Too Much and Not the Mood

of their own lives. My favorite book then was Denis Johnson’s Seek, a collection of bold literary journalism in which Johnson claimed an attractive semi-distance from his subjects. Johnson—like Orlean and crew— reserved a cool privilege to swoop into a narrative with a hilarious parenthetical or an insightful clause, then shift the spotlight back onto the subject at hand, which was always someone else, something else, the author little more than the reader’s smart, elusive buddy.

My problem was that after two years of working in that vein, my Andre the Giant project was a miserable failure. The writing was too distant from the material, or at times too close to it. My calibrations were off in a way I couldn’t repair. Nothing held together. The project’s only true successes were the opposite of reportage: passages of personally driven reflections about my diagnosis, at age twenty-four, with a rare set of hormone conditions similar to those of Andre the Giant, and how that diagnosis deeply affected my family, my wife, and—yep—me.

It was clear now. I was in memoirland. All I had to do was figure out what that meant.

I was only in my thirties, so part of that work included dispelling unhelpful myths about the genre: that memoirs are poisonously navel-gazey (false), or that you have to live a long, distinguished life in order to write one (nope). But more than that, I had to adjust to a concept many memoirists contend with—the idea that my story was worth a spotlight at all. Who cares? I’d confess to other memoir-writing friends, who like me were shouldered with a story they knew they had to tell, but at odds with the prospect of putting themselves at the center of it.

But then something interesting happened as I continued to write. All the research I’d done? All the story arcs I’d carved out for Andre the Giant and other rare hormone cases just like ours? They all found their natural narrative grooves alongside my experiences. Memoir didn’t mean drowning out others’ drama with mine, but rather placing my story (and my family’s story, and my wife’s story) in careful conversation with that of others who might have struggled with rare illness, or seismic catastrophe, or, quite simply, having a family. It was a sleight of hand I didn’t anticipate but one I was pleased with. By finally entering the spotlight, I allowed it to widen and tell a story far beyond my own.

It was clear now. I was in memoir-land. All I had to do now was figure out what that meant. I had to adjust to a concept many memoirists

contend with—the idea that my story was worth a

spotlight at all.