8 posts tagged “memoir”
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, BILL BRYSON
In which Bill Bryson shows that he wasn't a complete little turd of an abomination when he was growing up in the Iowa of the 1950's. Psych!
I'm not entirely sure why I keep reading Bill Bryson. He's smug, priveleged, and snide without the saving graces of being particularly funny. Also, I finish every book wanting to punch him in throat. The problem is, great men have mulled over the peculiarities of growing up in the 1950's, and Bryson is not one of them. He covers the same topics (pornography; Our Friend, the Atom!; bad food; refrigerators), uses the same humor (Nyuk nyuk nyuk, you see the joke is that hiding underneath a desk WOULDN'T protect you from 500 megatons of sheer atomic power. Nyuk nyuk nyuk, that's what makes it so FUNNY!), and tops everything off with a thin, tenuous sheen of racism, sexism, and classism. Nothing is overt, but it's a bit like spending fifteen excruciating afternoons with your Sassy Grandma who doesn't understand why you keep on wincing when she uses the word "coloreds." This is made all the more worse by Bryson's acid nostalgia for the Good Old Days Where We Would Party At Woolworth's and his hackneyed insights into the Cheapness of Modern Day Life.
Otherwise, Bryson is a reliable mash-up of Dave Barry, Dave Sedaris, and Debbie Downer - and a caricature of Stuff White People Like. Dear Bill, Let It Go. Also, come here, I've got to do something with your throat.
* PROTIP, BILL. Your repeated claims that the Blacks That I Knew were so Athletic. And Strong. And Great at Sports. And Did I Mention That I Once Shook Hands with a Black Man? Does NOT make you sound any more racially sensitive. Please stop, lest thou protest too much.
Hijinks: (1) Boisterous or rambunctious carryings-on; (2) Carefree antics or horseplay. SYN: Wodehouse, PG.
Galahad has neither the same efficient, godly gravitas of Jeeves (who must have been some breed of genie in his past life) nor the good-humored, drink-sodden cluelessness of Bertie, but he'll do. He'll do. Galahad at Blandings is light, frothy, and funny. My only complaint is that Wodehouse sometimes lets his pen get the best of him, meaning that we occasionally have to trod through pages of something resembling Stephen Fry's 'The Letter' before we can reach the simple conclusion that Galahad is, in fact, sitting on a comfortable armchair and pretty surprised. But excessive floridity aside, Wodehouse is still very, very funny, and I appreciate his profound underlying message of SISTERS = SUXXX!!!
In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.
Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.
Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).
Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.
*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting
Me Talk Pretty One Day; David Sedaris
A collection of David Sedaris' essays first detailing his aggressively alternative lifestyle on the Eastern Seaboard, then detailing his aggressively alternative lifestyle in France.
Somewhere, I am just not Getting David. While it's difficult for me to pinpoint any major, hateful flaw in his writing, his essays seem to just rub me the wrong way. I'll blame his tone. He's funny - but not as funny as he thinks he is. He's clever - but not as clever as he thinks he is. And he is charmingly different - but ...who wouldn't be after all that careful calculation.
Sedaris is above all things calculating and, at his worst, manipulative. He wields an iron, obsessive-compulsive hold over all of his anecdotes, hammering them out until they reach their full, quirky potential, but his work strains under his grip. Sedaris comes off as a little too arch, a little too ironic, and a little too pretentious to lose himself in full, earnest laughter. Furthermore, Sedaris' dedication to being "different" is at first charming, then twee, then aggravating. By the end, I wanted to kick him in the dick. His interest in the grotesque and the girlish is a too flawless and energetic, and, much like the book as a whole, seems to overshoot his goal.
(However, let's end on the note that I my entire goal in life is to be a contrarian. Me Talk Pretty One Day is nowhere as loathsome as I make it sound and some bits are hilarious. Seriously, I can be charmed by any foreign missteps in English.)
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness; William Styron
Ostensibly: William Styron's memoir on his struggle with depression. Actually: why William Styron should keep his day job and never, ever dabble in scientific writing.
I initially heard about Darkness Visible though an article in the New Orleans Times Picayune; the article was about columnist Chris Rose's plunge into depression, and it was written with the mix of earnestness, honest self-analysis, and self-deprecating humor that makes for perfect navel-gazing. After spending a mostly vegetative and dismal summer in the armpit of New England (also known as Providence), I too felt what I believed to be the pangs of existential crises and reached out to Styron for comfort. We could cry, loathe, eat marshmallows, and get fat together. It would be wonderful! And deep!
