Memoirs and Autobiographies: S & D

Destroy: any memoir written by anyone who's done a job you've had, especially if they're the depressive type. The bad memories come flooding back and you want to jump off a bridge. I'm staying as far from that hep kitchen memoir everyone recommends to me as I can, thanks...

Related to this thread: I was in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts last weekend visiting a friend and we were walking down the street and she pointed to an old woman across the street from us (after saying hello to her) and said that she was the mother of Augusten Burroughs(sic?) the author of Running With Scissors!! I couldn't believe it. I enjoyed that book a lot. And anyone who has read it will know what a big part his mother plays in it. It was strange to look at someone, a total stranger really, and know so much about them. And not good stuff either!

Annie Dillard: An American Childhood

Ray Bradbury: Dandelion Wine (which is really an autobiography of sorts)

If you want to read more along that line, try Bukowski's Post Office, Women and Ham on Rye. Now memoirs per se, but they read like one and you know he probably wasn't making up much of what he was writing about.

I recently read Wendell Berry's The Long-Legged House, which is actually his first book of essays, just reprinted from 1969 by Shoemaker and Hoard (who deserve a separate thread devoted to their awesomeness). Anyway, the essay of the same name which appears in that book is what we would today call a memoir; in it Berry discusses the lifelong blooming of his love for the part of Kentucky where he grew up, and again, it's so much richer than my stupid description would ever indicate. In fact, if it is a memoir, it's one of the greatest memoirs I've ever read.

G.K. Chesterton has an autobiography, titled, appropriately, Autobiography. (I should cross-post this to the GKC thread we have going. It's probably one of his better books, since GKC was always writing about himself anyway, though in a peculiarly un-self-involved, un-self-aggrandizing way.) And most of the great mystical literature is "autobiographical"--Bunyan (who I'm sure is not everybody's favorite), Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Augustine (also kind of a dick, but you can't ignore him), Newman, etc.

And C.S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy is amazing. What's more fucked up is that right after he published that book (a memoir in which the word "joy," used in a theological sense, becomes sort of the keynote), he got involved with Joy Gresham, fell in love for the first time, then being broken open as she was diagnosed with cancer and eventually died. I'm not wishing it on him, but all his late-'50s books are richer and wiser, seemingly as a result of this experience, than his stuff from the '40s (compare the first Narnia book or The Problem of Pain to The Four Loves, Reflections on the Psalms or Till We Have Faces). So he was surprised by Joy twice.

Have you read Lewis' A Grief Observed? It's excepts from his journal while coping with Joy's death. I've always thought it was his best, most emotional, most human, work.

There's also, more recently, AE's Candle of Vision, which matter-of-factly discusses his experiences with the supernatural. Seek it out if you're into that, and even more so if you dig Yeats and Dunsany.

Absolutely agreed. Simply comparing that one to Problem of Pain makes pretty tangible the contrast I was trying to set up between '40s Lewis and '50s Lewis. It's a wrenching book.
His letters are pretty great, too. That should be another thread--which author's-collected-letters books do you bother with?

There is an extraneous 's' in my last post. I will allow you the fun of spotting it for yourself.
-- Jerry the Nipper (jerrythenippe...), March 8th, 2004.

Yes.

Morley's 'Nothing's hould be mentioned here, I think.

and see also:
Biographies and Autobiographies About Authors, S/D

ms mac is v much into her biogs/autobiogs and its getting to near christmas hoarding time. recommendations of well-written books about interesting people gratefully accepted.

thinking sterling hayden's wanderer, is there a good one of christopher lee? etc etc

currently reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown about his experiences growing up in Harlem in the late 40s & 50s. He got into some petty crime an d got sent to reform school a couple of times, came out started dealing, got robbed moved into education. Interesting book.

I was hoping it would be an echo of

Pimp by Iceberg Slim which is a fictionalised account of his similar upbringing.

but Brown is its own thing, still interesting but not as snappy as Slim

Most biogs Ive read are either music or sports related to be honest which is probably not Ms Macs thing... Iain McCalman's bio on 18th Century mystic-charlatan-celebrity Count Cagliostro is quite triffic.

!

Just read Scott Mills' one. Should be starting a new column for V**E where I do really earnest reviews of celebrity biographies I get in Poundland.

whats the ! all about?

sounds perfect

is it called Scott Mills: A Life in Monochrome?

Scott Mills: Love You Bye

Not too bad as far as these things go. Racing through Lee Mack's 'Mack the Life' which is proving to be shamefully entertaining. Dreading reading the Rowland Rivron one.

Favorites:

Luis Buñuel - My Last Sigh
Gore Vidal - Palimpsest
Jean-Paul Sartre - The Words
Martin Amis - Experience
Philip Roth - Patrimony
Simone de Beauvoir - A Very Easy Death

The last great one I read was Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence is v good, dunno if it fits the bill though.

Very much would i think, she has damned near a fetish for mothy english intellectual types iirc

lauren slater, 'lying'

what's the genealogy for this kind of literary memoir, with this voice? everything has the hell written out of it, for sure, but somehow reading it i feel like there would be no point to thinking seriously about it, not because of the author's business about not telling the truth, but just because the stylization seems so automatic now - and i am not a person who reads a lot of contemporary 'literary' non/fiction - that it seems like there could be little to it but performance. i guess i felt similarly reading maggie nelson last year.