A friend who has taught college-level creative writing tells me that whenever he chastises his students for having written something outlandish, or flat, or discordant, they resort to the same disclaimer: “But that’s the way it really happened!” Which leads him to explain with a sigh that for three centuries, fiction has sought to impose order on the events of life, to arrange human activity into patterns that render each part purposeful or meaningful or holy, to convert life into narrative. But today’s young writers are more interested in chronicling their personal experience, asserting their personal identity, or both. This impulse is always present in the writing of fiction, but it is such a marginal aspect of what the best fiction has always done that you want to ask these neophytes why they’re writing fiction at all.
The answer is that many of the most talented are not. Not any more. Indeed, young people in their twenties and thirties are writing not first novels these days; they are writing memoirs. They are literary works rather than conventional autobiographies because they deal with the mental and emotional stuff that used to be the raw material of novels, rather than with achievements in the public world, of which the authors have typically accumulated very few. That these memoirists are so young should not surprise us: After all, the culture that shaped them has so stressed sex, intoxication, and other forms of self-gratification that it’s easy to feel at, say, 27 that the meaningful part of your life is over. No: What’s surprising is that these books appear to be gradually replacing novels.
But reading through a dozen recently published memoirs, each of which is an effort to portray the the individuality of its author, one is struck by nothing so much as their sameness. Practically all of them feature some combination of identity politics and mental illness. They replace the moral and social concerns of literature with either the chemical concerns of medicine or the sexual casework of Krafft-Ebing or the ethnic determinism of Herbert Spencer.
They fall into two categories. “Race-and-gender books,” about being black/Hispanic/Asian/gay at Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Columbia, are so numerous that one must — and so identical that one can — ignore them. It is the “crazy books,” the confessions of those who are either mentally ill or so maladjusted that their lives take on the patterns of insanity, that concern us here.
Two limpid pools of narcissism set the contemporary boundaries of the “crazy book” — Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 depression memoir Prozac Nation and Michael Ryan’s 1995 sex-addict memoir Secret Life. Wurtzel’s book has two tracks. The first follows our young author as she copes with depression and the medication she takes for her condition. The second track involves her precocious achievements and her sexual allure:
I wrote like crazy, at least two or three reported pieces a week, sometimes more. I wrote like my life depended on it, which it kind of did. My editors were mystified by my productivity, thought I was mainlining copy or something. . . . They nominated me for awards from the Texas Newspaper Association and the Dallas Press Club. . . . So they kind of let it slide when I started to crack. . . . When I did arrive at my office, I’d spend most of my time returning personal phone calls or telling the other reporters about the latest man in my life, an ever-changing array of cowboys, restaurateurs, musicians, and college sophomores.
In other words: What I’ve accomplished is mine; what I’ve done wrong is the lithium or the insanity talking. This suggests that the key feature of the “crazy book” is not the craziness per se. It’s that a medical diagnosis or a biochemical problem replaces the moral judgments and decisions that are the traditional purview of the novel.
The core of Secret Life is Ryan’s struggle with “sex addiction,” an “illness” some bluenoses among us might call sexual predation. He traces his addiction to two childhood traumas — having been molested several times over the course of a year as a 5-year-old, and having been psychologically “abused” by his alcoholic father.
Ryan lumps the two together as equivalent violations. But it is his molestation that he uses to explain his own lecherous behavior towards his teenage students and various anonymous sex partners. “She was only one in a long line of students with whom I reenacted my own sexual abuse, from the other side, as the molester, as if I could escape its unhappy imprinting by being [my molester] and not myself,” he says towards the end of the book. As for the sex itself, Ryan’s not the one doing it: “I wasn’t in a blackout. I was fully conscious the whole time.
But I was on automatic pilot, as if my brain were being beamed in from Mars. I knew I was headed for trouble, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
Well, if Ryan’s got nothing to do with it, then why should we read about him? No one doubts that Ryan’s traumas are real or permanent, but his all-absolving excuse deprives his memoir of any moral dynamism. It also explains why he decided to examine these issues in a memoir and not a novel. As both Secret Life and Prozac Nation show, “me-against-my-disease” is a lot simpler a proposition than dealing with characters who evolve.
Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story (Dial Press, 258 pages, $ 22.95) is this season’s bestselling “crazy book.” Knapp’s dysfunction is treated with the same medical-replaces-moral paradigm that characterizes Wurtzel’s and Ryan’s books. Like Wurtzel, Knapp is eager to have her cake and eat it: She’s a pitiable alcoholic when explaining what a long row she has to hoe, but a perfectly competent member of society when totting up her achievements.
She describes herself as a “high-functioning alcoholic,” a term that suggests she might not be an alcoholic at all: It’s almost as if she’s anointed herself an alcoholic in order to be taken seriously as someone saying something new. Like Wurtzel, Knapp isn’t dysfunctional. And like Wurtzel, Knapp sometimes seems merely braggadocious. She is basically telling us that she can do all the challenging work of being an intellectual with one hand tied behind her intellectual back. Comparing her own reminiscences with those of a lower- middle-class alcoholic friend, she writes: “Her story was a miniseries, an epic drama spanning generations, something that would star Brad Pitt and Julia Ormond. Mine was more along the lines of a John Updike novel, or a short story by John Cheever.” Cheever and Updike may have been familiar with Knapp’s classy Cambridge upbringing, but their fiction deals with a variety of people going through a variety of experiences.
