Lanie Tankard

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir  

by Ander Monson

 Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, April 2010 (208 pp., paperback)

Ander Monson jump starts your brain’s synapses with different connections in his new nonmemoir, Vanishing Point. He observes society. He muses. He sprinkles in a few personal experiences. And he does his edgy best to ignore the self in a genre that is nothing but.  He forces the reader to consider memoir in a creative new light.

Monson has also written a book of essays, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, and a book of stories, Other Electricities, which appear on his website: http://otherelectricities.com/.

In Vanishing Point, Monson has pulled together eighteen essays. Because some were previously published as stand-alone pieces, the volume bears a certain lack of coherence throughout, a few glitches in segue. Even so, this postmodern book kept me mostly riveted during the entirety of a nonstop evening flight from San Jose to Austin. And besides, isn’t that actually how we think, with one thought springing off another all the time — veering askew of the main idea with which we began and funneling our paths through labyrinthine conduits to a meetup in the nethermost region of our minds?

Because Monson perused close to one hundred memoirs to analyze the field, I thought the 100 Memoirs website would be an appropriate venue for reviewing the result. His list of eighty-three at the end of Vanishing Point includes some excellent reads.

He asks valid questions: Are we being obliterated by information? He compares journalism (verifiable truth) and memoir, discusses individualism and collectivism, looks at memory prevention drugs like Versed in surgery, examines the reliability of eyewitness testimony, delves into fact checking for family history, considers the rerouting of synapses in false memories, and compares fiction and nonfiction. He visits respected sources, although full citations do not appear in the book. The protagonist in this masterful chronicle is memory.

The author offers many strong points to consider, such as: “When technique becomes popular fashion, it becomes overused. Its special qualities fall away. All that remains is fad.”

Monson says that he is trying to find the courage NOT to tell his story. And yet, he also parses events in his own life — moving, death, jury duty, eating. Instead of merely stating that he is moving, he thinks about what leaving a city means. He compares floppy disks and the tenure of a book to our life spans: “Thinking about the memoir, or our lives at all, is thinking about death, about technology, about how obsolete we all are soon to become….”

Does Monson’s book succeed in defying classification? He appears to me to have written a memoir despite his best efforts to avoid doing so. Is Vanishing Point possibly a memoir about memoir? The author certainly evinces a strong resistance to the category. The subtitle is “Not a Memoir,” yet at several points in the book Monson refers to it as “this memoir.” Hmmm, perhaps memoir just sneaks up on you when you least expect it?

At the same time, the author has psychoanalyzed the field in a highly engaging philosophical treatise. He weighs the frame narrative in terms of presenting the truth, and ponders framing the future in terms of the past. He casts memoir as map. He comments that “with GPS, the whole idea of being lost is now entirely quaint.” Monson mulls over memoir as palimpsest, wonders whether the self is a wiki, steps outside of himself to observe the ubiquitous use of free wireless at places such as Panera Bread: “Earbuds are in, so we are partly in our inner space.” At times, he reminded me of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. http://bit.ly/5aEmK9

What is a page? Monson decides to find out. He plays with layout and margins.  He trims the sides off letters. He repeats the word me across an entire page, saying “I am putting the me back in memoir for you.” He examines “all that protects us from white space.” He seeks meaning everywhere, wanting to “leave some Borges behind the wall…something visionary and meaningful.” He digresses on self-Googling. He wonders whether communicating with old friends via social media is forcing us into being our old selves again. He believes that the rise of memoir coincided with the rise of role-playing games, and casts memoirists as gamers — role playing, battling conditions, and triumphing. He has some thoughtful turns of phrase: “your fellow Internetters” and “tiny fingerlings” for small potatoes.

And yet he tries so hard not to write memoir that occasionally (to use one of his own statements) he “makes me want to hit him with a rolled up REM/Losing My Religion poster.”

I recommend Vanishing Point to any open-minded reader interested in memoir as a broad playing field. Monson posits, “It’s likely that we are not as individual as we would like to think” and offers solid food for thought on that idea.

            Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas.

