Going Public With the Private Self

“Well what’s to be done about our ‘lives’ I wonder?” Virginia Woolf asked her diary in 1934. It was not the living of lives she was considering but the writing of them. She was even more astonishingly perceptive than usual when contemplating the daunting synergy of honesty, insight and persuasiveness needed to write one’s own story:

“After all,” Woolf wrote 11 years earlier, “in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau, perhaps.”

What would Woolf think of today’s abundant literature of memory (some call it self-centeredness) which has managed to crowd (some fear diminish) our novels, drama and poetry? Would she approve of the legions picking up their pens to turn piles of empty pages into mirrors?

Daniel Harris fiercely engages this autobiographical downpour in “A Memoir of No One in Particular,” in which he eschews the usual strategies of chronology, sensitivity and confession, aspiring instead to an alternatively sharp and “impersonal” view of himself.

“When I began to write this book, I viewed it as a satirical attack on the recent fashion for memoirs,” he begins. He thought he could best convey himself by writing not the traditional (and often self-congratulatory) trial-to-triumph account, but by undertaking a scrutiny of his habits, appearance and environment: “a memoir without time, an account of a man without a past.”

But his opinions and memories, almost as if talking among themselves, organize into narrative. The difficulty of sticking to his original plan should have alerted Harris that his writing had commandeered an agenda of its own. “The thick armor of vanity,” he writes, “that protects my ego from the knowledge of its own insignificance has at least been pierced by the dawning realization

The self-dismay strengthens with each sentence: “Perhaps even here I am simply making a case for myself, expressing resentment, railing against the injustice of neglect, begging for my fifteen minutes of fame. But if there is a chip on my shoulder, I must remove it.” For the next 200 pages, chip away he does. We’re almost blinded by an onslaught of data on Harris’ aging body, peculiar habits, his pretensions and inadequacies--almost all angrily, unrepentantly unpleasant: “I am a remarkably unsensual person whose attitude toward sex is aridly intellectual” or “My drag routines form an essential part of a lifelong campaign of self-deprecation in which I vilify myself as a ‘fat old fag.’”

Quotes like these can be giddily iconoclastic. But an entire book of embarrassing breast-beating that leads to nothing but a confirmation of their correctness? Something besides satire or candor is being written here, perhaps without the author’s informed consent.

This memoir’s unrelieved obsession with unattractiveness and inadequacy suggests its real purpose might be punishment--of its author for not being the writer he wants to be, and of his readers for not validating those literary dreams. Some will find this impressive; but it’s hard not to see “A Memoir of No One in Particular” as a deceptively excoriating example of the very navel-gazing that has come to make autobiography something of a joke.

This sort of hard-line approach to the self has been attempted before (most successfully in Michel Leiris’ “Manhood”); but the harshness of Harris’ book has a particular familiarity. Anyone who’s done time in 12-step or self-help groups will recognize this kind of haughty, furtively seething lament hissed by group members thrashing in self-dissatisfaction while relishing the secret pleasures such misery confers (to say nothing of the admiration--”so brave,” “movingly honest”--it provokes).

(The book’s accumulated sourness also makes one wonder why positive attributes seem so far from its author’s attention.)

Harris’ book frustrates because he seems to be more than capable of a large-scale scrutiny of the self-memorializing frenzy. There are many critical and cultural questions this phenomenon raises.Amid this country’s collapse of shared religious and social beliefs, it seems that being celebrated (or at least noticed) by millions of strangers is our version of immortality--and being noticed for suffering (whether from identity or experiences) our post-religious sainthood.

Woolf was drawn like one of her fictional moths to a flame by the generosity of autobiography. “I sometimes think only autobiography is literature--novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me,” she wrote a fellow writer.

Woolf was our last great commentator on self-literature--and we need a newer one. Perhaps, having vented so many frustrations so thoroughly, Harris can now investigate what has made writing about ourselves a far more popular assignment than developing the products of our imaginations--those overshadowed fictions that free writers and readers from self-consciousness, only to leave us, after their last pages, readier to contemplate who we really are.