Memoirs of Ego and Memoirs of Meaning
Bruce Piasecki is the author of 2040: A Fable, and the bestseller Doing More With Less
What can you expect in a person writing a memoir? What makes one memoir more meaningful than another?
I have reviewed Jay Parini’s lovely collection of American Autobiography from Norton to record this entry at Medium.com. The review was most enjoyable, like a fine shared dinner out, and a superb movie afterwards. It was meaningful, in short. There are memoirs of ego, and memoirs of meaning.
PREMISE AND CONCLUSION:
You can go to Jay’s masterful collection. I suggest you do some rainy day.
Relish and witness Professor Parini’s gifted and tight wonderful prose entries to each selection. It is like a crash course in American History, the fun kind. Watch the range of American great Memoirs from Quaker (I like John Woolman the best) and the early Puritan immigrants to the modern men and women you know from our shared days. I particularly like what Jay Parini says about Annie Dillard, a favorite of my wife since college, and when we first met over a fine dinner. He puts us all in our tradition, and in a sense, in our place. What does this have to do with Dorris Lessing and Barack Obama?
What I say next about President Obama’s books, and those by Doris Lessing, are written with these big Anthologies before me. You need perspective to judge what Memoirs matter, and know why.
Professor Parini, when he first befriended me more than a decade ago, asked me many questions about my Phd Advisor M. H. Abrams. Mike, who lived to 103, is the legendary Editor of the Norton Anthology series on English Literature, a mainstay in colleges. I think back then — that friendly grilling was my qualifier exam with Jay Parini! Jay respected that he himself — he has wonderful perspective — was working in a long established tradition, started by Abrams decades before. He wanted to know how he stacked up relative to Abrams, a person he deeply respected. In this way all writers are craftsmen, comparing their carpentry and tools to many others in the game of writing.
I have done more than reviewed this telling Anthology; I studied it to finish my Memoir Missing Persons (2015, Square One Press). Why did I do this?
I wanted to be respectful and explore a tradition, not simply convert the two hundred notebooks of my life into my reader’s burden, when the publisher asked for a memoir. And Jay honored me by writing an insightful introduction to Missing Persons to boot. This is said to explain to you why I think you should write a memoir, after reading many memoirs, and not before. It is a strong craze in our age, this writing of personal narratives.
There is an additional value in having done this self-assigned study of the genre of Memoir writing through the ages. I believe it helped me get out of the clanging echo that blinds most memoir writers, and I believe it has helped me keep perspective.
Do you agree? There are many horribly self-indulgent memoirs out there. In looking back at my notes from this period, and my notebooks in writing Missing Persons, I can now see, for example, what I dislike about Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin and what I deeply enjoy about the self-portrayed by Barack Obama in his break thru memoir The Audacity of Hope and his post-Presidential new memoir.
Here is an analogue to contemplate before buying a memoir from the bookstore or Amazon or www.bookshop.com. Like when you present your hurt to a doctor, writing an effective memoir is about self-portrayal, but not for yourself. In that subtle difference lies the writers that matter.
DORIS LESSING WRITES MEMOIRS OF EGO
I am a proponent that all writers need a damn healthy ego.
Without a strong id, ego, and superego, you’d never complete a book, nor sit long enough to get an agent. But to be honest, I think the best writers have a sense of humor about themselves — perspective you might say — and they also have, deep in their sportive seriousness about themselves, a sense of history and their humble place in it. No one, no one, is great enough to think all they think matters. The memoirs of meaning go through many drafts. Witness the drafts of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or the endless drafting Whitman took in redoing his collection Leaves of Grass.
Let’s start with what I praise and enjoy.
President Obama achieved number 1 bestseller status in the New York Times back in 2006 for many solid reasons.
This was his second book venture after Dreams of My Father.
In both books you see he is reclaiming his past to project a humble place in history. You can see him wanting to be useful. There is no executive privilege taken. There are smart declarations of his care and love for others, like Michelle and his daughters. That is more important to him, and in the act of writing you can measure both the audacity and the results. The father he writes about could be any father. That first declarative memoir is about the dreams of any parent; and his Audacity book is about the backbone of Hope in Society, not the certainty of self at their writer’s table or tablet.
This is what makes President Obama so much more than our first Black President in our history. Sure, there may have been some arrogance in the man; but there is also serious rumination and perspective.
In contrast, Doris Lessing, a most astonishing writer of world literature from 1939 to today, allows her Memoirs to meander off topic. And worst: most of the passages are simply ego-based.
Hold Under My Skin in your hands. It is heavy, heavier than an Obama book. Although she is exploring 1919 to 1930 (the formative thirty years before she leaves Southern Rhodesia), she is not really telling us anything that matters to the society that made her.