One of the goals of this blog focuses on the quest to understand memoir as a genre. What differentiates it from other forms? Why is it both popular and maligned in the contemporary literary world? I named this category “books about memoir,” and you can find the posts stored in this category by using the handy category list in the right-hand column. Or you can follow this link to find previous posts which reviewed those books, sometimes commenting on how they define the genre. 

I have cited a few other writers on this subject, but none of the definitions in these posts were as fun as these from Chris Offutt as taken from Harper’s. Open the link and enjoy a laugh.

Do these definitions work as well as the serious ones for you? What do they reveal that the others lack? Or vice versa?

On Wednesday of this week, writer, teacher, and therapist, Linda Joy Myers will be doing a guest blog about the memoir writer’s relationship to family and friends–”How to Write Your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays.” The next day, I will post an interview with her in this space.

The giveaway works this way.  Read both blog posts, add your comments, and you will be entered in the chance to win your own copy of  The Power of Memoir. I will draw the winner from the names of all commenters.  Hope you will be among them.

If you want to become acquainted with Linda Joy now, I reviewed two of her previous books, and you can click on the following links: the memoir Don’t Call Me Motherand Becoming Whole.

  I am also pleased to announce that I will also host a guest post here at 100memoirs.com from Linda Joy Myers on March 24 and an interview with her on March 25 about her subject “How to Write your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays.” Linda Joy, who is an author, teacher, and therapist, will talk about what we owe other people, especially family members, who show up in our own published memoirs.

Linda has generously offered a giveaway of her new book The Power of Memoir to one of the lucky commenters on her guest post. I will explain how the giveaway works at the time I post Linda Joy’s essay.

Linda Joy also heads the National Association of Memoir Writers, a website that offers both free resources and membership for people engaged in memoir writing. You will also find a Facebook fan page for the organization. I recommend exploring this online community.

Both of the topics for these guest posts–the role of humor in memoir and the ethics of writing about family member–surfaced in the comments section of my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. If you followed that conversation, you will want to read these guests posts also.

Guest posting is still new to me. I am grateful to Lanie Tankard, who offered two excellent guest essays in this space about memoir clusters and touchstones. One thing I love about blogging is that I learn something new every day. Growth happens faster when I connect to other writers. I love to share what I learn with you.

The whole concept derives from a single story. Supposedly Ernest Hemingway was challenged to tell a story in six words and chose these:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

The fact that six words can punch you in the gut or make you laugh out loud has led to many book and magazine sales and many conversations around the dinner table and at work. Here is a video that offers more illustrations.

Now for the fun part. A contest. Please offer your own six-word memoir below. I will send to the winner a copy of a lovely hardcover book, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food,  a book I reviewed here on a previous blog post.

Here are the rules: tell a truth about your life in six words. No more. No less. I will pick the one I find funniest or most profound. If more than one bowls me over, I reserve the right to dish out more prizes of recently published books. If the winner doesn’t want to read the memoir of Julia Child’s editor (pictured on the left), I’ll offer some other tasty book morsel.

You can enter as often as you wish between now and Sunday January 17 at 5 p.m. Go!

As promised previously, I will describe not only what I learned from reading the book but also from reading it on the Kindle. First, the content, then the form.

You would think a book that consists mostly of plot summaries and catalogs of other books could be deadly dull. I admit that there were a few times I skimmed past pages filled mostly with book titles. But the author’s own enthusiasm for his discoveries (previous books describing memoirs in a certain period and privileged information about sales numbers) and his spritely style kept me thoroughly engaged.

The structure, which includes both British and American works over centuries of time interspersed by a short summary of contemporary theory, and a conclusion that lists all memoirists and autobiographers, serves its purpose well. Yagoda has written the definitive research companion for those of us fascinated as much by the popularity of the genre as by individual memoirs.

Here are some gems gleaned from the book:

“As for fiction . . .it’s hard to find an important American novel that’s not some variation on a memoir.”

“Autobiography more than any other genre, trades on its authenticity and credibility. If those qualities are understood to be lacking in a memoir, why would anyone possibly take it seriously or even bother to read it?”

“In experiment after experiment, study after study, subsequent phychologists have gone a good deal farther, establishing that memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it.  It is itself a creative writer, cobbling together ‘actual’ memories, beliefs about the world, cues from a variety of sources, and memories of previous memories to plausibly imagine what might have been, and then, in a master stroke, packing this scenario to the mind as the real one.”

