The Memoirs We Need
By Daniel Born
“I have shown myself as . . . contemptible and vile when that is how I was, good, generous, sublime, when that is how I was; I have disclosed my innermost self as you alone know it to be.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
“If you can fake authenticity,” an old friend used to say, “you’ve got it made.” Never has that maxim made more sense than at the present time. The reading public’s insatiable appetite for memoir shows no signs of abating—no matter how lurid, ridiculous, or just plain confected the story may be. Even more remarkable, as Terry Caesar’s Bookends piece in this issue reminds us, it’s no longer merely the human experience that attracts such attention: Now, in the posthuman quest for higher wisdom, we must grapple with the dog’s life as well.
So I wonder: If I fake my imaginary dog’s memoir and get exposed on Oprah, can I too become a celebrity? I have already thought of a title: A Million Little Milk Bones.
The memoirists keep making up their fantastic versions of heartfelt sincerity, and readers, unable to resist, keep biting. Margaret B. Jones, a half-white, half-native American child who grows up abused by her black foster mother, takes to the streets of south Los Angeles. Embracing her inner thug, the 12-year-old Jones pedals drugs for the Bloods street gang. Compelling for sure, except that the would-be memoirist of Love and Consequences is entirely fabricated by one Margaret Seltzer, a middle-class woman raised in Sherman Oaks and educated at the exclusive Campbell Hall Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. Seltzer confessed the deception to the media only after her 47-year-old sister spotted a profile of the former gangbanger Jones in the New York Times and subsequently tattled on Setzer to her publisher, Riverhead Books.
Her mother, Gay Seltzer, expressed contrition—almost—when a Los Angeles Times reporter asked her about her daughter’s literary derring-do. “I think she got caught up in the facts of the story she was trying to write,” the paper reported the mother as saying. “She’s always been an activist and she tried to draw on the immediacy of the situation and became caught up in the persona of the narrator.” One senses this family has workshopped a lot of creative nonfiction.
Other whoppers take longer to uncover. One of the most spectacular in recent years is that of Misha Defonseca, whose parents, members of the Jewish Belgian resistance, were arrested by the Nazis when Misha was seven. The irrepressible Misha had a story to tell. As Nilanajana S. Roy summarizes her account in the Business Standard, she “set off to find her parents. Over the next five years, she walked roughly 3,000 miles; she visited the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, was adopted by a pack of wolves who guided her through the journey, and killed a German soldier who was bent on raping her.” Her popular 1997 memoir, Surviving with Wolves, has sold several million copies.
The problem, as Roy points out, is that Misha Defonseca is a fabrication. Only this spring was it discovered that her actual name is Monique de Wael; she is not Jewish; she grew up in a comfortable flat in Brussels. It is true that her parents were part of the Belgian resistance movement and disappeared when she was four. Oh, and by the way, this also is true: Monique loves both dogs and wolves.
Gathered together, the names on the fraudulent memoir list from recent years form an imposing army; Kristina Lindgren of the Los Angeles Times has compiled a useful directory of them. These include J. T. LeRoy, an ex-drug addict and hustler who is actually the New York writer Laura Albert; Binjamin Wilkomirski, another Holocaust memoirist who won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography in 1996 with his searing account of survival in two Nazi death camps, only to be outed as the faker Bruno Grosjean Dessekker, in fact raised in Switzerland; and Tom Carew, author of Jihad! Jihad! The Secret War in Afghanistan (2001). Carew, whose real name is Philip Anthony Sessarego, claimed to be a secret agent for Britain’s Special Air Services during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, when in fact he was a former member of the Royal Artillery with a gift for literary storytelling.
When have we ever asked a literary genre to bear so much existential weight? Why, as the journalist Nilanjana Roy asks, do we “remain so fascinated by the memoir, with its increasingly dubious promise of truth”?
Some of the blame might be ascribed to the French philosopher and man of letters Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who brilliantly read his audience’s thirst for authenticity. As he boldly claimed at the outset of his landmark work Confessions—published posthumously in the 1780s—“This is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and will probably ever exist.” Rousseau understood the value of throwing down the gauntlet for all memoirists to come. And he pointed out the temptation to any would-be memoirist: “No one can write a man’s life except himself. His inner mode of being, his true life, is known only to himself; and yet in writing it he disguises it; under the cover of his life’s story, he offers an apology; he presents himself as he wants to be seen, not at all as he is.”
How, then, to present the self? Rousseau generously provided practical rhetorical instruction on how to achieve truthful effects. Most important among these tips is the understanding that a memoir in which the author appears as the hero of his own tale is less credible than one that showcases both noble and shameful behavior. “My task is to tell the truth, not persuade others of it,” he famously declares. And so Rousseau presents all his actions, including the most dastardly acts: giving up his own infant children to an orphanage, and participating at one point in what can only be understood as a serial gangbang of a young woman (“the poor little thing”)—after which he tells us that he felt “ashamed” of himself. Rousseau’s book lives up to its title, tellingly cribbed from an earlier master, Augustine.
Much of the current crop of fake memoirs aggressively embraces Rousseau’s lesson. Wallowing in the moral abyss, and then opining about the adjunct guilt and shame, will always score you points on the authenticity meter. Hence our fascination with gang members, junkies, ex-cons, very bad girls—all predictably victims of child abuse, alcoholic parents, and general dysfunction. Although the blueprint by now is a little ragged from use, it’s easy to overlook this fact when presented with a happy ending. It seems American readers’ brains are hard-wired for a narrative structure of sin and suffering (the more raw, the better), followed by absolute redemption. It’s a cliché that has become an easily winning formula—and that makes it ripe for confabulation.
For Rousseau, the only kind of redemption is that which comes from being believed. And the proof that he’s been honest with us lies in his inability to suppress the petty quality of his own character. In one of my favorite passages of the book, toward the very end, he declares, “I have told the truth. . . . I hereby declare publicly and without fear: that anyone who, without even having read my writings, examines with his own eyes my nature, my character, my morals, my inclinations, my pleasures, my habits, and can think me a dishonourable man, is himself a man who ought to be choked.”
Now this is authenticity: a person who seems incapable of—or unwilling to—covering anything up.
One way to get around this troublesome business of the truth is to claim literary license up front. Ernest Hemingway did it in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of the Lost Generation writers in Paris during the 1920s, when he wrote in the preface, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”
Biographers may argue about what parts of the book are true, but it’s not its facticity that makes us keep reading A Moveable Feast. (As Oscar Wilde might say, there are no true or false memoirs, only memoirs that are well written or badly written—that is all.) Rousseau, if he were here, would tell us what keeps us coming back to Hemingway’s literary classic: The memoir, in spite of its author’s most polished efforts to depict himself in a positive light, will ultimately reveal the character of the writer.
Hemingway tells story after story that casts his peers and literary rivals in a negative light. The effect of these stories can be amusing, but they are also a reminder of the unrelenting cruelty of Papa’s heart. Most notoriously perhaps, there is Hemingway’s hilarious account of F. Scott Fitzgerald asking for reassurance in a restaurant men’s room about the adequacy of his equipment. And here is Hemingway describing one of his conversations with erstwhile mentor Gertrude Stein:
“What about his novels?” I asked her. She did not want to talk about Anderson’s works any more than she would talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.
Hemingway’s own obsession with his place in the writing pantheon, passed off as one of Gertrude’s problems, veritably leaps out from the page. And it’s the delivery of a sudden flash of revelation and insight like this that makes the experience of reading memoirs worthwhile. These are the kinds of memoirs we need, and it’s too bad that so many of the first-person derivative spawn, wrapping themselves lately in the mantle of truth, have given the genre such a bad name. •