Misery and Memoirs

Benjamin Kunkel's article Misery Loves a Memoir in this morning's New York Times Sunday Book Review struck a chord. In describing the literary form of memoirs and autobiography, he considers (what I consider) the self-indulgence of those who write about adversarial suffering or victimization, and their victory/epiphany. Like Kunkel, I wince when encountering it. Kunkel, however, provided me this morning with an excellent explanation of why I wince. While his writing in this article sometimes gets in the way of his point, I enjoyed (? -- appreciated) his explication.

"A lie exposed is a fantasy revealed, and here, in the cases of James Frey and JT LeRoy, was the fantasy underlying contemporary autobiographical writing: Suffering produces meaning. Life is what happens to you, not what you do. Victim and hero are one. Hence the preponderance of memoirs having to do with mental illness, sexual and other violence, drug and alcohol addiction, bad parents and/or mad or missing loved ones. "
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Contemporary memoirs tend to be either convalescent or nostalgic in mood. (It's as Augustine said in his "Confessions": "I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy.") But is there nothing more to life than recovery and grief? Is there no idea of the good life we can sustain beyond the possession of health?
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The best and most Romantic memoir an American has produced is "Walden" — though nobody calls it one. But it is: Here is what I did with a few years of my life and how I feel about it now. What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health. His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.

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