What If?

Lorrie Moore, pictured above, discusses memoirs for the New York Review of Books.

From the article...

Despite having some sympathy with this idea, or with caustic wit, or with avoiding writing, one can nonetheless assume that there are good reasons to embark on a memoir: the world and the self collide in a particular way that only you, or mostly you, can narrate; you would like a preemptive grab at controlling the discourse. For instance: Are you Winston Churchill? Are you Nixon in China? Are you Pat Nixon in China? Did you compose Nixon in China? (Its composer, John Adams, has in fact written an engaging memoir.) Are you connected to a fascinating and underexplored chapter in history in any manner whatever? Are you a professional storyteller with a beautiful prose style and some autobiography begging for reportage? Are you a trenchant thinker with incisive analytical powers? Do you have a social cause you would like to advocate strenuously? And if none of the above, are you Brigitte Bardot?

If not, wherefore the memoir? Are you helpless before your own life, and unsure of how to write the autobiographical novel that might exploit or explore or redream it into art? Do you have a case of what the literary critic Michael Wood has called “catastrophe envy”? Have you drunk the Reality Hunger Kool-Aid of David Shields’s current “anti-novel jihad” and joined him in chiding the limping dog of fiction as if it were an unfortunate habit of lying, an omnivorous pornography of the real, instead of the struggling but majestic thing that it is? Are you coming into the house of narrative through the back door because the back door is where the money is? Are you prone to what a recent article by Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times Book Review suggested might be the “oversharing” of inconsequential you? “Unremarkable lives” should go “unremarked upon, the way God intended,” Genzliger wrote, in what reads like a reversal of the final lines of Middlemarch—George Eliot on a perversely moody or perhaps drink-addled day.