The idiots who run my English Department have somehow decided that I am the person to teach a seminar next semester in “Memoir writing.” (Okay, I made that decision, but that doesn’t mean I can defend it.) I’m familiar with a load of memoirs, but they’re mainly ones I’ve read for pleasure, mostly on literary topics–I’m sure there are many that I haven’t read or even heard of. Recommend me some that blew your socks off, and tell me a little bit about why they did, and I might put them on my syllabus.
The Tolstoy quote “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the main connector to my favorite modern memoirs.
The Glass Castleby Jeanette Walls- a gossip/fashion columnist, Walls grew up the child of an artist mom and a ne’er do well father who dreamed of one day building a mansion made of glass (hence the title). Both loved their children but neither could ever really be bothered to parent them. The opening chapter, set in the present when she began to write the memoir, involves meeting with her mom, then a couple of short steps up from a bag lady (and going through garbage) yet asking her daughter for money to get, of all things, a facelift.
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated by Alison Arngrim is that rarest of accomplishments: a (sorta kinda) celebrity memoir that is actually a great memoir on its own. Includes eccentric parents (her father was more-or-less openly gay when he married her mother and her mom is best known as the voice of Underdog and Casper the Friendly Ghost) and a villain (her sexually abusive brother, a troubled teen star), memories of the Little House on the Prairie set, and just candid observations from somebody you end up wishing was on your speed dial. She’s fitfully funny; you laugh even on pages when she talks about being molested as a child, and she doesn’t come across as bitter or as self-pitying at all. (Example: when she tells her father- a few years ago- that she has decided to go on Larry King and discuss the sexual abuse she endured from her brother he’s absolutely thrilled because she has an entire hour on a top rated interview program; the fact it’s about sexual abuse that occurred in his house doesn’t concern him.)
Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up in Polygamy and Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk are largely interchangeable but still good (I’d choose one or the other but not both) memoirs by Dorothy Allred Solomon. She was the 28th of 48 children of Rulon Allred, leader of an apostate Mormon polygamist cult who was eventually murdered by a rival cult leader. A very frank look at her family including both her likes and dislikes; she had a love-hate relationship with her father.
Interesting for a memoir class is that many years previously she had written her first memoir, In My Father’s House, that is nowhere near as frank. More of the main characters were still alive among other things, and she actually takes a much harder look at polygamy in recent years than she did at the time when she was closer to it. (Dorothy Solomon converted to mainstream Mormonism and has lived in a monogamous marriage since her teens but kept a relationship with her polygamous relatives; her mother and aunt were identical twins who were both married to her father.)
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers are two big bestsellers that have been much disputed by others who were there- Burroughs was sued by the family of the doctor he lived with and describes in the book for what they termed his libel and invasion of privacy, while Eggers’ sister had major issues with his book revealed on a blog. (She also later committed suicide; no idea the extent to which this is connected, if at all, to her brother’s book.) IMHO both Burroughs and Eggers come across as first order narcissists. For perspective it might be interesting to read Running With Scissors, in which Burroughs (born Christopher Robison) paints a scathing picture of his mother as a self absorbed mentally ill horror, and The Long Journey Home, his mother’s own memoir written almost a decade after his book became a bestseller.
Speaking of comparison-contrast, The McCourt Brothers both wrote memoirs: Frank’s Angela’s Ashes was by far the best and the bestselling, but it had two sequels (Tis and Teacher Man) and his brother Malachy also wrote of his impoverished Irish childhood but mostly his own adventures and experiences as a bar owner/actor/raconteur in NYC. Since so much is written of* Angela’s Ashes *especially I’ll skip it here.
Daddy’s Boy by Chris Elliot was a fictitious memoir that I read when it came out and thought was hysterical. Not sure if it’s aged well.
Continuing on Sampiro’s theme:
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. It fits into the alcoholism genre, but is actually a deeply felt exploration of the family in which she grew up and how it shaped her. It’s one of my favorite books, and I find myself returning to it frequently because she captures something about family dynamics that’s very true and hard to explain.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan. Another memoir of growing up with an alcoholic father, but with a really interesting twist – Mom supported the family by winning contests. It’s moving, funny and realistic even though it describes some very unusual circumstances.
One of the classics of the genre is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
You might also get an interesting discussion out Frederick Douglass’s works. He wrote three separate accounts of his life. Students could compare the way Douglass wrote about the same events in three different decades.
Stay away from the Autobiography of Mark Twain, unless it’s the Albert Bigelow Paine version. The one that came out last year is one of the most boring books ever leashed on the Earth and a prime example of how even great authors need an editor.
To round out the family, there’s also Look Me In the Eye, by Burroughs’s older brother John Elder Robinson. Robinson says in the book that he was out of the house before most of the events in Running With Scissors, so he doesn’t have much to say on that subject. But his story is interesting in its own right – Robinson has Asperger’s syndrome, which wasn’t diagnosed or even widely known about in the US until he was an adult, and he describes how he had a hard time understanding others growing up. He devoted himself to electronics and spent some time working with KISS and other rock bands before going to work in the toy industry and later starting his own business doing repair and maintenance on luxury cars.
