Editor’s Corner

May 15, 2009

The Perils and Promise of Memoir

By Constance Hale

We at the Digest are rarely unanimous about submissions we receive, but “The Monster Inside My Son” by Ann Bauer elicited uniform praise for its artful embedding of one narrative within another, its painful honesty, its tackling of the thorny subject of autism, and its understated and eloquent voice. Then the argument began.

“This is very well rendered,” one of us said, “but is it journalism?”

More questions tumbled out: Do powerful personal stories, powerfully told, deserve inclusion in a digest of nonfiction? When an essay lacks evidence of reporting, does it qualify as journalism? When the writer is a principal protagonist, rather than a neutral observer, does the story fall within the literature of fact? In a new journalistic ecology in which anyone can write about anything and put it up on the Web, can we assume that traditional standards of verification have been brought to bear?

Published on Salon.com, Bauer’s story is a wrenching account of a mother’s journey as her 21-year-old son “evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage.” And violent.

The dramatic tension is drawn out, the narrator able to pack deep emotion into spare sentences (After her son “picked me up and threw me across the room,” Bauer notes, “I had three broken ribs and a bit of damage to my liver that made my doctor fret.”)

Although Bauer had done research and reporting for her piece, she tells us that in the end she and her editor decided to let her “simply [tell] my story, with all of its darkness and questions, and let readers take from it what they would.”

We looked for examples of how others have blended reporting and writing to uncover the hard truths of autism. Among the strong third-person, conventionally reported narratives was a 2004 story about Asperger’s Syndrome in The New York Times by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Harmon, included as "Another Great Read" to highlight the differences between first- and third-person approaches. In "An Anthropologist on Mars," written for The New Yorker in 1993, Oliver Sacks profiles Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism who holds a Ph.D. in animal science and teaches at Colorado State University. In 1986, Grandin co-wrote Emergence: Labeled Autistic, her first-person account of struggling to exist as an autistic person in the world. (She has published several other books since.) And we were impressed with a WNYC story by a 17-year-old radio journalist about the difficulty of caring for her autistic brother.

Which brings us back to memoir. In the end, where do we come out on the question of whether memoir qualifies as narrative journalism? At our most expansive, we allow journalists to move into the minds of their subjects, though we still expect a process of fact-checking. If the role of narrative journalism is to report on the whole of the human experience—to explore the human condition—memoir certainly belongs.


3 Responses to The Perils and Promise of Memoir
Roy Peter Clark says:
June 19, 2009 at 2:47pm
I agree that there are, to borrow terms from constitutional law, both loose constructionists and strict constructionists in the memoir game, and their antagonism can be as virulent as an argument over a supreme court nominee. I have argued, rather impotently, that what we have here is not a failure to communicate, but two discrete, if not always discreet, genres: the nonfiction memoir and the literary memoir.

I also get a little frustrated by the unwillingness of certain members of the memoirati to recognize a simple distinction: distortion by intent; and distortion by the natural failures of memory. When Annie Dillard wrote about the cat with the bloody footprints at the beginning of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it wasn't a failure of memory. She admitted in public to having borrowed the scene from a student. Way out of bounds. If, on the other hand, I'm trying to remember an important moment from my childhood, I'll render it the best way I can, even though I'm sure that if we could travel back in time it might look very different.

I think it is unethical for a writer to write something he or she knows to be untrue and try to pass it off as true to the reader. Transparency is the antidote.
Constance Hale says:
June 18, 2009 at 12:14pm
Ed Lambeth, a Nieman Fellow in 1968 and Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Missouri sent a comment by email:

Walt Harrington, former Washington Post magazine writer and now a senior faculty member at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, edited a book in 2005 that includes a deeply engaging chapter by Mary Kay Blakely, “To Seem Is Not to Be.” It appears in THE BEHOLDER'S EYE, A COLLECTION OF AMERICA'S FINEST PERSONAL JOURNALISM by Grove Press. Among many, many virtues of Blakely’s narrative is the experience of “watching” the graceful and distinguished writer Blakely interview Donna Williams, author of Nobody Nowhere, The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic, and her then new husband, Paul, a musician. Blakely’s patient listening and the cumulative discernment of her interviewing may be a valuable heuristic for other narrative writers taking on similarly challenging subjects. There is much more I could say about the 16-page chapter, but it’s better that I merely flag the bracing wonder I found there.

Madeleine Blais says:
May 19, 2009 at 7:30am
Memoir exists on a continuum. At one end are the dream sequences, passages that relay on the fog, quicksand and mist of what we may or may not know. Joan Wickersham's brilliant new book, THE SUICIDE INDEX: PUTTING MY FATHER'S DEATH IN ORDER has a chapter in which she clearly imagines a scene between her father and his which she also clearly never witnessed. As such, this type of writing is more poetry than journalism and can hardly be considered narrative of the most rigorous fact-bound sort. And the other end are works that are firmly entrenched in time and place (Katharine Graham's Personal History is perhaps a good example.) Skillful writers make it clear (as Wickersham does) when a scene is being fully imagined rather than faithfully recorded. As a hardcore journalist, I love it when I sense both are happening simultaneously.
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