Person on the Page

A few weeks ago, I posted “Let’s Legitimize Personal Nonfiction.”  In this post, I recounted my own experience of negative attitudes toward people who write about their difficult personal experiences and called for a firm recognition that personal nonfiction can be literary, and therefore legitimate, writing. Since then, I’ve been researching to discover some of the specific sources of this popular notion that such writing amounts to a writer’s navel-gazing act of self-absorbed whining on the page.

Among others who express this opinion in highly regarded public forums, I found a playwright who is a regular contributor to the obituary column of the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger.  In 2011, the NYT published Genzingler’s review of four memoirs that comprises more accurately a criticism of the genre itself and its authors. His article is titled “The Problem with Memoirs.”  Genzlinger’s critique is one of the most strongly stated—and most arrogant—ridicules of those of us who write about our personal experiences and then seek an audience for our work.

The article begins with a single-sentence paragraph: “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” In this opening comment, Genzlinger establishes a derisive tone for his message, expressing his regret that a significant population of writers is not consigned to silence. He then specifies who among memoirists is exempt from his suggestion that they should “shut up.”  He writes

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment.

So, according to Genzlinger, three types of people are approved to write memoirs:

1. Those who have accomplished something noteworthy. Like what? Wealth? Fame? And does the wealth or fame have to be earned, or can it be inherited?

2. Those who have had an extremely unusual experience.  Such as?  Such as, say, having one’s arm trapped by a falling rock while mountain climbing and surviving by cutting off one’s arm to allow oneself to make it back to civilization? No, even that is not enough, according to Genzlinger.  He writes, “If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop.  You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.” What kind of unusual experience does qualify one to write a memoir?

3. Those who are brilliant enough to write about their ordinary experiences as a reflection of a broad historical moment.

These three categories disqualify most of us from writing, which seems to be Genzlinger’s aim, as he comments that in what he suggests was a golden age before the surge in published memoirs, “Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.”

I am appalled. That Genzlinger would voice such an elitist view in light of the popularity of memoirs at the time he was writing is surprising. His message impugns dozens of memoirists whose books were on the market.  But that the NYT expresses its tacit approval of the viewpoint by publishing Genzlinger’s article is alarming.  A sea of people with what Genzlinger would define as unremarkable lives were likely to read this article. And, indeed, several at the time published their rebuttals to his argument. Now it’s my turn.

First, to Mr. Genzlinger: Please forgive me for taking so long to respond to your article. When it was published in 2011, I was somewhat busily engaged in building my undistinguished career as an English professor and keeping up with a community college teaching load while I maintained an active search for a more advantageous position. I didn’t always have time to keep up with what was being published in the Times. And before that, while you were following in your father’s footsteps pursuing your career as a nationally-known journalist, I was a survivor of childhood psychological and sexual abuse who managed to become a first-generation college graduate (neither of my parents having finished high school) and earned a PhD, all while raising two daughters and maintaining a home. All of these workaday details qualify me as one of the unremarkable people who, as you say, have not earned the right to write about their experiences.  So please disregard what I have just written. And ignore what I am about to say.

Now, on to more important matters.

Let’s be thankful that when Henry David Thoreau asked Ralph Waldo Emerson if he could camp out for a while by the pond in the woods behind Emerson’s house so that he could be alone and think about things, Emerson did not say to Thoreau, “Sure, but for heaven’s sake, don’t write about it. Such ruminating about mundane personal experiences is not worthy of publication.”  And let’s be glad that if Walt Whitman was advised to stop focusing such close attention on grass, the commonest and least remarkable of flora, he paid no heed to the advice. Some of the most memorable literature, particularly American literature, gives voice to common people and portrays their everyday experiences.

One of the most striking and vital elements of personal nonfiction, whether personal essays or memoirs, is a writer’s ability to examine an everyday, sometimes momentary, experience, one that will resonate with a host of potential readers, and to discover something profound in it. Sometimes those experiences are traumatic. Those, too, resonate with readers. Genzlinger’s comment, “No one wants to relive your misery,” simply isn’t true.

The underlying truth of the matter is that the kinds of memoirs that Genzlinger reviewed in his article were written by everyday people whose narrated experiences make some readers uncomfortable. They tell stories of teenage traumas, of coping with family members’ suicides and with caring for dying parents, and of living with disabilities. (I confess that I have been guilty of such literary snobbery myself.  In my post “Apology to Mature Women Everywhere,” I try to make amends for my own arrogance.) These may be subjects that readers who hold privileged positions in our culture would like to avoid. The writers may be people that some would like to silence for reasons other than those that Genzlinger expresses directly. 

To those writers, I say, keep writing!

Let’s continue to capture our commonplace experiences and to discover their meaning.  Let’s work at our craft and settle for nothing less than our very best writing.  Let’s flood the market with the subjects that Genzlinger insists “belong [only] on a blog.” (As if blogs cannot be literary? As if bloggers are not good writers? What??)

Please, keep writing.