I decided to pursue more information about this whole “memoir-boom” that Dr.McNeil claimed has been happening in recent years. In doing so, I came across a very informative and thought-provoking podcast from the New Yorker, featuring an essayist, memoirist, and critic named Daniel Mendelsohn, which can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/01/25/100125on_audio_mendelsohn.
One of the most fascinating bits of information that I absorbed from this podcast is that St.Augustine’s Confessions could be considered the first legitimate memoir or autobiography ever written and one that has shaped all future memoirs henceforth. Mendelsohn notes that St.Augustine’s auto-biography is the first time that an interior journey is made public, which is something that everyone can relate to as opposed to the memoirs that preceded Confessions, detailing the lives of great military/political leaders of the Greek and Roman eras. This assertion by Mendelsohn seems to conform to our class discussion of “Traditional vs Contemporary auto-biography”. One could argue that St.Augustine was a remarkable or exemplary individual, but the whole idea of Confessions was to display his sins and focus on his path to redemption. Mendelsohn asserts that this paved the way for the modern memoirs regarding a recovery from addiction since the same sort of psychological release is enabled when one details their sins or the perils of an addiction. Thus, even non-believers have in some form or another, have followed the Augustinian tradition of spilling “dirty secrets”, ones that can be relatable to everyone and humble even the most celebrated people in society. However, Mendelsohn also argues that now more than ever, people are getting overwhelmed by personal narratives due to their abundance in reality tv and the internet; he claims that this particularly makes “phoney” memoirs that happen to get published through traditional print media much more scandalous than ever before. The name James Frey kept coming up in the podcast, so I looked him up as well. As it turns out, he wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces that was intended to be a novel about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, but transformed into a non-fiction memoir when the publisher pressured him into satisfying the high-demand for “hard-luck memoirs” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/five-fake-memoirs-that-fooled-the-literary-world-77092955/). As a result of scandals such as James Frey’s pseudo-memoir, Mendelsohn proclaims that memoir has sort of become a dirty word with the masses associating it with “self-indulgence” and “self exposure in return for…success, money, literary fame” (The Memoir Boom, New Yorker podcast).
Regardless of memoir scandals, our analysis of Digital Lives in our last two classes has made it quite clear that the appetite for producing and consuming autobiographies and memoirs has increased along with the rise of social media and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, PostSecret, and Six Word Memoir. These online communities are absolutely huge, with over a billion Facebook users and over 500 million Twitter users. In the very first class of English 474, I asked a question along the lines of ‘What is the societal impact of having constant production/consumption of personal narrative due to social media?’ I will end this blog by recommending that everybody watch a documentary called Status Anxiety hosted by a philosopher named Alain de Buton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_acgqf27CIU). Although the documentary is generally focusing on the social anxieties faced by capitalist democracies compared to monarchical societies of centuries past, many of the claims that are made in the documentary can be related to an excessive consumption of Facebook, and the obsession of having a profile that shows the best representation of ourselves. The damage to self-esteem that can be induced by constant facebook exposure has been studied by psychologists more recently, and I am planning on reading this fascinating study to better understand its effects (http://esource.dbs.ie/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10788/334/ba_smith-duff_c_2012.pdf?sequence=1). In the end, the desire to document our lives, whether it’s the good times or the bad times, seems to feed a fundamental human desire of validating our existence. I guess this means we just got to deal with a constant cycle of “Memoir-Booms” as a result…whether we like it or not.