What Makes Bad Memoir? Jimmy Connors Provides a Willing Example

I’VE NEVER LIKED JIMMY CONNORS, considering him among the triumvirate of people who temporarily turned tennis into a game played by bad-tempered men in (very) short pants. And since I spent a lot of my youth watching tennis with my mother, I’ll resort to a quote of hers to qualify just whom Connors has morphed into.

My mother had great expressions, many of which I use every day, some of which I live by. My favorite is “Character is fate,” which she mostly slapped down when the topic was Richard Nixon and my generation’s great desire to see him reduced to the ignominy he so rightly earned.

It turns out she’s right about character and fate, and since she never liked Jimmy Connors either, she would not be one bit surprised to learn that Connors has played out to be someone who must depend on someone else’s private – as well as medical – issue to provide the sensationalism needed to sell a book. Oh yeah, and he revealed this detail without first consulting the other person.

All that to sell a book. That’s how it looks from here, since this heretofore unknown detail is the single detail about this book that is making headlines, lots and lots of headlines, as he must have known it would.

Shame on him.

I rarely take out writers of bad memoir, finding it best to vote with my dollars at the bookstore, choosing those books that illuminate us, provoke us and inform us about how to live this life with some degree of honor and integrity.

It’s fools like this that give the art and craft of memoir a bad name.

No, I won’t provide a link to his book. Neither will I tell you what he wrote, nor about whom he wrote it. For that, you’ve got Fox News.