Three quick examples:
- Pg 13: “Memory is a careless and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one.” In contrast, in Obama’s new memoir you can see him cross-checking his memory against actual White House and press documents, on the historical issues of our day. He is not satisfied with the self-flattery. He is a disciplined writer, who digs deep, while remaining popular. You can watch him go down the rumination path with many important historic events, quite fascinating, really. In contrast, Lessing is about the lazy organ.
- Doris Again on Pg. 14: “In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers writing about me.” She then goes into short bursts on inconsequential things like “One I had never met or even heard of before.”….”But less and less do facts matter partly because writers are like pegs to hang people’s fantasies on.” “Writers may protest as much as they like; but our lives do not belong to us.” Parini’s Anthology proves her horribly wrong, most Memoirs are used with fascination to reinforce the value of a writer’s life. Serious readers and scholars evaluate writers, they do not peg them. Regarding Lessing, more of this lower grade chatter continues for a rambling four hundred pages.
- Doris then on Pg. 407: “Later, in England, I go a letter from one of the trade unionists that went like this — Comrade! My life has been spent in the service of suffering humanity, uplifting the lives of the wretched of the earth….This went on for some sixteen pages, and it was only in the end I understood it was a proposition for a shared life or at least a bed. I was surprised I accumulated quite a collection of these letters….Two Poles, three Yugoslavs, two Afrikaners, and a revolutionary from Chile; but the letters could hardly be told apart.” She needed a more rigorous editor for this Memoir published by Harper Collins in 1994.
Let’s break these down.
It is of course rare for a person to hear about five biographies being written about them in a single year. That is enough; but the way she frames her passage here examined is nothing short of ego bound. Where is the human insight in this declaration? Where is the Obama humor, swagger, and self-fun? It is more interesting to find Doris Lessing using words in the Memoirs like biltong for dried meat, or plocinine for a small black child, or veldtschoen for shoes made of cowhide. But word choice does make an insight in this case. Her Memoir taught me little, if anything about her times, her skills, or why she writes. Orwell said much more in his essay “Why I Write” in thirty pages than she has in over four hundred.
There are many people writing biographies of Obama, but he used his two memoirs “to get an insider look” to us that matters. In this way, his Memoirs are a gift.
You can see this kind of venture ego that takes the time to be understood in all the great Memoirs Parini has collected for you. Take a more humble strong ego like Jimmy Carter. I have read three of President Carter’s autobiographies on my shelf, and each bettered me. I am not saying Lessing is less of a writer or less of a person; I am saying she is simply locked in her own clanging echo, a dangerous trait. It makes for a weaker memoir, and a boring read.
Let’s break down the “love letter” indulgence even more.
Maybe the two Poles and three Yugoslavs, two Afrikaners and the Chilean revolutionary sensed a loneliness in her, or themselves, that warranted cure. But is that worth preserving in your memoir? I am happy when a scholar or a biographer in academia says they are working on my work — I see this when another writes me about an update on Wikipedia or a public forum. Moreover, I am delighted when a client is willing to pay the big bucks to hire my team after reading one of my books. But is any of this really sustaining?
Does any detail Doris provides above offer the reader something that matters? It is not interesting unless transformed into the higher burn of something that matters to readers. What matters is the social impact, and the work itself transacted and reflected on by folks like Carter and Obama, or the less famous Memoir writers in Parini’s collection. I have always felt achievement requires venture ego, synthesizing with impact both thought and event. I explore this at length in my new 2040 book. We all have an ego. We all have lived experiences to share with meaning.
THE SIGNATURE OF A REAL MEMOIR WRITER
When you read Obama’s writing, you encounter something clearly his own. There is no staff drafting it. I will not read anything that egoist Governor Cuomo writes. Each week I read now about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Memoir about his heroics regarding the pandemic, which we are now finding was staff written. It will be more like Lessing.
In contrast to Lessing and Cuomo, you can correlate your memory of Obama’s speeches, so articulate, so sound; with his writing style. Authenticity will be felt.
It is the same hard working man, the same self-venturing sensibility, in both speech and memoir.
Sure, all memoir writers have exceptional egos, but my point matters. Lessing should be read in her magical fictions, her books of literature, and ignored as a Memoir writer. Obama is a man of history, and his latest Memoir is better in impact and revelation than his many staffers who tried to capture this man.
Please note that my Creative Force Fund staff is now ready to distribute 100 of the books I’ve written from July 4 to the end of the year. The only requirement is that you tell my chief administrative officer which book you would like and why you would like to read it.
For the record, I waited until my Memoir sold several thousand before daring to write this self-reflection on the craft. The royalty statement arrived this week. The numbers help me measure my humble effort in contrast to the greats like Obama and Lessing, whose memoirs will sell in the hundreds of thousands. In sum, it takes both nerve and a readiness to discover how low one sits in the anthologies of time.
Bruce Piasecki
President/Founder, AHC Group
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author and Speaker
For additional perspectives: www.doingmorewithlessbook.com