So imagine my surprise when Styron's memoir was less a deep and soulful search but instead a grab-bag of pop psychology and badly butchered neuroscientific theory. To put it simply, I came for emotional catharsis and heart-rending empathy (see: the beginning half of The Bell Jar, Gary's hefty section in The Corrections, hysterical entries on LiveJournal), and all I got was this half-hearted, mealy-mouthed textbook on Bill Styron's brain. Personally, I blame Styron's lack of focus.
Darkness Visible breaks down as 40% puttering scientific theory, 50% exposition on what Styron will talk about but not now dude not now just wait like five minutes until I finish this Cinnabun, and 10% actual explanation. To make things worse, Styron puts the worst of all these elements into a great big blender and spews it out without any real organization. He sluggishly hops from topic to topic until nothing emerges except the most muddled timeline: Styron is depressed in Paris, depressed elsewhere, Styron grinds his ax against those that have Done Him Wrong, Styron enters treatment, and suddenly, Styron is happier than a fifteen year old boy at a titty bar.
Styron makes little room for searing descriptions of his struggle with depression and the gems are few and far between. His occasional anecdotes hit the wrong note and seem more cranky and petty than honest and sympathetic. His interest in the scientific theory is half-hearted - Styron seems much more at home cherry-picking explanations to seem like a reliable source. And he lacks any sort of commanding voice. In the end, I was left high and dry. Darkness Visible is meandering at best, and completely unwilling to devote any amount of real energy into probing into the depths of its subject.
The library's copy of Angela's Ashes is dog-eared beyond repair. That's how I roll. (PS: This man has never met a conjunction he didn't like.)
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. [pg. 11]
The rain drove us into the church - our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers, and candles.
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain. [pg. 12]
Not until late December did they take Male to St. Paul's Church to be baptized and named Francis after his father's father and the lovely saint of Assisi. Angela wanted to give him a middle name, Munchin, after the patron saint of Limerick but Malachy said over his dead body. No son of his would have a Limerick name. It's hard enough going through life with one name. Sticking on middle names was an atrocious American habit and there was no need for a second name when you're christened after the man from Assisi. [pg. 17]
This maddened Malachy again and he wanted to jump at the priest for calling the child some class of a Protestant. The priest said, Quiet, man, you're in God's house, and when Malachy said, God's house, my arse, he was thrown out on Court Street because you can't say arse in God's house. [pg. 18]
The ship pulled away from the dock. Mam said, That's the Statue of Liberty and that's Ellis Island where all the immigrants came in. Then she leaned over the side and vomited and the wind from the Atlantic blew it all over us and other happy people admiring the view. Passengers cursed and ran, seagulls came from all over the harbor and Mam hung limp and pale on the ship's rail. [pg. 46]
The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. [pg. 113]
He'll go to the cinema the rest of his life, sit next to girls from lanes and do dirty things like an expert. He loves his mother but he'll never get married for fear he might have a wife in and out of the lunatic asylum. What's the use of getting married when you can sit in cinemas and do dirty things with girls from lanes who don't care what they do because they already did it with their brothers. [pg. 117]
The boys in Leamy's don't want Fintan praying for them and they threaten to give him a good fong in the arse if they catch him praying for them. He says he wants to be a saint when he grows up, which is ridiculous because you can't be a saint till you're dead. He says our grandchildren will be praying to his picture. One big boy says, My grandchildren will piss on your picture, and Fintan just smiles. His sister ran away to England when she was seventeen and everyone knows he wears her blouse at home and curls his hair with hot iron tongs every Saturday night so that he'll look gorgeous at Mass on Sunday. If he meets you going to Mass he'll say, Isn't my hair gorgeous, Frankie? He loves that word, gorgeous, and no other boy will ever use it. [pg. 156]
She slams the door in our faces. We don't know what to do till Billy Campbell says, We'll go back to St. Joseph's and pray that from now on everyone in Mickey Spellacy's family will die in the middle of the summer and he'll never get a day off from school for the rest of his life.
One of our prayers is surely powerful because next summer Mickey himself is carried off by the galloping consumption and he doesn't get a day off from school and that will surely teach him a lesson. [pg. 172]
Grandma is there to help and she says, That's right, no hope in heaven for the infant that's not baptized.
Bridey says it would be a hard God that would do the likes of that.
He has to be hard, says Grandma, otherwise you'd have all kinds of babies clamorin' to get into heaven, Protestants an' everything, an' why should they get in after what they did to use for eight hundred years? [pg. 182]
He tilts over on the chair and farts and smiles to himself and I know now I'm going to get better because a doctor would never fart in the presence of a dying boy. [pg. 192]
I feel sad over the bad thing but I can't back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can't say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head. [pg. 210]
'Tis my son, sir. He has two bad eyes.
