LISTENING TO THE RADIO recently, I heard an announcer introduce someone who had written a “memoir,” and I swear the announcer spat out the word, making it an expletive, heightening it with invective. It sounded more like a projectile than a part of speech. Poor man, I thought, you haven’t read any good memoir, have you?
But just what is a good memoir? In these days of rocks stars and celebrity memoir and myriad wild liars like our former vice president, Dick Cheney, it’s worth having some standards, I think, or at least some understanding of what makes this genre worthy of real respect.
Good memoir is about territory, and that territory is bordered by the areas of the writer’s expertise. It was with this in mind that the late great Caroline Knapp wrote my all-time favorite memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, and then when she wanted to write about her relationship with her dogs, producing the marvelous A Pack of Two. Had she lived she would undoubtedly have written many more.
What Knapp taught all of us who followed her is that good memoir is best written from one area of expertise at a time. When writers know this, readers do well to pay attention to those writers. Why? For no other reason that those writers offer us the marvelous opportunity to learn to live this life with some degree of honor and intelligence. Heady stuff, I know, but it beats the hell out of a self-help book any day. (Notice the invective in that language, the expletive? Poor self-help books, I know, but let them fend for themselves).
Within the great genre of memoir exists many sub-genres, one of which is my very favorite place from which to read. This is when someone else takes on the extraordinary task of illuminating for me what I call the human pilot light. It fascinates me, this little light of ours.
When in the spring of 2009 Christa Parravani sat down to begin writing her beautiful book, Her (Henry Holt & Company, 2013), while a combination of forces created a specific threat to extinguishing her very self, those forces were not nearly as powerful as the specific set of circumstances that allowed her to stay lit from within. What we fortunate readers get to witness is nothing less than her writing her way to a separate identity. Nothing less will suffice, of course, since it is the death of Cara, her twin, from a drug overdose — a twin with whom she shared an unsteady childhood, a twin who was raped and whose rape ultimately sent them both spiraling toward death – from which Christa must separate.
And it is writing that saved Christa. Interestingly, being a writer was Cara’s chosen path. Christa is the photographer, and while taking on even her sister’s profession she finds a way, as she says, to lay out the strand of her life next to the strand that is her sister’s tale. The author wrote her way to a separate identity and in doing so shows us not only what survival looks like, but what it takes to be your very own woman.
I was carrying the book around with me for the last few weeks and several people recognized it, one of whom asked “Oh my, isn’t that that book about the death of her twin? Isn’t it really sad?” It’s not about that. It’s about identity and what is sometimes required of us to have our own. And no, it’s not sad. It’s inspirational, expertly crafted, providing endless lessons on structure and narrative and courage. A wonderful book. Read it and learn.