“C.S. Barclay has observed that most of our autobiographical memories are ‘reconstructions aimed at preserving the essential integrity’ of our sense of ourselves and our histories. They are, he wrote, largely ‘true but inaccurate.’”

Psychologist Daniel Schacter in his book The Seven Sins of Memory identifies five persistent memory biases:

“Consistency and change biases show how our theories about ourselves can lead us to reconstruct the past as overly similar to or different from, the present. Hindsight biases reveal that recollections of past events are filtered by current knowledge. Egocentric biases illustrate the powerful role of the self in orchestrating perceptions and memories of reality. And stereotypical biases demonstrate how generic memories shape interpretations of the world, even when we are unaware of their existence or influence.”

“In fact, there is an inherent and irresolvable conflict between the capabilities of memory and the demands of narrative. The latter demands specifics; the former is really bad at them.”

Yagoda describes humorist memoirists from Twain to Sedaris who have created an enormously influential voice of “near-nuclear power of a self-deprecating narrator deploying hyperbole based on shrewd and perceptive observation.”

1854 illustrates the difference between American and English traditions in memoir because it is the date when two contrasting memoirs were published–P.T. Barnum’s (the self-promoter) and John Stuart Mill (who stipulated that his memoirs be published only after his death).

For me, the section on memory itself, from which most of the quotes above come, and the section on the American memoir craze of the 1950′s, with its rosy contrast to today’s “misery memoirs” were most telling. Also, every age in which memoir is popular becomes an age in which memoir-bashing becomes an indoor sport also. Anyone who aspires to understand his or her own life inside the spirit of the age needs to read this book.

Now, a word about the process of reading and reviewing from a Kindle copy of a book.

Strengths:

1. I can search the text! Once, I wanted to find a reference to Mary Karr.  All I had to do was go to Menu, type in the name, and locate the four places where it appears. I could go to anyone of the four by moving the cursor.

2. I was able to underline portions as I read.  Then, in order to share them here, I could locate them and type them out.

Weaknesses:

1. A good index at the back of a hard copy book can serve the same purpose as a searchable text.

2. Navigation in the highlights is pretty “clunky” while still serving as an improvement over flipping back through many pages of underlining.

Bottom Line: I recommend the book in any form. And I think I will find the electronic copy adequate to my needs. So, I guess the Kindle gets a thumbs up too!

Today I got out my six-month-old Kindle and spent 20 seconds ordering the two books–Mary Karr’s Lit and Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History. These are books #5 and #6 I have ordered.  I now have a library of about 15 titles, including some free ones, on my Kindle.

This Christmas season Amazon announced that electronic books have outsold hard copy books for the first time.  I am beginning to understand why. While I still love to hold a single book in my hand and write my comments in the margins, I am warming to the idea of electronic books, now that I have had time to play with the Kindle a bit more and have ordered books for different purposes.

My first e-books were book club selections. I ordered electronically because I had only a month to read the book and little or no time to go to libraries and book stores. I wrote a blog post comparing Kindle to the Nook when the new reader, the Nook, came out and explained some of my early forays into the electronic book world here.

The two books pictured above are the first books I would previously have gone out of my way to order as hard copies. Thus, I felt a little unfaithful to the old form  book when I ordered them today. Previously, I probably would have ordered them as used books online. However, in this case, I saved money by placing a Kindle edition order, because the books were recently published and therefore not available cheaply as used books.  I even paid more ($14.27) than the usual price for an e-book to get the Yagoda book, but it would have cost more to order it new or used, and it would have taken days for it to arrive. In both cases, the digital price was the cheapest price and obviously the only one that could put the book in my lap in seconds. 

I will attempt to underline the books as I read them–something that is supposedly possible but sounds like it might be cumbersome.

What experiences have you had with e-books and e-book readers? Will you pledge to remain faithful to paper books, or will you ditch them easily and eagerly for digital books?

This one is different. Nancy K. Miller has written a witty and thoughtful book about memoir. She writes about her own life while splicing in bits of contrast and comparison with other memoirs written by contemporaries. She also takes the reader on a tour of the times which influence the stories she shares–by showing us what she was wearing (in the 60′s it was a knit dress) and telling us what she and others of her generation were doing.

