I hereby interrupt this abeyance in new blog post production in order to not tell you about my mother.
From Neil “accused-of-being-a-gadfly” Genzlinger’s “The Problem With Memoirs“, as published in the January 28, 2011 NYT:
But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal.
Ha! A critic after my own jackass heart. From my animadversion-rife November 6, 2006 review of Koren Zailckas’ Smashed on Amazon.com:
Smashed is a book that I hope Zailckas will consider with embarrassment as she grows up, assuming she ever does. Zailckas’ writing takes herself far too seriously and attempts to inject poetic turns of phrase far too often. Bottling her parents’ alcohol buzz like a firefly? Ugh. Trying to claim that all women remember their first drink? Gross.
Her “Woe is me, cautionary tale, this is all so serious, look at how I can weave artsy-sounding phrases into my passages” tone is too heavy, suffocating what otherwise may have been an interesting book with its embarrassingly obvious fumblings towards “gravitas”. With each sentence, I felt like the author was looking wistfully out a window to a great beyond, breathlessly imparting what she felt were pearls of wisdom to an entranced audience. Gross!
Might be an interesting book for those intrigued by the specific topic of drinking, but for those who are looking for a good read by a mature (and I’m not talking years, here) writer, keep looking.
… I wish she’d waited a few years before writing this — what she’s saying is probably important and she could probably say it well if she grew up first.
And from the December 19, 2010 “Deciduous Wings” as published on Eyeshot, quoting Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”:
. . . one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Indeed.
Genzlinger’s parting adjuration, which I’d like to nuzzle up to like so much cat fur:
If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.
Write on.
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