Why We Need Memoirs by Christopher Mahon copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

About the author
Christopher Mahon grew up in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, the high central plains of Colorado, and the tree-lined, lake-infused suburbs of southeastern Michigan. He has been a Californian since graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1978.

Christopher has published fiction in The Jessamyn West Review, poetry in the anthology What Have You Lost? and numerous articles in San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California newspapers. He works as a freelance editor and substitute teacher in northern San Diego County, where he lives with his wife and their two Jack Russell terriers.

An excerpt from Christopher's memoir-in-progress has recently been published at www.toasted-cheese.com

One

"Memoirs," an agent recently wrote me, "are difficult beasts."

She went on to say that although memoirs have clearly been popular among book readers, it is also clear that the market is now becoming saturated with them. If you’re going to write a memoir, you need a clear angle, maybe even a gimmick to stand out. It’s got to be eminently pitchable.

I get the sensation sometimes that memoirs are not as respected as a genre in the literary community— among publishers, agents and, sometimes, even writers— as its three more legitimate siblings, fiction, poetry and drama.

I can guess why.

Ever since Frank McCourt greeted the world with the memoir of his Irish boyhood, Angela’s Ashes, in 1996, you can argue that writers have flooded the market with pale imitations, trying to cash in on the memoir phenomenon, the fad, the commercial trend in unfolding the personal past.

You might say that memoirs can be too confessional, and that they can be embarrassing Ì for the reader, the writer, the culture Ì in the same way certain tabloid television shows are embarrassing.

But they don’t have to be.

At their best, memoirs are as valuable as any form of literature. In fact, we should issue each year as many memoirs as novels. We desperately need them.

Why?

Because memoirs can be genuine.

And that’s important when you live in an artificial age.

We live in an age of television, automobiles, shopping malls and supermarkets, an age where genuine reality is so altered on televised media Ì and I’m tempted to say all electronic media Ì that it almost always disappears; an age where the great powers of the natural world (trees, rivers, stars), what I would like to call an authentic reality, recede further and further each day.

Where can we find what’s real? What’s genuine?

A memoirist can say (eloquently and artistically, we hope), "This happened to me. I lived it. It’s my life. You can’t spin this away. This is my own vision of what’s true for me."

And how many people—and in what arena — say that nowadays?

This is what’s true for me. You can’t spin this away.


Two


Few televised dramas or comedies give me the feeling that they represent any genuine reality. It’s almost always skewed, to the unbelievably extreme or the superficially tender. Most other television programs are defined by personalities, from Oprah to Bill O’Reilly, but they are not real people, are they? They are just cultural and electronic images, media presentations, carefully packaged to market a product or an idea.

Whenever I step into an automobile, I’m reminded of how artificial my life can be. There I am, like so many others, early in the morning: I am on a freeway during a morning commute, crawling 33 miles in 75 minutes, surrounded by other automobiles — all made out of plastic metal (even metal is not genuine anymore) and glass, all crawling like I’m crawling. I don’t feel the air around me. I’m inside an artificial shell, listening to the radio, often a pre-packaged program, punching the buttons, hoping to find some music in between the commercials. I look up into the hills and see all the houses — those drab suburban edifices of little architectural value — and ask myself: is this a real world?

Whenever I step into a supermarket, I am stunned by the artificiality. All those aisles. All those cans. All those boxes. All that fluorescent lighting. And then I go to the deli. "Were these once chickens?" I ask.

Shopping malls freak me out in ways that the streets of great cities — L.A., San Francisco, New York — do not.

Even death, that ultimate reality, seems to have disappeared from the scene.

My mother died two years ago and I was there at her bedside in a hospital in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, when she took her last breath. It may be the single most profound moment in my life. I held her hand as she died. My father died last December 28th in an assisted living home and I was not there. I haven’t been back to Michigan yet. He donated his body to science and the memorial Mass is scheduled for April.

I think in decades and generations past death touched family members more deeply.

Even medical science has managed to camouflage the nature of death, the ultimate reality (along with life), and, sometimes, pain. I’m not saying it’s not good to reduce the pain of horrible diseases. I’m just saying life — even illnesses — may be less real when they’re experienced more and more through the medium of technology and pharmacology. Technology, pharmacology, and artificial forces have created many diseases, I would argue.

It’s ironic, perhaps, because people are dying for the genuine.

For the real.