At the heart of this book lies a fascinating assertion that memoir as a genre is not narcissistic or solipsistic (as its critics claim) but rather communal. Having turned 50 in the decade of the 1990′s, Miller began to gobble up memoir and discovered as she did so she was simultaneously excavating her own life and contributing to the larger narrative of educated women’s lives after the upheavals of the 1960′s. To use postmodernist language, she sees her own life as a text connected to other texts.

All that sounds a little pretentious and heavy-handed when I describe it, but not when Miller does so at her best.  Listen to her explain her intent:  “I explore two propositions: the first, that the subjects of life writing (memoir, diary, essay, confession) are as much others as ourselves; the second, that reading the lives of other people with whom we do not identify has as much to tell us (if not more) about our lives as the lives in which we do.” and “When I read the lives of others, I also see my childhood, my mother, the craziness of my family.”

When Miller reads the memoir of another woman who graduated from Hunter College, she recognizes that her own memories are so different they might have taken place in different cities if not on different planets. She concludes therefore that memoir teaches us that “all we have are flashes.” Not only that, but these flashes are more like fiction than history.

To give you the real flavor of her style and her thesis, here’s the last paragraph from the title essay: “That’s why I devour memoirs the way some people read detective stories or thrillers.  After all, there are crimes, mostly of the heart, and mysteries. Memoirs provide me with suspense of a different order. Will she stop falling in love with the wrong man, get a better job . . . sit down and write her poetry, her novel, or her memoir. Will you? You think, OK, her life is populated by famous and semifamous people; her life is glamorous or tragic. Your father wasn’t a writer or a cook, just a lawyer or a businessman. Your mother didn’t drink or suffer from tuberculosis. You didn’t grow up in Ceylon or, closer to home, Texas. You are not now, thank God, dying of breast cancer, or AIDS. But still, you can’t help returning to your own life as if there were some magical, meaningful thread leading from the memoir writers to you. The six degrees of separation that mark the distance from your life to another’s are really, as it turns out, degrees of connection. And my memoir is also about you.”

Nancy K. Miller’s memoir is not about me. Yet she is right about the way in which I compare my life to hers as I read about her urban education (in contrast to my rural one), her Jewish upbringing (in contrast to my Mennonite one), her dance lessons with Martha Graham (in contrast to no permission to dance), etc. Yet we have much in common also.  We were professors and now we are moving into old age, reflecting, remembering, wanting to understand ourselves, others, and the ages in which we have lived.

Is Miller right about memoir being more like fiction than history?

When you read memoir, how does it teach you about yourself–both in the commonalities and the differences?

The subtitles of memoir books usually offer clues to the particular niche the author aims for.  This time we have memoir as “healing story.”  Myers is a practicing psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area who teaches memoir writing classes and has written her own memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother. The author uses occasional snippets from her own memoir as examples of the writing principles she describes, and throughout the book she draws upon her own experience with memoir writing as a way to frame issues for the reader.

Becoming Whole offers very practical guidance combining some of the free writing exercises Natalie Goldberg made famous with a whole field of memoir-as-therapy. Have you ever heard of a writing therapist?  Music therapy and art therapy probably sound more familiar, but writing therapy is making its way, too.

Early in the book Myers refers to research conducted by James Pennebaker, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and published in his 1990 book Opening Up:  The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. In this book Pennebaker described a study comparing a control group of people who were asked to write lists and plans for the day with another group who used the same 15 minutes to write about “your very deepest thoughts and feelings” about the “most traumatic moments in your life.”  The positive health impact on the second group was remarkably different from the first.

Based on this research, previous pioneers (Willhelm Reich), and subsequent studies, a field of writing and psychology has emerged.  Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smythe have pioneered something they call The Writing Cure.  Myers builds on this psychological base to create her own book for writers that could also serve as a guide for therapists and writing teachers who are drawn to the idea of writing as healing.  Writing about positive emotions and a positive future leads to improvement in both physical and mental health.

