"I Did It All For The Glory Of [Me]"

In recent years, nearly every personal newspaper, magazine, or internet piece has been written written by someone "who is working on a memoir," "has just completed a memoir," or "is thinking about writing a memoir." While some of these pieces are very good, most are unmemorable, becoming indistinguishable from previous entries within moments after reading. Why so many memoirs?

Neil Genzlinger's recent NY Times Book Review The Problem with Memoirs laments the market saturation. While reviewing four memoirs (none of which I've read), he offers guidelines for deciding whether a memoir should be published:

Sure, the resulting list [of tens of thousands of memoirs from an Amazon search] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually every­one who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an under­privileged child or been an under­privileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.

[Rules]

1 That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Dis­aster Preparedness,” by Heather Havri­lesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.

2 No one wants to relive your misery. . . .

No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal. . . .

If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. . . .

That’s what makes a good memoir — it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery. 

Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.

Enduring ordeals like the ones mentioned above inevitably produces new insights, recognitions of false gods in which we've placed our trust, which are profound to us. We want to discover their meaningfulness. But, our "will" resists the work of the Holy Spirit. We don't want to die. So rather than taking up our cross and waiting and trusting Christ to work in us, we bind ourselves to another version of the law, another attempt at shaping others' perception of us, that will end the pain and improve our circumstances, perhaps through a memoir whose scope does not escape navel gazing. Rather than accepting justification through Christ on the cross, we seek to transform ourselves and avoid a painful death. But the cross is what and all we need, even as failed actual or contemplated memoirists.

DFW on Fear and Love

1 John 4:18: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

From the short story Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace, collected in Oblivion. Narrator posthumously (sadly, foretellingly) recounts his meetings with his psychotherapist:

"For instance, it turned out that one of his basic operating premises was the claim that there were really only two basic, fundamental orientations a person could have toward the world, (1) love and (2) fear, and that they couldn't coexist (or, in logical terms, that their domains were exhaustive and mutually exclusive, or that their two sets had no intersection but their union comprised all possible elements, or that

(ψx)((Fx - ~(Lx)) & (Lx - ~ (Fx))) & ~ ((эx) (~(Fx) & ~(Lx)),

meaning in other words that each day of your life was spent in service to one of these masters or the other, and 'One cannot serve two masters' - the Bible again - and that one of the worst things about the. the conception of competitive, achievement-oriented masculinity that America supposedly hardwired into its males was that it caused a more or less constant state of fear that made genuine love next to impossible. That is, that what passed for love in American men was usually just the need to be regarded in a certain way, meaning that today's males were so constantly afraid of 'not measuring up' (Dr. G's phrase, with evidently no pun intended) that they had to spend all their time convincing others of their masculine 'validity' (which happens to also be a term from formal logic) in order to ease their own insecurity, making genuine love next to impossible.

Although it seemed a little bit simplistic to see this fear as just a male problem (try watching a girl stand on a scale sometime), it turns out that Dr. Gustafson was very nearly right in his concept of the two masters - though not in the way that he, when alive and confused about his own real identity believed - and even while I played along by pretending to argue or not quite understand what he was driving at, the idea struck me that maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic inability to really love . . . ."

Don't Throw Rhat . . .

Romans 5:20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass . . . .

Overheard last night during debate between ESPN college football analyst Mark May and former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz about South Carolina's play call late in its game last Saturday versus Kentucky, which resulted in a game ending interception:

May: I totally disagree. You're Steve Spurrier, you're on the road in a hostile environment. They called a timeout before the play. You tell your quarterback they're two things you cannot do.

Holtz: No! No!

May: (1) fumble the ball, (2) throw an interception.

Holtz: No! No!

May: You have the field goal try in the bag. What does he do - he underthrows the fade and throws an interception. You can't turn the ball over.

Holtz: No! No!

May: Turn the ball over you lose. What does he do? Turns the ball over - they lose.

Holtz: You don't ever say "Don't do this!" Because it will happen every time! We're playing Penn State. I've got Tony Rice at quarterback. We put in Jeff Graham. We've got the ball on the 3 yard line. I say to Jeff Graham: "I've got three points on the board. Don't take them off. Don't throw an interception." Guess what happens. Boom! He throws the interception! I put the thought in his mind. You don't say don't do this. . . .

Host John Saunders: It's like standing on the [golf] tee and saying don't hit it in the water. It happens every time.

Objects in the Rear View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Autobiographies are often unreliable, as we have long suspected and as new research now confirms. According to a Monday NY Times article by Benedict Carey, entitled Why Indiscretions Appear Youthful, not surprisingly, most people actually see themselves as morally righteous, at least in the present. And, if we do perceive a time that our morality was lacking, it was always long ago. The article outlines recent research into recollections of good and bad behavior, concluding that people "date their memories of moral failings about 10 years earlier, on average, than their memories of good deeds."

In recent years psychologists have exposed the many ways that people subconsciously maintain and manage their moral self-image. They rate themselves as morally superior to the next person; overestimate the likelihood that they will act virtuously in the future, see their good intentions as praiseworthy while dismissing others' as inconsequential. And they soften their moral principles when doing a truly dirty job, like carrying out orders to exploit uninformed customers. . . .

Now, scientists are beginning to learn how memory assists and even amplifies this righteous self-messaging. In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward, these new studies suggest - creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography. . . .

"The main finding is that if I ask you to tell me about a positive moral memory, you'll tell me something recent," Dr. Escobedo said. "If I ask you to tell me about bad moral memory, you're going to give me something from much further in the past."

[T]o talk about moral lapses at all, people first needed time to reimagine themselves as having evolved - as being a different person from the one who fleeced his customers, lied to her spouse or snatched a few purses over at the senior center. . . .

Future selves score the best reviews of all, said David Dunning, a social psychologist at Cornell. "People seem to situate themselves in time differently than they do others," Dr. Dunning wrote in an email. "Ask students what's important for gaining an accurate impression of them and they emphasize more their unwritten future potential than they do when asked the same question about another person. We presume that future potential is more rosy than the past is."

MATM: Universality, Sympathy, and Synecdoche, New York

This comes to us from Mockingbird contributor Ron Flowers:

syn·ec·do·che
: A figure of speech in which (among others) a part is used for the whole.

Galatians 3:28 - There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Synecdoche, New York

The film was Charlie Kaufmann's (writer of Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind among others) answer to Sony's request that he direct a horror film. I'm guessing that the result was not what Sony had in mind, but I think I get the point. SNY traces reality through the life of Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) from his late 30s to his elderly years. As the film begins, Caden is overseeing final rehearsals for his portrayal of Death of a Salesman using only young actors, because, as he addresses his lead actor:

Try to keep in mind that a young

person playing Willy Loman thinks

he's only pretending to be at the

end of a life full of despair. But

the tragedy is that we know that

you, the young actor, will end up

in this very place of desolation.

Caden has been there. He spends his time fretting over news stories and real and imagined ailments, preoccupied by death, while his wife (Catherine Keener), after revealing she fantasized about Caden dying and starting over again guilt free, abandons him with their four-year old daughter to pursue her art career in Germany.

Death of a Salesman earns Caden a MacArthur Genius Grant. In reaction to his wife's and father's criticism that he was wasting his time staging others' work, Caden explains to his therapist his vision for his next project:
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