Making the Most of the Memoir

Then, in the age of the steamship, another wave of immigrants slipping into New York Harbor at dawn gathered on deck to look north where the arm of the Statue of Liberty reached out, as always, to touch the heart and lift the spirit.

Linda Callender continued the story in her memoir:

” . . . [T]he closed-packed skyscrapers on the narrow tip of lower Manhattan were in full view. With majestic authority, they appeared to rise straight up out of the water and it seemed incredible that the tiny piece of land could support such massive superstructures. Just then, as if on cue, like a brilliant banner of exultant hope and joy, a great crimson ball of sun rose slowly . . . throwing them into stark relief and suffusing the somber morning sky with glowing life and color. A royal reception indeed!”

Now approaching 80 and living in a modest Pasadena apartment, Callender has found herself happily part of a reemergent American cultural phenomenon: the evaluating of one’s life by the writing of a memoir.

Dozens of established authors, novelists to pundits, are turning to the published memoir, an occurrence that has been attracting increasing notice. That is not to mention the continuing irresistibility of the first-person accounts of celebrities, whether actors, athletes, politicians, generals, tycoons, lawyers, accused criminals, or anyone else brushed by fame or notoriety.

And thousands more work-a-day Americans are, like Callender, at keyboards looking back at their own lives, often for an audience no bigger than the regulars at the household dinner table.

Young people, barely old enough to have done anything, are writing down everything. At midlife, baby boomers are trying, for the umpteenth time, to get things straight in their minds. Seniors, troubled by today, seek refuge and reassurance in yesterday. Minorities, women, gays, middle-aged white men in the suburbs, are expressing their place in the society in first-person singular.

These are, as we keep telling ourselves, confusing times in which to live. Rapid social change, runaway technology, crumbling consensus . . . the whole list. So, how do we satisfy that age-old, irrepressible urge to find meaning in life? One way, is to look closely at the life we know best.

“The 1990s, for good and bad, have been the era of the personal confessional. We have reached a point where, like primitive people of old, the meaning of life comes with the stories we tell about it,” said Tristine Rainer.

Through the UCLA Writer’s Extension Program and her own private classes, Rainer teaches students how to write their memoirs and is finishing a forthcoming book, “Your Life As Story: Writing the New Autobiography.” Previously, she wrote a well-received volume on personal diary writing.

“Whether their books are published or not, the writers tell me that along with having their children, it was the most meaningful thing they ever did,” she said.

At its best, the memoir transforms experience into literature by means of grace and understanding.

When he felt the urge to look back, journalist Russell Baker recalled saying to his wife, “I am now going upstairs to invent the story of my life.”

The result was his popular and lasting memoir, “Growing Up.” In a speech at the New York Public Library, Baker explained: “Although nobody’s life makes any sense, if you’re going to make a book out of it you might as well make it into a story.”

Baker’s book sold about 500,000 copies in hardcover and paperback.

In Pasadena, the only copies of Callender’s memoir came off her personal printer. But the quest by this British immigrant and now part-time apartment manager was the same.

A friend encouraged her storytelling. She had been a letter writer all her life. “So the next morning my husband came out to find me sitting at the typewriter in my nightie,” she said.

There is no ready accounting of the number of memoirs published and sold. The general category of biography, in which autobiography is included, has remained more or less stable over recent years, at least in the numbers of titles offered. But there is no mistaking the trend in attention given memoirs.

In the spring, the New York Times Magazine called this era “The Age of the Literary Memoir.” Vogue said it was “The New Age of Memoirs.” Harper’s referred to it as “The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism.” Around the nation, other trends have been found in poets publishing memoirs, in African American women sharing their life stories, in first-person spiritual quests, and in Americans from all walks of life spilling forth willingly their darkest family secrets. In the New Yorker, essayist and editor Bill Buford wrote that America is undergoing an “extraordinary revival of storytelling.”

The flip side is that Americans are reading these memoirs too. And for reasons that perhaps give us a glimpse beneath the skin to the connective artistic tissue of the culture.

Best-seller lists are sprinkled with autobiographies, and many more claim space on bookstore shelves, in every form from star athletes promoting their well-financed images to the unhappy post-teens with grudges against their parents, a genre sometimes referred to as the if-they-only-potty-trained-me-better memoir.

Why? One reason, a good one, is that stories told at human scale are scarce at the end of the 20th century. The daily news often is outlandish, magazines are absorbed with celebrity, movies and television grow evermore fantastically outsized. Without extended families and tight-knit villages to provide the stories to illuminate their own experiences, Americans look elsewhere.

“Most people in their daily lives don’t have the connections with others that they get through these books--a serious connection to the experience of others,” said Barry Glassner, chair of the sociology department at USC.

“Take the workplace. People have to cover themselves. If they show weakness or vulnerability--anything except efficiency, they put themselves at risk,” he said. “This is a change that has happened only in the last 10 years or so. So where can they turn now?”

They can turn to books, and sometimes both the reader and writer are reaching out.

Naomi Mann, a former college English literature instructor in San Francisco, saw her daughter journey to India and drift away under the influence of a Hindu guru. Mann searched for a way to reconnect, and came upon the idea of a mother-daughter book as told through their exchange of letters.

“I was casting a hook to draw her back,” Mann recalls. “It dawned on me that no matter how angry and alienated she felt, she kept writing letters.”

Over time, the correspondence about a book indeed brought the two together, and daughter returned to the U.S. Along the way, the concept of the book itself changed to a narrative memoir rather than the back-and-forth of letters. It is to be published next year with the title, “Seeking the Mother of Immortal Bliss.”