Warning - pitching semi-personal material
I actually just helped record the audiobook for a really incredible memoir! Gathering Family: A Memoir of Jewish Immigration to America is a wonderful book and we’ve done a tour of several synagogues in CT giving readings from the memoir and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I highly recommend it and not just because I’m involved with the book but because the story is pretty fascinating.
[ul]Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking - a brilliant exercise in depicting the emotional reality of awful events[/ul]
[ul]Gillian Rose - Love’s Work: a Reckoning with Life - another deathbed book (she was dying of cancer) - very clear-eyed and moving.[/ul]
[ul]Paul Guest - One More Theory About Happiness - the story of how a poet ended up paralyzed and found peace (more or less).[/ul]
On a less gloomy note:
[ul]Joe Brainard - I Remember - an unconventional sort of poetic memoir (good for depicting how even a fairly uneventful life can lead to fascinating writing).[/ul]
[ul]Muriel Spark - Curriculum Vitae - very witty and dry, just a joy to read.[/ul]
[ul]Annie Dillard - For the Time Being - not precisely a memoir, but contains elements of life writing and I suspect students would find it inspiring and intriguing.[/ul]
Also gonna second the Caroline Knapp recommendation from up-thread.
Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi, if you’re OK with graphic novels on your syllabus. Both are great depictions of growing up in totalitarian Iran. They’re also personal accounts of growing up and adolescence in a more universal way – that anyone can relate to. They’re moving, funny, sad, and honest.
Another good graphic-novel memoir: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I’m not really a graphic-novel fan, so I was surprised at how much I liked it and how readable it was.
I had a fine list of good ones, and Sampiro has listed them all, so just read his list.
Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam. A memoir about a group of young men building rockets in a small coal mining town in West Virginia in the 50’s. The book has everything: coming of age, science, romance, friendship, labor disputes, small town politics. One of the best books I have read.
I think Living to tell the tale is the translation of Gabriel García Márquez’ memoirs, Vivir para contarla. I had to drop it at the time of his initiation to sex because it sounds just like my Gramps From Hell talking about his own, but it’s certainly a well-written book, and it’s from a different literary tradition than the ones proposed so far.
Worthwhile contemporary memoirs of non-dead authors:
Stephen Fry’s memoirs are absolutely fantastic. The second volume has just been released.
Similarly Clive James, which are superbly written and surprisingly moving, of which there are now several volumes.
Harpo Speaks is a great and fun read, and a good example of someone remaining optimistic in the face of adversity. You’ll also learn where one Doper got his board handle. You’ll have to explain to your students who all the celebrities mentioned were.
Groucho Marx’s autobiography is also very good.
Mel Blanc is another guy who wrote about coming up through the Great Depression with humor and optimism.
Frederik Pohl’s autobiography also covers the Great Depression, but more frankly and with less sunshine. He talks about his family not surrendering to poverty only because there was nobody to accept their surrender. He also writes about the “fool killer” that drives guys to do stupid dangerous things - many examples in the WWII era. Pohl’s one of the best SF authors and editors ever, but don’t hold that against him. His autobiography has the Best Title Ev-ah: “The Way the Future Was”.
One of the crucial distinctions I will draw is between “autobiographies” and “memoirs.” Not sure where the line is, but it’s there somewhere. I think it’s mainly in the selectiveness of memoir-writing, while a-bios tend to be all-inclusive, beginning-to-end, as-best-as-I-can type of things. Ain’t doing those, because that’s not what the course is, and they’re all damned long.
**One Train Later **by Andy Summers (of the Police) - a thoughtful, well-written look at the life of a journeyman guitarist who was in a bunch of interesting places but never made it, then caught lightning in a bottle with a next-generation punk/pop band.
Many of the theoretical discussions of the difference would suggest that a memoir is a “I was part of this and that historical event” kind of book (Henry Kissinger’s memoirs come to mind), whereas an autobiography is, indeed, an inclusive work that doesn’t restrict itself to the selective criteria of memoirs. So by restricting yourself to memoirs you’ll probably have a surfeit of war, politics, and other major historical things to work with. Is there a special reason for this self-limitation?
It would help if you could tell us a little more about the course’s conception: I’ve not taught memoirs, but we’ve gone through a lot of theoretical discussion at my university, and there’s a lot of different things you can do, and on the decision what you want to do depends what memoirs I would recommend.
Stephen King’s On Writing quickly became a classic. First part is a memoir, second part a manual on how to write, and there’s an appendix about his run-in with a van.
Roald Dahl’s Boy and Flying Solo are the two best books he ever wrote.
Beverly Cleary’s A Girl from Yamhill and *My Own Two Feet[/i\ are very good.
Ah yeah, Bit of a Blur by Alex James (bass player for Blur) is another pop memoir that’s well worth reading. By all accounts he’s a dreadful shit in person, but he’s a really talented writer.