Oh, by God, he does, woman. They're desperate-looking eyes altogether. They look like two rising suns. The Japs could use him on their flag, ha ha ha. [pg. 226]
I get under the cows and squirt the milk into Alphie's mouth till he's full and throws it up. Farmers chase us till they see how small Michael and Alphie are. Malachy laughs at the farmers. He says, Hit me now with the child in me arms. [pg. 247]
And Mrs. Purcell says, Do you know what, Frankie?
What, Mrs. Purcell?
That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman. [pg. 275]
Everything is damp and musty and Laman Griffin snores over our heads. There are no stairs in this house and that means no angel ever on the seventh step.
But I'm twelve going on thirteen and I might be too old for angels. [pg. 278]
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's a fortnight since my last confession.
And what have you done since then, my child?
I hit my brother, I went on the mooch from school, I lied to my mother.
Yes, my child, and what else?
I- I- I did dirty things, Father.
Ah, my child, was that with yourself or with another or with some class of beast?
Some class of beast. I never heard of a sin like that before. This priest must be from the country and if he is he's opening up new worlds to me. [pg. 293]
He said it was very awkward hopping up on the bike with his thing sticking out but if you cycle very fast and think of the sufferings of the Virgin Mary you'll go soft in no time. [pg. 315]
Frank McCourt lives in Limerick, Ireland, dire poverty, and to tell the tale. His story is beautifully written, and you fat American's with your nine course meals and NAAFA will never be able to match his accomplishments.
The Ireland of Frank McCourt has never seen a leprechaun in its entire tormented 800 year history, but it has seen sorrow and poverty and the English. McCourt's Ireland is desperately proud, desperately poor, desperately pious, and just plain desperate; without a dependable navigator, Ireland is all uncomfortable sob-story and weepy heart, and Angela's Ashes would read like 368 pages of a Feed the Children Marathon, but with McCourt at the steering wheel Ireland gets the opportunity to be bittersweet and funny.
McCourt elevates this memoir from simply another book capitalizing on another depressing childhood to a story that is bitterly funny. It takes a special kind of narrative voice to move a memoir - to make it rise above glurge and self-absorption, to make it readable and even fun - and McCourt has it in spades. Is he sometimes ineffective? Yes. Is he sometimes unsympathetic? Yes. Does he abuse run on sentences? Hell yes. But he always has a grip on the reader's attention, and has the dual gift of: (a) a subtle but hilarious sense of humor and (b) the ability to sometimes knock a sentence (or a sentence that is a paragraph long) out of the park. Furthermore, McCourt is grimly empty of self-pity which means his Limerick and all its people remain mean, cruel, capriciously kind, and very, very complex.
All these elements put-together means that I am of course thrilled with this book and will use words like provocative, touching, heart-rending, and beautiful to prove it. I will also molest McCourt's precise prose without shame and try to pillage his style. This will not work and I will throw myself into the sciences and alcoholism.
ADDENDUM: Ok, so the book sort of sagged towards the end. The thing is, with a memoir there's not much to keep you chugging along. And with a memoir about abject poverty instead of, say, Roald Dahl's smashing times with the RAF, it's not so much a question of AND THEN DID FRANK RISE OUT OF THE SLUMS AND KILL HEINRICH HIMMLER WITH A JET PLANE but NOW WHAT KIND OF TERRIBLE THIRD WORLD INFECTION DID FRANK PICK UP? This, admittedly, is not enough to keep my miniscule attention span. Also, the end of the book has a lot more sex (or the 'excitement' as McCourt likes to call it), which I would normally cheer on but: (a) first of all, the man calls it the 'excitement' which is about as randy and exciting as a woman referring to her coochie as a 'flower', no; and (b) I had the misfortune of looking at the book jacket and saw McCourt's craggy 60 year old face peering at me through his enormous bushy eyebrows and the thought of him hooking up on a couch pretty much ruined everything. In short, McCourt's way of describing sex pretty much has all the appeal of your Grandpa talking about the nice O-ree-ental woman he met and bedded during his tour of Asia against the Japs and Hitler.
This section is long and really pretty irrelevant towards my overall enjoyment of the book, but STILL IT WAS BOTHERING ME.
A WARNING: I SPENT THE LAST 200 PAGES OF THIS BOOK CHANTING "KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF" TO A BOY WHO HAD BEEN RAPED BY A 30 YEAR OLD PEDOPHILE. SO. YOU KNOW WHERE I STAND IN TERMS OF OVERWHELMING SYMPATHY, ETC.
