to Taste (Ecco, 2011). The subtitle is How I Lost my Sense of Smell and Found My Way.

Birnbaum was hit by a car in August 2005 while jogging in Brookline, Mass., and sustained substantial injuries, including a broken pelvis and a fractured skull. The head trauma led to nerve damage, and she lost her sense of smell. She was only months away from enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America. She couldn’t smell a thing.

The New York Times did a lovely feature on her in which the reader learns of the Times Dining editor asking the author to develop a recipe to run with this piece, which she did, a little piece of memoir about which you can read here on her blog. Talk about a delicious (and successful) multi-platform media hit.

Another memoir sitting on my night table (and waiting to be opened) is by the great and wondrous Oscar Hijuelos, the author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The memoir is entitled Thoughts Without Cigarettes, and everything I’ve read about it, including this piece from the Seattle Times, makes me want to start today. Imagine this: During a White House dinner, the great Gabriel García Márquez, realizing he is talking to the author of Mambo Kings, says: “That’s a book I wish I had written.” Sigh.

After listening to an interview on Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360 with writer Alexandra Styron, I will definitely pick up her new memoir, Reading my Father. It was a  fairly remarkable talk. You can listen to it here. The daughter of the astonishing William Styron, Alexandra Styron recounts the process of reviewing her father’s archives, and discovering what he had been up to when the world thought he had stopped writing. I pretty much had to pull over the car and just breathe during that point in the interview. Be warned. And listen up.

And you? It’s officially summer. There’s no one but yourself to blame if you’ve not got a juicy memoir tucked into your beach bag.

What are you reading?