These new memoirs don’t. They focus narrowly, even exclusively, on childhood and the part of young adulthood in which children are still heavily under the influence of their parents. It’s as if young Americans today felt that they were most themselves when they were living under parental dominion. Knapp’s parents are so obviously kindhearted, if inexpressive, that it feels like a cheap narrative trick when she blames them for giving her a misleading, heartless upbringing: “Growing up, I never heard my parents say ‘I love you,’ not to us and not to each other. I never heard them fight either. That’s something else I picked up as a kid: adults didn’t have conflicts, or, if they did, they kept them to themselves, closeting any hints of distress behind closed doors.” Anyone who believes into adulthood that adults don’t have conflicts is unlikely to offer us a literary work as rich as even the worst novels, which are sustained by conflict.
This desperate desire to blame the adults is what dooms Jill Ciment’s Half a Life (Crown, 210 pages, $ 23). The story of a Jewish Canadian immigrant who becomes a “bad girl” in the San Fernando Valley seems oddly promising, considering Ciment holds three archetypal modern occupations — public-opinion pollster, porn model, and “artist” who never actually produces anything. Such a resume suggests Ciment might have something to tell us about the anomie of the shopping-mall world we live in. But Half a Life is not the book it thinks it is. It purports to tell the story of a family never given a chance by its rotten, domineering father. But Ciment seems not to realize that the man she depicts is merely a feckless, nervous, but ultimately quite decent fellow. The real story is that of Ciment’s mother, the supposed hero of the book, who uses her rapport with her children to split the family in two and drive Mr. Ciment into a studio apartment, the better to accommodate her desire to hang around in singles bars. Similarly, Wurtzel gets high on cocaine and trashes “my dad, who I really wanted to call just then, if only to remind him that he still owed me my allowance from the four years in high school when I couldn’t find him.”
The authors typically bear the same relation to their parents that they do to their illnesses: They have problems because of these wretched people and accomplishments despite them. Only Wurtzel gets at the central moral cop-out here; at one point, she locates the source of her unhappiness in “the scariness of being an adult.”
The scariness of being an adult is, in part, the subject of Suzanne E. Berger’s Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin, 216 pages, $ 22. 95). Despite its teasing title (bachelors, hold on to your wallets!), this is a joyless, morally obtuse tale, the story of a Boston-area poet who throws out her back picking up one of her children and is bedridden for upwards of a year. Horizontal Woman resembles Wurtzel’s and Ryan’s books in that no doctor seems actually able to find anything wrong with Suzanne Berger. But back pain is Berger’s ticket to “identity”:
Differently placed on the floor, on the couch, on the ground, I appeared fallen, an outsider to be stared at. Strangely disabled, not suffering from visible damage, I did not fit in any category of illness, or “handicap,” and so I was Other. Becoming Other, I could partly experience the reverberations of physical, emotional, and ethnic difference perceived as oddness in our culture, which favors the usual and the robust.
Actually, it’s hard to think of a more diametrically wrong view of “our culture.” At least if you take these books as evidence.
No book is more frequently cited as an antecedent to the new spate of memoirs than Frank Conroy’s 1967 coming-of-age narrative Stop-Time. Stop-Time describes Conroy’s travels with a flighty mother and her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Conroy’s passage through several excellent and third-rate high schools, his discovery of books, his flight to Europe, and the launching of his career as a writer. And yet Stop-Time is much closer in spirit to the three centuries of novel-writing that preceded it than it is to today’s memoirs. Conroy gave his book an organizing principle beyond measuring his emotions and impulses and assigning blame or praise for them. StopTime is about journeys, about people in motion.
They are always humorously and adventurously rendered, and that makes the book picaresque in the manner of Tom Jones, as when Conroy races through a train station to avoid being sent to reform school:
A reckless, all-out dash through the station, astonished faces falling behind one by one, frozen by my speed. It was like running through a crowd of cardboard cutouts. I swerved, jumped, and dodged between them to the doors, slipping past the outstretched arms of a guard into the open roar of the street, into the twilight and the high, vaulting sky. Running headlong through the streets I felt my limbs go wild with freedom.
Conroy’s book shows that a memoir of dysfunction does not have to be a braggart’s exercise void of moral considerations.
Indeed, even out-and- out mental illness can be presented with Conroy’s clarity. Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 Girl, Interrupted is a “crazy book” about genuine craziness, a minimalist story of a teenager’s two-year stay in a mental hospital for ” borderline personality disorder.” And yet from a distance of twenty-five years, Kaysen takes a pull-up-your-socks attitude to her time as a mental patient. In fact, she does not believe she was mentally ill: “For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison,” she writes of herself and her fellow inmates:
As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.
In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.
Kaysen’s book features none of the gloating I’ve-been-there,-so-I-know moral superiority we pick up in Knapp and Berger and Ryan.