Augusten Burroughs' biological parents are headcases, so he is shuttled off to live at his mother's psychiatrist's house. There, he has a crazy, traumatic childhood that is much, much crazier and more traumatic than yours. And he has a published memoir to prove it.
To understand Running with Scissors, think PostSecret, think Todd Browning's Freaks, think of 120 Days of Sodom, think Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul, think of every English major with a hard on for David Sedaris. Ready? So am I.
Running with Scissors promises a freak show, and does it deliver. Scat, rampant infidelity, drugs, preteen groping, run-of-the-mill pedophilia, and just a whole lot of humpin'. All that happens throughout the course of Burroughs' memoir is unbelievable for the most part, but it's as entertaining as any spectacular trainwreck. In addition to the list above, think carnie geek.
Burroughs is in it for the long haul and a Pulitzer. Not content with dragging out his freakish -- let's not get timid here; and besides, Burroughs wears that word like a Purple Heart -- backstory, Burroughs wants us to acknowledge his story of amazing triumph! But he's more, much more than that. He's also got a dark, rapier wit! And what better way of expressing that except for a dry, ironic voice? Keep reaching for that rainbow, starshine.
Now, it's hard to pin the right kind of tone for a memoir. Not too detached, but not overly weepy, self-aware but not self-obsessed, and always charming. Dahl could do it, Burroughs can't. He's cloying when he wants to be moving, archly superior instead of reminscent, almost constantly self pitying -- not without cause, but that doesn't make the reading any smoother -- and never very sympathetic. He wants his humor to be blacker-than-black, but instead, comes off as over-aggressive, embellishing a story that is powerful on its own merits. His attempts at clever are so desperate, that they just come off as sleazy and manipulative. It all comes to a head in his tacky, watery-eyed, chic-techique ending, where he comes to recognize his talents as a person and a writer. All thanks to his best friend and adopted sister (read: desperate fag-hag). The orchestra swells.
And what do you call this act?
This is the shock-jock of all memoirs. If you like it, you'll like it for the twisted memoirs. If you like it for, god help me, Burroughs' narration or the people, I will take a torch to your body. So read it for the anecdotes, wash off the grime from Burroughs' perverse narrative voice, and kindly underline a beautiful adage from your sweet old grandmother: shut your fucking mouth before you make yourself look stupid.
In which David Sedaris waxes lyrical about his family, friends, and existential angst, all while keeping a snappy postmodern tone. Also known as: David Sedaris writes the college essays of your wet dreams.
THE GOOD: Don't let the hipster hype fool you. Sedaris actually has a pretty keen sense of humor, and even better he's got a great arsenal of stories. While some of the beginning shorts are pretty common, Sedaris is lucky because he has one of the most dysfunctional families in the U.S. And he mines them for gold! And he's surprisingly good at it! So yes! He's got, on the whole, a wonderful narrative voice - when it's not strained, something that I'll get to later - and a beautiful train-wreck pedigree, which meant that I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. That's not saying much, but hey! I didn't want to burn it! And it was still better than the Da Vinci Code!
THE BAD: Remember when I said Sedaris had a good voice when it wasn't strained? Well, it is strained. The tragedy is that except for a few exceptions, Sedaris doesn't think you'll really get, dig, understand his wild tales unless he wrings out every bit of heartwrenching emotion from them. Which makes what should be a great set of anecdotes read like... well... Chicken Soup for the Hipster Soul. Take for example, Exhibit A: Sedaris describes stuffing his gawp with disgusting Halloween Candy to avoid sharing said candy with creepy, possibly Mormon, neighbors. Now that in and of itself is good. It's solid. And it's funny! Gold stars for everyone!
Too bad Sedaris goes on to ruin the entire thing when he builds tiny, touching anecdote into a cosmic screed about the heart of darkness... and Hershey's. OH I WAS SELFISH, LIKE ALL HUMANS WERE SELFISH, AND THE CANDY WAS DELICIOUS YET IT BURNED BLOO BLOO BLOO. BACK ME UP ON THE VIOLIN, HOLMES.
So yes, Sedaris has a tendency to... overplay his stories. I wish that he'd have the confidence in his readers to let us read into his writing on our own. His over-narration is invasive and annoying, to use polite words. And too often, he takes a beautiful anecdote and cheapens it with his hipster trash emotional shit. It's like watching a beautiful butterfly of an essay turn into.... a college app.
SO HEY, SISTER. Stop the poignancy. Just give us the sweet stories and the sweet narrative voice.
