Maybe the vignette about the time she and her sister wrote to Amy Carter at the White House would have made a passable subplot in an episode of a mediocre Disney sitcom. The prose isn’t particularly surprising, and, more to the point, neither is the selection of anecdotes: cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity. “We filled each other with fear and anger, then made jokes and laughed together, to soften the blows,” she writes - in other words, they did what all siblings do. There is a divorce, but so what? There are siblings. Her mother is a little odd, but no odder than yours or mine. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.Īnd so Havrilesky, a former writer for Salon who is now a critic for the iPad publication The Daily, spends 239 pages dragging us through what seems to be an utterly ordinary childhood in North Carolina. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out - not that they were bad lives, just bland. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Disaster Preparedness,” by Heather Havrilesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. ![]() That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped. Three of the four did not need to be written, a ratio that probably applies to all memoirs published over the last two decades. So in a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre, here are a few guidelines for would-be memoirists, arrived at after reading four new memoirs. ![]() By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Sure, the resulting list has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.īut then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. 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. A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
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