And there are memoirs being written today in the craftsmanlike tradition of Stop-Time, works so different from the “crazy books” that they almost feel like they were written in a different century. Novelist Mark Salzman’s Lost in Place (Random House, 224 pages, $ 22) is the story of a precocious teenage misfit in suburban Connecticut obsessed first with kung fu, then with marijuana. Salzman drifts from doting admiration of his social-worker, amateur-astronomer father, into self- loathing surliness, and finally into an adult friendship. His parents are not just a constant excuse and a pretext. In fact, they’re not even constant: They’re living, breathing human beings who change for the better and for the worse. And Salzman’s narrative has an extreme modesty that makes it perhaps the funniest coming-of-age story since Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs. ” Although it may be true these days that you can’t throw a rock in America without hitting a psychic or a Tibetan lama or a yoga instructor, in 1973 becoming a Zen student in Ridgefield qualified as extraordinary,” Salzman writes.
Then there was kung fu. From the movies and television programs I saw, I gathered that one of the key benefits of being a Buddhist monk was that you could beat the crap out of bad people without getting emotionally involved or physically tired. You were always on the emotional high ground because you were a pacifist, but if someone was foolish enough to throw a punch at you anyway, surprise! Kung fu turned you into a cross between Sugar Ray Robinson, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mahatma Gandhi. My hope was to impose this surprise on at least one of the eighth-grade assholes who used to pick on me for being tiny, polite to adults and a cellist in a youth orchestra.
Later, when he grows more serious about his Chinese, young Mark makes his first attempt to speak it in public, walking up to a cluster of old men and blurting out, “Tongzhi! Nimen hao ma!” (“Comrades! How are you?”), only to discover moments later that they are fire-breathing anti-Communists of the Overseas Chinese Kuomintang Association.
Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (Viking Penguin, 320 pages, $ 11.95) also has little in common with the run of “crazy books.” Karr’s book is again the tale of coming of age in a deranged family, and something far more: a Texas gothic version of The Decameron or The Thousand and One Nights. Karr’s parents and family are, for all their gigantic flaws, inspired storytellers, and their narrative set pieces make the book not just a coming-of-age story but also the evocation of a Texas of the late 50s and 60s that has not only been lost but repudiated.
Which is not to say that her childhood is any less catastrophic than the worst childhood a “crazy book” writer could imagine. Karr’s father is an angry, drunken union-radical redneck, her mother a drunk herself, seven times married and with a lively strain of nymphomania. Rather than divorce his wife, Mary’s uncle power-saws his house in two, drags the two halves apart with a truck, boards up the exposed walls, and plants a row of trees between the two half-houses. Clearly, Karr was surrounded by nuts. And her own initiation into adulthood — particularly into sex, by her babysitter in Colorado — is nearly as gruesome as Ryan’s.
The difference is that Karr, like a good novelist, sees human relationships as dynamic, while Ryan, like a clinician, sees them as static. Karr’s father is riddled with disappointment — disappointment that he had daughters, not sons. When he retires, he himself turns into a shots-and-beers-for-breakfast alcoholic and lashes out at her constantly. Yet Mary stays in touch with her frequently incoherent mother and returns to Texas to care for her father during a revoltingly evoked five years between a massive stroke and a painful death. (What a description of bedsores!) The relationship of father and daughter is constantly changing, and Karr discovers that it is far more complicated than any simple condemnation:
All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. . . . It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters.
The fact that Karr is able to make peace with her mother after her father’s death suggests she understands that people possess free will, that human beings are more complicated than animals in the zoo.
Contrast Karr’s relationship with her parents to Ryan’s in Secret Life. Karr has a lousy childhood, Ryan is a victim. Karr has a problem, Ryan has a condition. Karr has a character, Ryan has a status. While Karr’s book, too, is a memoir, she writes out of the richer, individualistic ideology that reigned in the heyday of the novel.
The anti- individualist ethos of Ryan and most other memoirists — that emotional difficulties and personal misfortunes are an essential component not of one’s life story but of one’s permanent identity — also amounts to an ideology. If you link it with the sense of calling that Knapp feels about her drinking, or Berger feels about her back injury, or Wurtzel feels about her manic depression, or Ryan feels about his sex addiction, this ideology begins to look more and more like a religion.
It is all-explaining. It is deterministic. It posits a force that binds us together and determines our fates, even if that force — or Higher Power — is nothing more than molecular biology and Mendelian genetics. It possesses a rite of absolution: the Twelve-Step program. As it appears in these memoirs, its theology combines radical egalitarianism, the mass popularity of therapy, identity politics, a distrust of the family, and freak-show-type voyeurism masquerading as social concern. The literal shamelessness of these works should not be mistaken for self-deprecation: By telling us they’re crazy, these modern memoirists are telling us they’re holy.
At the very least, we can draw from these tales some lessons beloved of all religions at all times. These are all stories of how the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. They are evidence that bad, boring people spring from bad, boring families. They suggest that the worst thing about addictions and complexes is that they breed in their sufferers a tedious solipsism. They prove that the ego is a prison. That’s what our modern memoirists have to say, even if it’s not what they think they have to say.
By Christopher Caldwell
