Ookie Wookie Nookie
May. 8th, 2007 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersI have an old Hawai'ian song stuck in my head and I don't understand the words (because I don't speak Hawai'ian), so I've been using nonsense. Thus the subject-line.
But that's not what I'm going to write about.
Over the weekend at my parents' place in Central Oregon, there was much discussion of various memoirs that various family members have been reading. There was an ongoing argument between my brother and my niece about Craig Lesley's Burning Fence, which my niece didn't like and my brother did. I don't remember the other titles that came up, although I think my sister mentioned Angela's Ashes at some point, which is one I've heard of. My mother talked again about the one written by a woman who is now a big time TV newsperson or something, but who was raised by parents who lived lives of intentional poverty and seemingly total irresponsibility toward their kids, who were frequently left to go hungry or to wait in the car for hours while the parents drank in the tavern. (The latter of which is something my sister-in-law remembers happening to her as a kid too.)
As part of this discussion, my niece rented the DVD of the movie adaptation of Running with Scissors, which she said was really funny. I missed the beginning of it, but watched the middle on Saturday night and the last part on Sunday morning. It's about a bunch of crazy people -- several of them literally mentally ill -- and the crazy psychiatrist who fucks with them. I had a hard time understanding what exactly the movie was about other than a series of fucked-up things happening to a bunch of fucked-up people. It was hard to sympathize with any of them, because they all seemed so helpless to do anything right, although the point of view character, who is based on the author, Augusten Burroughs, escapes to New York in the end.
After the end of the movie on Sunday, my sister talked about James Frey, whose "memoir," A Million Little Pieces was exposed last year as largely made up, causing Oprah to swan about like the diva she is because she had been snookered. Interestingly, my sister sees a difference between memoirs, which she thinks can be exaggerated, and autobiographies, which she thinks should stick to the facts. I told her that my impression was that Frey had done much more than exaggerate, and I also mentioned the other great literary fraud exposure of last year, JT LeRoy, who claimed to have been the son of a prostitute, to have been sexually abused as a boy, and to have been a teenage street hustler, but ended up actually being a woman living in San Francisco named Laura Albert. JT LeRoy's most famous book was appropriately called The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.
When I got back to Seattle, I googled Augusten Burroughs and found out that the truthfulness of Running with Scissors has been challenged by the psychiatrist and his family, who sued the publisher. And suddenly I remembered a review I read last year in the wake of the Frey and LeRoy exposures that talked about the glut of "misery memoirs" we have been suffering through in recent years, and how they have been so popular that apparently a number of writers have felt the need to pile on the misery to meet the hunger for tales of family and personal dysfunction. What is the appeal of these things? From listening to my family, it seems it's a mixture of "there but for the grace of God go I," a certain amount of schadenfreude, and also looking for tales of redemption or hope. But it seems like such a strange little literary trend that these type of stories are coming in the form of memoirs. Is this being pushed by the whole talk show confessional movement as well? Or is it just a bunch of ookie wookie nookie?
But that's not what I'm going to write about.
Over the weekend at my parents' place in Central Oregon, there was much discussion of various memoirs that various family members have been reading. There was an ongoing argument between my brother and my niece about Craig Lesley's Burning Fence, which my niece didn't like and my brother did. I don't remember the other titles that came up, although I think my sister mentioned Angela's Ashes at some point, which is one I've heard of. My mother talked again about the one written by a woman who is now a big time TV newsperson or something, but who was raised by parents who lived lives of intentional poverty and seemingly total irresponsibility toward their kids, who were frequently left to go hungry or to wait in the car for hours while the parents drank in the tavern. (The latter of which is something my sister-in-law remembers happening to her as a kid too.)
As part of this discussion, my niece rented the DVD of the movie adaptation of Running with Scissors, which she said was really funny. I missed the beginning of it, but watched the middle on Saturday night and the last part on Sunday morning. It's about a bunch of crazy people -- several of them literally mentally ill -- and the crazy psychiatrist who fucks with them. I had a hard time understanding what exactly the movie was about other than a series of fucked-up things happening to a bunch of fucked-up people. It was hard to sympathize with any of them, because they all seemed so helpless to do anything right, although the point of view character, who is based on the author, Augusten Burroughs, escapes to New York in the end.
After the end of the movie on Sunday, my sister talked about James Frey, whose "memoir," A Million Little Pieces was exposed last year as largely made up, causing Oprah to swan about like the diva she is because she had been snookered. Interestingly, my sister sees a difference between memoirs, which she thinks can be exaggerated, and autobiographies, which she thinks should stick to the facts. I told her that my impression was that Frey had done much more than exaggerate, and I also mentioned the other great literary fraud exposure of last year, JT LeRoy, who claimed to have been the son of a prostitute, to have been sexually abused as a boy, and to have been a teenage street hustler, but ended up actually being a woman living in San Francisco named Laura Albert. JT LeRoy's most famous book was appropriately called The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.
When I got back to Seattle, I googled Augusten Burroughs and found out that the truthfulness of Running with Scissors has been challenged by the psychiatrist and his family, who sued the publisher. And suddenly I remembered a review I read last year in the wake of the Frey and LeRoy exposures that talked about the glut of "misery memoirs" we have been suffering through in recent years, and how they have been so popular that apparently a number of writers have felt the need to pile on the misery to meet the hunger for tales of family and personal dysfunction. What is the appeal of these things? From listening to my family, it seems it's a mixture of "there but for the grace of God go I," a certain amount of schadenfreude, and also looking for tales of redemption or hope. But it seems like such a strange little literary trend that these type of stories are coming in the form of memoirs. Is this being pushed by the whole talk show confessional movement as well? Or is it just a bunch of ookie wookie nookie?
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 08:41 pm (UTC)To put it another way, I believe history is written by those who thereby decide who won, who lost, and who was rained out. I believe the news itself is a creative work of storytelling in the realist style, such is the power of the selection of detail, what to tell and what to omit. But I find much that interests me in the relation between such works and other primary sources. I adore chatty footnotes.
But you actually had a question. I agree these forms are fed by the same springs that lead to reality teevee. We could make up some pretty fancy sounding theories about how such works assuage the existential doubts of a deracinated industrial population, that has lost the village and family stories that explain where we are in the world.
Literary memoir has been a growing field for a couple decades now, but the standard form of printed story now is the Novel. (Not the epic poem.) Markets for short stories dried up when the mass-market magazines died, and there's little room left for essays either. So if you go on for a whole book like that, you need some explosions or sex or something to sell it.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 09:39 pm (UTC)I also agree that literary hoaxes are hugely entertaining in themselves. There's a movie out right now about the guy who hoaxed an autobiography of Howard Hughes.