And memoirs, however humble, can offer that.


Three

I understand I enter a slippery intellectual landscape when I start invoking words like "real," "genuine," and "artificial" and begin to make distinctions among them.

Can’t something artificial also be real? Can’t a lie be genuine?

And yet I'm struck now how the nature of the real, the genuine, the artificial has changed over the decades, over the centuries, and how that change affects the nature of literature (and most especially, fiction and memoirs).

Back in the 19th century and the early 20th century, in the era of the towering fiction writers -- when people like Balzac, Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville were writing — there was lots of what I’d like to call "reality" to go around. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had all of Russia, Thomas Hardy had the Moors, Melville had the ocean, Joyce had dear dirty Dublin, Jane Austen had a country house set below the English sky, Mark Twain had the Mississippi River, and Hemingway had the fishing streams of Michigan, the streets of Paris in the early part of the 20th century, and the gulf streams off Cuba.

Fiction, perhaps, has always been a great escape from reality, and the fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries may have been so powerful because it was bouncing off some formidable reality. Granted, fiction might have been an escape, an antidote to reality, but it was a profound and wonderful escape because it contended with the reality of the day.

People have complained in recent years that fiction has gone minimalist, that it has not taken on the great themes fiction took on in the past. That makes sense to me because perhaps the reality from which the great themes were born have receded from our lives.

Reality, for me — now that so much of the natural world has been removed from human experience — is a real emotion tied to a real event. It’s not an emotion created by a media event. It’s an emotion created by an interaction with another person or the physical world.

So today, perhaps, we may not need an antidote to—or an escape from —reality. We may need more reality itself.

Memoirs can offer that. They can speak from the reality of our lives.

Memoirs can tell the stories of reality in an era when such a reality is constantly obfuscated by television, by automobiles, by shopping malls.

Memoirs can even explore the reality of our artificial world.

But, most importantly, if in fact American literature has become less profound as we have receded from the natural world, and the great real powers it reminds us of— and I think an argument can be made for that —then memoirs may at least help us get back in touch with the reality of our own lives.

Four

Memoirs are also important for another reason at this time in our lives. And I’m speaking of memoirs written in this country now, in the United States of America.

We’re living in a time in which the very definition of what it means to be an American is up for grabs. Some people, we are told, hate Americans. They are ready to bomb places simply by virtue of the fact that Americans live there. Other people love America, are willing to die for the country and what they believe it now stands for in this 21st century, so far from the late 18th century in which this country was born.

Immigrants still stream into this land, through all of its borders— north, east, west, and south—seeking to be part of the undying American dream.

What is this American dream? Who are these Americans? And to whom does the privilege or the honor or the duty of defining what it means to be an American fall?

Is it to be defined by an advertising campaign? A political campaign? A tradition? And who is the caretaker of this tradition?

Why cannot the story of America be told individual by individual, piece by piece? Why cannot we form a great mosaic of memoirs in which the eloquent voices of a great variety of Americans speak, and from that great mosaic deduce the nature of Americans? This may provide a deeper and broader definition of Americans than all the political campaigns we see on TV, all the television sit coms and dramas, all the news shows, and even all the TV interviews.

I know I have slammed TV. So now I must say I appreciate the exceptions — shows like The Charlie Rose Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and all of C-SPAN.

So I will close now with something I saw aired on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer last November 20th. I saw an interview with a Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. He, of course, was speaking about the great tension between Americans and many others in the world.

The interviewer, Elizabeth Farnsworth, asked "And here you have this opportunity to address Americans directly, what do you have to say to Americans? What sort of fundamental message?"

And Orhan Pamuk answered, "I’ll be modest, and I will repeat what I’ve been saying to my Turkish readers for the last 20 years, that... and I’ve been saying to my readers that what is important is not clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West, whatever. But think of that other peoples in other continents and civilizations are actually exactly like you and you can learn this through literature. Pay attention to good literature and novels, and do not believe in politicians. "

Yes.

Believe more in the writers than in the politicians, if you want a deeper understanding of our humanity.

Let us read our memoirs.

Memoirs, perhaps, like some I’ve heard of recently: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight For Civil Rights, by Tannarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due; The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story, by John Laurence; and Lost in America: A Journey with My Father by Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D.

And let us write our memoirs.

With our very deep and our very genuine voices, let us tell the world in a thousand different ways that we are just like everyone else.

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