Leonard Kriegel has noted of Franklin’s Autobiography that “there is something missing … something essential, an absence not merely of the deeper self but of the very possibility of a deeper self” (213). I read America differently than Parini does: the deeper self is essential to American writers and artists but is not found in traditional autobiography. Unless you lived a life as consequential as Douglass’s or Franklin’s, you wouldn’t have (in the last two centuries) been drawn to write your life story, let alone think of it as such. Without a publisher’s blessing, your biography would not have been written, either. About the closest you would have come to anything full-length and life-assessing might have been the confession, a religious work in which your failings as a sinner would have been assuaged by your atonement. Indeed, some older confessionals are remarkably inner, albeit ideologically beset, in their focus. And yet despite the conditions that severely limited who actually wrote an autobiography, American writers have written auto-biographically. Which is to say, they have used personal experience in story, essay, poem, or travel account—in the short form—in service of a larger subject.
The autobiographical essay has, especially in the twentieth century, flourished as an alternative to, even a comment on, the over-wrought life story. As a memoir-essay, personal narrative, or personal essay, by either known or unknown authors, this compact piece has been published in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. (The personal essay’s most important innovator was the Romantic era’s William Hazlitt. As Phillip Lopate has written, Hazlitt “brought a new intimacy” to the form, “establishing as never before a conversational rapport, a dialogue with the reader” [180].) One of the greatest essayists, who uses the direct personal style in much of his work, is George Orwell. His 1931 tale “A Hanging” ranks among the finest short memoirs ever written. The piece tells of a Hindu man who, during the British occupation of Burma, is hanged in “classy European style,” that is, dispassionately and efficiently. The piece shudders with the Orwellian notion of a blithe state torturing a debased individual as it also glows with a familiar participatory truth. The idea that a personal narrative could be as exciting and intimate as a Hemingway tale has taken time to sink in, in part because the form has had to play second fiddle to the narrative invention of fiction. It wasn’t until Orwell’s several examples (“Shooting an Elephant,” “Marrakech,” and “How the Poor Die”) and those of writers as diverse as E. B. White and Zora Neale Hurston had captured readers with their participatory narrators that the form gained currency. (Of course, today, short and long sections of personal narrative grace books on psychology, economics, travel, science, even literary criticism, by authors whose direct experience gives their subjects greater weight.) The short memoir piece is spare, universal, confessional, and true. Who among us has not been touched by what is perhaps the best personal essay by an American, Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect,” first published in Vogue in 1961?1
The Memoir
It may be that the memoir has risen in the last two decades because the personal essay expanded its singular theme and fleshed out its emotional immediacy. It may be that the life story shrank its garrulous, self-important voice. In either event, the hull of traditional autobiography began to leak sometime during the 1980s. It was then that a new kind of storytelling emerged: short and midlength books, sometimes called memoir, in which the author chose a particular life experience to focus on. Heralding the new in particular were three books of intense interior drive: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), a story of mother-daughter closeness in which both, disturbingly, inhabit each other’s pasts; Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1988), a tale in a boy’s voice of his peripatetic mother and cruel stepfather that reads like a novel with fiction’s narrative punch; and Richard Rhodes’s A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood (1990), a harrowing story of two brothers who endure the abuse of a tyrannical mother and the neglect of a hapless father. Such books felt new, in part, because they lacked the scope of autobiography and the limitation of the essay.
Another publishing event, in 1995, also reshaped our sense of what memoir might be. This was the publication of the unexpurgated edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.2 The new edition included material Anne’s father, Otto, excised from the original when he first published her diary in 1947: Anne’s insight into his character, her budding and more explicit sexual feelings for Peter, and the anxiety she had about herself. Her anxiety was spurred mostly by difficulties she had had with her mother, which she discussed in passages that were also kept out. As great a book as the original edition was, we had not read, for a half century, Anne’s most trying revelations about her family, truths which, read now, only deepen her story. The new Anne Frank blossoms as a memoirist: we can finally see her as clearly as she once saw those suffering around her.
The emotional concentrations of Gornick, Wolff, and Rhodes, as well as the ever-affecting Anne Frank, all carry that personable voice: diary-like, reflective, intimately close and trusting, at times uncomfortably so. An instance of the latter is Lucy Grealy’s Auto-biography of a Face (1994). Despite the title’s playfulness, Grealy details how her interior self was changed by an operation for cancer that surgically took away one-third of her jaw when she was nine. “This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it” (7). Engagement with “this singularity of meaning” is emblematic of a new approach to personal narration. As my writing teachers trumpeted, a good topic is a narrowed topic. One emotional or thematic focus is plenty for a book. Indeed, only those parts of Grealy’s life that were germane to the shadow and substance of her disfigurement got in.
How simple this is! For two decades, writers have gravitated to this simplicity, whether they were writing about buying a house in Mexico, living with AIDS, or losing a child. Memoir situates the one story as equal to or greater than—even against—the epic chronology of the Life. Autobiography’s central tenet—wisdom gained through many years—is much too grandiose for the memoirist. In fact, memoir writers are so bent on activating the particular in their books that many are writing of the immediate past, even the still-corruptible present, not waiting for time to ripen or change what they know.
As the memoir has evolved, the canvas and the frame have gotten a lot smaller. And, to see the new form properly, we have to look more closely and the canvas has to contain more detail—detail that is revealing and reflective, textured and telling, exclusive and sharp. For example, note how this memoir’s subtitle announces its severe singularity: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (2006). Buford, of course, is writing autobiographically. But he’s hardly writing an autobiography. He’s writing memoir. He’s focused not on a life but on a portion thereof, a portion small enough to allow him the nitty-gritty he and his readers crave. It’s true that critics have