Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that on the day that we’re about to swear in Samuel Alito, the man responsible for this statement: ”Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?”(and a black girl child at that), that Coretta Scott King would choose to leave the planet? Does no one else see this as a Very Bad Sign?
The memoir brouhaha continues to niggle at me — my hunch is that it’s gained such cultural traction because it’s a symptom of a larger problem that America is having with telling and recognizing the truth. In a year in which the American Dialect Society votes that “Truthiness” is the “word of the year” should it come as any surprise to us that we’re also beset by an avalanche of literary hoaxes?
“Truthiness” the ADS website declares, “refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, ‘I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.’”
James Frey isn’t the only practitioner of truthiness — where he preferred to think of himself not as a spoiled rich addict from the suburbs of Minneapolis but as a hard ass, a macho guy prepared to “throw down” at a moment’s notice, the sort of guy who could stand not one, but two root canals without anesthesia — he didn’t come to his truthiness in a vacuum. He lives in a nation that preferred to think that the Iraqi people would welcome invasion of their sovereign nation by a foreign superpower not with insurgency but with flowers and parades. He lives in a nation that prefers to believe that oil will last forever and that we are entitled to all the world’s goodies. He lives in a nation that prefers to believe that just because the President says he’s only doing illegal wiretaps on “evildoers” that he’s neither breaking the law nor violating the Constitutional right to privacy of us all.
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I’ve written about memoir before, and the recent James Frey brouhaha has gotten me thinking about it all again. I actually haven’t done much work on my book these past couple of months because the avalanche of freelance work I picked up when I thought I might want to quit my job at the Big Corporation, along with a slough of deadlines at said day job have all had me up to my eyeballs in Other People’s Work. But watching the Wrath of Oprah sort of freaked me out. I thought I’d enjoy it more than I did — frankly that book was crap — riddled with cliche and worn-out macho posturing — to say nothing of how damaging his assertion is that addiction can be kicked without anyone else’s help — having grown up in a family riddled with alcoholics, most of them asserting to their grave that they don’t have a problem, it’s nothing they can’t handle — well, let’s just say that Frey’s whole macho-boy routine didn’t really resonate with me.
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Okay, here’s what I forgot — if you’ve been writing and editing on a computer screen all day, it is very difficult to read anything else in the evening. It was a long week in the trenches — life at the Big Corporation is kind of hectic, and I was finishing a freelance copyediting job at the same time. Taking on all these freelance jobs while working full time might not have been the smartest idea I every had, but at least I’ll have enough money to renovate my shameful bathroom when I get to the other side (there wasn’t ever a shower in there before, and so 100 years of paint is peeling off the walls, to say nothing of the plywood patch under the toilet where the floor was all rotten — like I said, needs help).
However, I did manage to finish one book this week, Julia Briggs’ Virginia Woolf : An Inner Life. I know, I know, you’re thinking another Virginia Woolf biography? My favorite of the Woolf bios is the one by Hermione Lee, but what I loved about the Julia Briggs book is that it focuses on Woolf’s work. Too often the events of her life take over consideration of the work but Briggs, a British Woolf scholar, moves from book to book outlining the artistic and intellectual problems at hand, and how Woolf addressed them. Probably not the bio to start with if you don’t already know Woolf, but if you’re familiar with the novels, or with Woolf’s diaries and the delightfully witty (and sometimes bitchy) letters, then I think you’ll really enjoy this in-depth discussion of how Woolf’s artistic project developed and grew across a lifetime.
I’m also about half way through Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born and I’m loving it. I had a meltdown at Border’s a few weeks ago. I was standing in the fiction section (don’t get me started on the essays and biographies shelved erroneously in fiction) when I realized that it now seems women are only allowed to write books with hot pink covers featuring high-heeled shoes. What is the deal? Are women now only allowed to write chick lit? I couldn’t find one serious book by a woman shelved face out — not Gordimer, not Didion’s astonishing new memoir (which was shelved in fiction, much to my annoyance) not even any younger women writes like A.L. Kennedy or Mary Gaitskill. Now, it’s not that I don’t enjoy a light read once in a while, I do — but the overwhelming impression I got standing in the stacks that day was that if you’re a woman, you’d better be writing light social comedies that all end (as a true comedy should) with a wedding. Gack. What I’m loving about the Powell is that it’s a portrait of an unredeemed social climber — what seems so revolutionary at the moment is that Powell isn’t comdemning Amanda, nor is she redeeming her. Would a writer be able to publish a book these days that neither condemns nor redeems a character who isn’t “nice” to begin with? The curse of the writing programs — the notion that every work of fiction must have an “epiphany” — that every character must have a moment or “realization” in which clarity is bestowed on him or her. What I love about Powell, and Elizabeth Bowen, and Graham Greene is that their goal seems to be to portray human complexity, not to flatten it out.
A little zen saying to start off the New Year. I had all sorts of good intentions for my week off — I had freelance projects on deck, and I really really really need to get back to the memoir, which I’ve neglected shamefully in the last couple of months as my “real” job at the Big Company has gotten way better, but also way busier.
But as I zoomed through the past couple of months, packing 3 jobs into every day, zinging from deadline to deadline, making them all but driving myself a little crazy in the process I wound up doing what I always do when I have too much work and am determined to get through it all. I got sick.
I could blame it on Nina’s Twins — we love them but they are our Little Vectors of Illness — infecting everyone in their path this holiday season with a particularly virulent head cold complete with a sort of sleeping-sickness component. However, I probably would have fought off the baby germs if I hadn’t been run down from working seven days a week for months. So, what did I do with my week off? A little work for the Big Company (to make up for some previous unforseen computer down time), some freelance copyediting, but mostly, a lot of sitting on the couch blowing my nose while watching old movies.
So, because it’s that time of year — a few resolutions:
So, those are the “resolutions” I’m thinking about as the calendar rolls over this year. Mostly I’d like to get more work done with less of that panicky feeling. “Never hurry. Never rest.” Pace oneself. Take time off to breathe. Turn off the stuff coming into one’s house. Read a book.