FIRST-PERSON PROFIT
Like everyone, I have a past, and sometimes it bubbles up, begging for air and analysis. I don’t delude myself into thinking this phenomena, the grand and minor triumphs and traumas of having made it through at least part of a life, is particular to me: the condition of contending with histories both global and personal unites us as human beings even if it can also divide us in so many smaller theatres of experience.
Personal writing, be it of the kind that shows up in the myriad essays that churn through the web or book length works of memoir, ideally tries to play out bigger ideas in those small theatres, connecting readers and writers to the ongoing project of human existence. It also, Laura Bennet contended in Slate last week, functions to bolster a flawed media industry, where endless clicks are the goal and anything salacious goes so long as, like house fires and car crashes, it draws eyeballs.
Bennet’s piece, “The First-Person Industrial Complex” sheds light on a certain aspect of the our contemporary thirst for outrageous, consumable pieces of writing. In her interviews with editors, such as Jia Tolentino at the popular women’s website Jezebel, Bennet explores a cynical idea: the plethora of first-person writing is directly related to the business model of so much digital media. Earlier this year, Tolentino acquired an essay about a young woman reuniting with her biological father and subsequently having a sexual affair with him. The young woman in question had very little experience as a published writer, and had hoped to build the beginnings of a great career with a powerfully affecting story in a high-profile place. According to Who Pays Writers, a crowdsourced guide for freelancing rates, she may have been paid as little as $250 for the piece that ended relationships with most of her family on her mother’s side. According to Bennet, her second pitch to Jezebel, a critical reading of a television show, went unanswered.
Bennet’s examination into a media culture that encourages digging up the barely analyzed past as a means of making rent falls down because of what it doesn’t quite do, which is address the art of it.
Luckily, for that, we have Mary Karr. She has taught classes on the art of memoir for the past 30 years, since before many of the editors, let alone writers, of essays with titles like “How I forgave myself after my rape” or “I was a teenage Midwestern foodie” or “IT HAPPENED TO ME: My 8-Pound Baby And A 3-Pound Tumor Shared My Uterus” were born.
In her latest book, Karr traces what she calls memoir’s ascendancy, a process that started well before the Internet became an endless repository of all of our most lurid suffering. The Art of Memoir is written mostly for aspiring memoirists, of which, as Bennet’s article suggests, there is no shortage. Karr’s latest answers no questions but one: why do people write about themselves? Is it ever really for little or large sums of money, or is it because in writing about ourselves over and over we get at some of the truth of what it means to live in this world?
Karr suggests that readers and writers want the same thing: great art mined from the bald reality of a life as it’s lived. In one chapter, she gives us the example of Kathryn Harrison, whose The Kiss (1997) was shredded by critics and readers. In her book, born of years of contemplation and drafting and thinking and rewriting, Harrison describes her experience of falling in love, and lust, with her biological father, from whom she’d long been separated. Sound familiar? Karr praises Harrison’s work, citing the author as a “study in the courage a book can demand from its scribbler.” At the time, Harrison was accused of taking advantage of prurient interest to make a quick buck off of her own life.
While there is room for both commerce and art in our consideration of the modern memoir, it’s hard not to feel chagrined at the way history — on the personal and impersonal scale — is wont to repeat itself. I am not so naive as to argue that no one thinks of the money when pitching their pain, but neither am I so cynical as to think that any would-be memoirist is chasing all that much more than art, in the end.