I’ve been thinking a lot about memoir, and their place in life narratives. Specifically, I am intrigued by the uprising of relational memoirs. By this I mean memoirs that are not actually about the author, but are focused one, sometimes two, important people in the author’s life. There are many popular examples of this. Jeannette Walls’, Glass Castle, though following the chronology of her own life, is primarily about her parents. Missing Sarah, by Maggie De Vries is about De Vries’ sister. Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett is about her best friend. The emphasis in these works seems not to be the “memory” aspect of memoirs, but is attached more to the “memorial” aspect. Having read all of these examples, and many more traditional memoirs (where the author’s journey is the most significant), I find the ‘relational memoirs’ to be more successful. This point is seconded by an (very cynical) article in the New York Times, the 4th bullet down: “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it”. And I can’t help wondering: why?
Instinctively, I would think the opposite to be true, that we prefer traditional memoir over relational. When we read non-fiction, we generally have one expectation: that the story be real. That it be true. The author is the expert of his/her experience, and we live vicariously through their words. So then would we feel cheated when the author is not actually the one actually experiencing, but is a bystander of sorts, looking in? Logic tells me yes, we would feel disappointed and steer away from these sorts of memoir, questioning their validity. However, reality tells me that these are often the most insightful, the most touching, subgenre of memoirs.
Perhaps what makes them so insightful is this distance between author and experience. As the article suggests, the idea of “shared experience” is an intriguing one; the author is understanding the phenomena, the circumstance, coming to terms with it, at the same time the reader is. I wonder if perhaps circumstances in memoirs, like addiction, like abortion, like sex-work, feel so foreign to us that we cannot connect to it when it’s explained first-hand. The appeal in relational memoirs is that the author and reader feel the same bewilderment to begin with. It’s not as direct an approach, but I think relational memoirs have equaled the ability to change reader’s perspective as traditional memoirs. If not more.
But then, is that highlighting a bigger societal problem; that we must be able to relate to the life stories presented before us, or at least relate to the narrator of the story, in order to be empathetic?