The book contains very practical guidelines and suggestions for how to organize fragments of memory into an integrated whole.  I recommend that you add it to your library and don’t just borrow it from the library.  This is a book that begs for notes in the margins and underlining (all my books are such beggars!).  I will leave you with a quote from Myers that describes the benefits of writing as therapy:  “When you write a healing memoir, one that probes the depth and breadth of your identity and sense of self, you will find yourself at a place different from where you began–and you will know the place for the very first time.”

T. S. Eliot said the same thing, of course, earlier and more poetically.  But Myers does something poets seldom, if ever, do.  She charts a path for how such transformation might take place.

Now it is later–more than 20 years later.  I am writing, albeit very slowly.  This week I submitted two short memoirs and a poem to a local literary contest.  And I am writing to you, here, right now, in this moment.

A fitting way to honor Natalie Goldberg’s classic text, having just read the new and expanded version, will be to do a timed writing to illustrate one of her most important ideas.  First, however, I want to note a few other items of interest from the book.  The interview at the back sheds much light on the journey Goldberg has been on and contains a lot of her philosophy in nugget form.  For example, she explains why she loves memoir:  “Memoir is the study of how memory works.  It’s analogous to writing practice, to working with the mind.”  Goldberg loves that memory works in flashes and slices, not in linear chronology. By extension, one could add, the structure of a memoir should help us see the writer’s mind.  Memoir.  Memory. Mind.  We can call them the 3-M Company–the magic behind writing down the bones.

Now, to illustrate a timed writing.  Here’s how it works.  First, you pick a subject.  If you are in a workshop, Natalie picks the subject.  But I am going to pick this one myself, something Natalie recommends when you are ready.  She prefers that students write by hand, just as fast as they can keep a pen moving over the paper, but that won’t work with a blog.  So I will give myself ten minutes to write on one of the ideas I enjoy after reading this book and attending the workshop:  what does it mean to go slow and be dumb?

I have rushed at life.  Born first of five children, I exploded out of the womb and then tried my hardest to grow up before anyone could slow me down. I liked friends who were older because I thought they would induct me in the mysteries.  I remember convincing Mother to buy me high-heeled shoes at the age of 12 so that I could know what it was to be an adult.  I am amazed now that she did that.  I can only assume that Mother was reliving her own childhood and adolescence and enjoyed pushing forward to new adventures also.  I liked to finish as many books as possible and only read a few favorites slowly.  So when Natalie says a writer must learn to be slow and dumb, I feel a little chastened by all that pellmell speed in my life. I think I am only slow when it really matters.  I hope it will really matter more to me to be slow.  They say it is amazing to watch Thich Nhat Hanh move in the world.  I got a glimpse of that by walking behind Natalie in the workshop for ten minutes.  I tried to think of each foot as an anchor and to think of all the bones that ground me in each step.  I don’t know what it means to be dumb because I have spent my life aching to be smart.  But even that is not true altogether, because I have not had the luxury of others plowing the field of higher education before me.  I discovered on my own that people will tell you much more if you ask them how to do something (treat them like they are smart) rather than try to show them how smart you are.  I have called this being a “babe in the woods” and noticed how helpful people are if you humble yourself.  Buddhists call this beginner’s mind.  I think I have changed jobs every 4-8 years all my life because that way I got to have beginner’s mind again.

I stopped because the time was up.  If I were handwriting, I think I would have written a little more than that.  I will refrain from judging–and invite you to do the same! If we were in class, and I read this piece aloud, Natalie would ask what you recall.  If you said something like, “I was the first person in my family to go to college, too,”  Natalie would wave dismissively.  “Just the words.  What were the words?”  People might say things like high-heels.  And I could only assume my mother was living her own life over again, etc.  The writer learns quickly that the specific image is the one that lingers.  I did not have too many sensory-rich images in this piece, so it will not likely stick in your memory or mine.  However, I hope the illustration helped you see what happens in the workshop and imagine how valuable it can be to learn from direct experiences like these.  What it cannot do is replicate what happens to your mind when you practice writing every day.  Ironically, writing as fast as possible, trying to capture all the random thoughts as they come, is the key to becoming slow and dumb. Sounds like a koan?! 

What kind of writer are you?  Fast? Smart? Slow? Dumb?