On the Essay

Lenore (winner of the Style Weekly fiction contest,with a powerful short story, and also mother of one of the Junior Member of the Household's favorite people in the universe), stops by the Hinterlands "Creative vs. Narrative vs. Literary" entry (a.k.a. my own entirely subjective guide to nonfiction's finer distinctions) and asks:

Would you say a bit more about essays - such as the differences among personal essays and various types of memoir (if there are various types.)? Annie Dillard's work and Ehrlich's "Match to the Heart" seem like memoir, as well as fitting into the narrative nonfiction category.

Repeating the "entirely subjective" disclaimer here--I welcome other thoughts on these issues as we grope towards setting some parameters around these terms--I happily wax forth (can you wax forth?) on this topic.

I've noted (not here, but to myself) that memoir is a genre that a certain number of critics love to hate, though when they are disparaging it as self-indulgent drivel, what they really are talking about is not the entire genre of memoir but, usually, the disease-and-dysfunction memoir subset.  But, as with all realms of literature, the truth is that within this subset there are  mediocre-to-terrible, formulaic books that are clearly just a publisher's effort to cash in on the latest disease/trauma of the moment, and there are also powerful, engaging narratives.  In this latter category I'd include books such as the wonderfully mordant Slackjaw (oooh look, he's got a new book!  Ruining it for Everybody .  Love the title. It's on my list. ), A Match to the Heart, Girl Interrupted (which is MUCH better than the movie made from it).  In the best of such books, the story is only the framework on which the author builds something much larger.

For example Girl, Interrupted is often quite funny, and written in short, terse chapters.  Why it was almost hopeless to try to make a movie from it is that the language is everything.  It's Kaysen's voice, and the way she plays out a scene, that makes the book more than just another "I go to the crazy-house" story.

The book is in part about entering a limbo of going nowhere--to be in a setting that is both utterly structured and yet, for the residents, almost completely removed from any sense of past or future or purpose or direction, a kind of suffocating non-life that makes you think, as you're reading, "I'd go crazy if I had to live like that."  Exactly.  In one part, she writes about "checks," the frequency with which the psychiatric hospital staff had to check on any one resident--five-minute checks, ten-minute, fifteen-minute.

It never stopped.... It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons.  Soup spoons, maybe?  Dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by withour our savoring it: our lives.

Slackjaw is a riff on suicide attempts, mental illness, a drinking problem, blindness and head injury--all the author's.  (Sorry, got distracted for a bit reading it here....)

And yes, I wrote a memoir too, and interestingly I think my publisher was rather more hoping for disease-of-the-week and I was more interested in questions about identity and exploring how it was possible to be at the same time "perfectly normal" and yet, it seemed, completely around the bend.  Well, there's a long story about all that, Skin Game's evolution, which, in the unlikely event that you all clamor for it, I can go on about on another day.

But anyway (did I digress?) we come at last to Lenore's question about the difference between a first-person narrative or essay and a "memoir."  "Essay" is first a form, in the way that a short-story is one form and a novel another.  And an essay collection, like a short-story collection, is often a series of self-contained shorter pieces that collectively build to something larger. Anyway, we presume that an essay will be more compact in length, that "essay" is a term about structure (and do we all remember our first school lessons in "the essay"?  Introductory paragraph, 1-3 paragraphs of supporting text, concluding paragraph.  And inevitably deadly dull, limp and lifeless as 3-week-old celery.  How many of us have ever taught English/composition to older students and had to struggle mightily to root out that idea so firmly planted in our students' minds by their earlier education?).

Within the form are different types of essay, the travel essay, the critical essay, and that rather vague, catch-all term, the "personal" essay.  What is a "personal" essay?  Ideally, a piece in which the author's personal and particular experience is like the central melody in a jazz piece, on which the author riffs and develops in interesting ways.

Some essays are a hybrid--some travel essays are quite personal, for example.  And that would be true also for book-length works.  Take The Worst Journey in the World.  Is it memoir or adventure writing?  Well it's a damn good read, so who cares, but the spine on my copy is printed "HISTORY/MEMOIR."  (Though one might ask, isn't any memoir inherently  "history"? )

I say "memoir" is a book in which the author's personal and particular experience is the story line.  So The Worst Journey in the World (which is about the author, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's trip to Antarctica with the doomed Scott expedition) is a memoir, because the story line is AC-G's trip to Antarctica.  To be certain, it's a travel/adventure memoir, but a memoir nonetheless.   By contrast, Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania (or How I Traveled to the South Pacific and Hated Everything I Saw and Everyone I Met) is much more about Theroux's observations than it is about Theroux paddling around the Pacific.  In the same way, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book built not upon Annie Dillard (about whom we learn very little) but on Annie Dillard's observations of the natural world around her.  It's a very personal book, in that we can't imagine it from anyone's hand but Dillards, but it's not a memoir.  I'd call it narrative nonfiction, because the author is very much present in the text, and it's a book we read  as much (if not more) for the pleasure its writing gives than for the subject itself.  Whereas I'd call A Match to the Heart "memoir," because Gretel Ehrlich's personal and particular experience of being struck by lightning is the core of the book, that unifying melody that runs through it.

These are subtle distinctions, I know, but I think they work.  Let's test out these ideas on some different books and see if they hold up.  Anyone?

Oh, one more to add on the memoir column: Joan Didion's new book Year of Magical Thinking--deeply personal and particular, and yet, of course, as we would expect from Didion, much more.  At least, based on the part I've read thus far that was excerpted in the NYTimes mag.  At once so measured and so permeated with grief, I actually had to stop reading it.

Comments

[Lenore]

Thanks, Caroline for the clarifcation.

I'd seen Tinker Creek as memoir, but now I get that it's narrative nonfiction. Of course An American Life is memoir, but perhaps Holy the Firm occupies a middle terrain between memoir and narrative? It felt quite personal, to me. Annie Dillard seems to roam all over the huge nonfiction map.

One thing I am clear about,in my opinion, she's better with nonfiction. I couldn't get through The Living, the novel was soporific. I regretted paying the hardback price. (I believe it's her only attempt, with good reason!)

Thanks for your blog, Caroline. I'm enjoying my first foray into the world of blogdom.
Lenore

[fred1st]

Okay, I have some language to use here. I have my eventual book of personal narratives (not always essays) that are mostly about nature and place but never divorced from my point of view, and partly about how we ended up in Floyd in the first place. I need to be able to tell a book store where to shelve the thing (once I decide how I will get it between covers) so your words here are a help. So thanks!