“People are very often devastated by the things their children do or don’t do. . . . This is a story about getting a second chance. I can’t think of anything more American than that,” Mann said. “If I can put on my hat as an academic, I see that post-modernism took the novel so far from the realm of story that narrative autobiography has slipped into the vacuum.

“It’s a way to unscramble chaos, to which all good art strives. . . . Today, there are no authority figures to transmit the legends and myths and experiences that help us understand ourselves.”

At Dutton’s bookstore in Brentwood, Doug Dutton paused to consider whether he really could detect a trend in memoirs. Then he joked, “Well, God knows, our favorite subject is ourselves. I guess the ‘me’ generation of the ‘70s spent the ‘80s writing its memoirs which they are now getting around to publishing.”

Reflecting longer, Dutton acknowledged reading two memoirs last year--both dealing with a problem that had afflicted an acquaintance. He wanted not the clinical facts but the understanding of true experience. “It’s a real comfort to know you’re not alone,” he said.

Sometimes the connections between writer and reader go far beyond a narrow shared experience. In a well-received and moving book published this summer with the title “In My Father’s Name,” Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Arax delved into the 1972 murder of his father while exploring the family’s Armenian American heritage and life in the Central Valley.

“All of a sudden because people know all the intimate details of my life, they feel they can share the most intimate details of their lives,” Arax said. More than 100 letters, mini-memoirs all, now sit on his desk, awaiting reply. “It has been boggling, and I’m not sure what to do,” he said. “These are the kinds of letters that require hours and hours to respond to. . . . There are a lot of lonely people out there.”

In San Diego County, Wendy Schramm is an instructor at Mira Costa Community College Writing Center and a passionate reader of one form of memoir: the personal essay.

“What I find so inviting,” she said, “ . . . is their mode of transportation: They walk. They don’t run or drive or ride, they walk. And, in walking, they are able to take in the sights. They also bend and curve, often getting quite lost along the way, but the joy is in the journey, not in the destination. . . . After an evening full of ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ that shouts and crashes its way into insistence, I could use a stroll in the fresh air.”

Trends aside, the memoir is an ancient storytelling form. Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs were known to have written memoirs. Author Rainer said they were “mostly of the O.J. Simpson style--’I didn’t do it.’ ” The genre has remained part of written history, and sometimes has created images and understanding of human experience as powerful as any form of expression.

The Holocaust is one example. After World War II, the memories of death camp survivors were sealed in their hearts, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Then, with books such as Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ in 1960, and others that followed, the calamity of Nazi Germany could be grasped truly.

“Books like these have been a major contributor to the world’s understanding of a tragedy that engulfed so many,” said Hier.

Today, the same sense of looming history drove West Hollywood gay activist David Mixner to write his newly published memoir, “Stranger Among Friends.”

“I will turn 50 in August. I live in a community where 50 is old age. Of my friends, 85% are dead. As of today, I’ve lost 256 friends to AIDS,” he said. “We are rapidly losing the history of our community, especially the formative years of the ‘60s and ‘70s . . . I thought it important that people today know.”

Most of the current published memoirs, if anything so broad can be reduced to generalization, have less to do with factual truth and history, however, and more with self-realization. A little too much for some tastes.

“We are in a national period of self-criticism, self-examination, put in very big terms,” said Donald Lamb, chairman of W. W. Norton publishers. “A lot of these are confessional books: Out-of-body experiences written by people who are out of their minds.”

Today, books of this type are the first to come to mind for many when they think of memoirs, so much so as to stigmatize the genre for some serious readers.

“There is something about this era that encourages it,” said Southern California literary agent Angela Rinaldi. On one hand, she said, “We’ve come to know more about people’s lives than we need to, or are comfortable with.” But on the other hand, Rinaldi added, the best of them are finely written. “They read like first novels to me--they’re wonderful. I see it as storytelling . . . and it brings new awareness to a genre that had perhaps gotten a little dusty.”

As typical as any would be this summer’s book, “My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism” by George S. McGovern, the former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate. He describes the book as a tribute to his deceased daughter Teresa, found frozen in a snowbank in 1994 after a binge.

McGovern also allowed that the writing of such a book is a quest to conquer guilt and confront demons. His manuscript, he writes, “shows many small smudges--that is what happens when tears fall onto the page.”

We may believe that such books reflect the times, and we may be correct. But they are hardly original to this era. As forlorn as almost anything current is the 1879 book, “Confession,” by Leo Tolstoy. Having gained fame from his novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy found that “life had lost its charm for me.” His memoir tells of his fight against suicide and search for spiritual meaning, and begins as bleak and self-absorbed as any modern woe-is-me tale.

Writing reflectively about self need not always involve anguish, however. Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker staffer and Time magazine columnist, produced a bestseller this year with a memoir, “Messages From My Father,” so gentle that barely anything at all happens and almost none of it bad.

“My father’s life was not that spectacular. He was a grocer from Kansas City, and he was not a bootlegger on the side, or if he was I was too dim to know it. I never heard my parents raise their voices, never, not once,” said Trillin.

Having written 18 other books of various types, Trillin said, he felt no compulsion at first to produce a memoir. An editor suggested it. But as he thought about it, Trillin said, the books he wanted his daughters to read included, one after another, real-life stories. His own book, then, took on the same motif: a desire to pass along his father’s story to his daughters.

Wayne Hilbig, president of ALTI publishers in La Jolla, said the direction of memoirs might be shifting--from bad experiences to good ones.

“You see a growing list of titles in which values are central. As a society, our faith is diminishing,” he said. “People are looking for encouragement, for things to believe in.”

Surely, they--that is, we--feel the need to believe in and understand ourselves.

Times researcher Janet Lundblad assisted with this story.