Mary Karr’s op ed several weeks ago, a subject of one of my earlier posts,  made the case that Obama’s memoir offers important insights about how he would lead, based on the difficult task of the excellent memoir writer–sorting fragments of memory into a cohesive, honest, narrative large enough to contain paradox.

David Kirkpatrick, in his recent New York Times essay called “Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life,” chronicles the construction of John McCain’s public persona.  The headline, however, is a bit misleading.  It was Mark Salter, McCain’s trusted friend and speech writer, who constructed the narrative in the most important McCain memoir, Faith of My Fathers, which, once published, became the source of all future political stories.  Salter took McCain’s own memories as well as his favorite stories and heroes–  Marlon Brando’s films, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He created a narrative about self-sacrifice as a family tradition after finding a quote from McCain’s grandfather to his father in the Navy archives.

McCain’s memoir has been described by former campaign manager John Weaver as very important to his political success.  It made his persona much grander, more cause-oriented than it had been before.  Weaver concludes, “The book played a major role in creating the brand that has served McCain so well.”

All of this analysis of memoir in the news leads me to wonder how the campaigns of the future will look.  Will more memoir in politics lead to more artificiality or more authenticity?  Will we get a real voice or one created for political expediency?

My guess is that Joe the plumber is getting offers for a memoir right now!

Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including

and

describes why memoir writing is a good test of a leader’s character and intelligence:  “a president, like a memoirist, must be able to hold in his mind highly incendiary paradoxes and communicate those contradictions to a broad and overheated audience. Think of Lincoln during the Civil War.”

If the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote is true–”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”–then Barack Obama has the very kind of mind we need most in these troubled times.  His speech on race was the turning point for me in deciding I was with him to the end.  He talked about the incendiary stain on the American Dream–racism– in terms that were clear, courageous, and paradoxical. No other politician since Lincoln himself has held both sides of a such an important debate so gracefully, so lovingly.

Obama writes his own books, drafts his own speeches, and thinks his own thoughts, while respecting those of others. Yes, words do matter.  And this kind of writer and thinker comes along only once a century.

John McCain’s memoirs

were written with (by?) his speech writer and long-time staffer, Mark Salter, profiled earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.  I have not read them.  Maybe I should.  Or maybe someone out there can tell me how much evidence there is in these memoirs that McCain has the capacity to be Lincolnesque in his ability to hold together “highly incendiary paradoxes.”  What I hear when I listen to McCain speak is not paradox but artificial, incendiary, clarity, such as these final words from his acceptance speech:  “Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

If memoir writing is poor preparation for the presidency, as Republicans have claimed and Mary Karr denies, wouldn’t it be even more embarrassing to be a pseudo memoir writer?  John McCain’s name is huge on these covers, but he split the royalties 50-50 with the staffer who did the writing.  If someone outsources writing to others, how do we know he won’t outsource thinking and wisdom also?

The book club meets at 7 p.m. once each month.  The hosting rotates among the six members–Sandy, Kim, Mary, Hope, Karen, and me.  We usually begin with drinks, sit at a dining room table, eat hors d’oeuvres and desserts and tell where we did or did not connect with the book, whether we trust the author’s voice, and what we think we learned from reading the book.

In the past year our group discussed Night by Elie Wiesel, Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, One Drop by Bliss Broyard, Boom by Tom Brokaw, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. Last night the book club met at my house, and the book under discussion was

.

Baptist minister Don Piper is the “I” of the story, but he freely admits that he needed his co-author, Cecil Murphey, to shape the tale.

Don Piper boils down his story this way:  “I died on January 18, 1989. . . . Immediately after I died, I went straight to heaven.  While I was in heaven, a Baptist preacher came on the accident scene.  Even though he knew I was dead, he rushed to my lifeless body and prayed for me.  Despite the scoffing of the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) , he refused to stop praying.  At least ninety minutes after the EMTs pronounced me dead, God answered that man’s prayers.  I returned to earth.”

None of the members of the book club are Baptists, so I was curious about how such an overtly religious book would be received.  The first responses were positive.  The book got high marks for readability, pacing, and dramatic narrative.  No one questioned the validity of the story.

Overall, however, the assessment of the book came down to the assessment of the voice, the character of Don Piper, the man who tells the story.  Here the group became much more critical.  The book seemed to be written the confirm the truth of theological claims rather than to share the transformation of a life.  Piper goes out of his way to distance himself, for example, from other narratives of death survival  He doesn’t go into the light, he wants us to know, he goes straight to Christian heaven.

When his description follows familiar biblical narratives (yes, he walked on streets of gold and saw the pearly gates), it may be comforting to fellow believers, but it is not compelling reading.   However, when he tries to describe the ineffable without the aid of the Bible, he is much more convincing.   I loved his description of heavenly music:  “I can only describe it as a holy swoosh of wings. But I’d have to magnify that thousands of times to explain the effect of the sound in heaven.  It was the most beautiful and pleasant sound I’ve ever heard, and it didn’t stop.

It was like a song that goes on forever.  I felt awestruck, wanting only to listen.  I didn’t just hear music.  It seemed as if I were a part of the music–and it played in and through my body.  I stood still, and yet I felt embraced by the sounds. . . .My heart filled with the deepest joy I’ve ever experienced.”

We book clubbers wanted to see not only the glories of heaven, but also tenderness, joy, and larger vision as a result of a visit to heaven.  Piper’s pain in his crushed body understandably took precedence over what might have been more of an immediate transformation.  His recovery, especially his ability to walk, is the second miracle in the story, again brought about by the prayers and support of loved ones. One person we wanted to know a lot more about was his wife Eva.  She is a very flat character, and, surely, she must have a story of her own!  Piper continued as a minister and is using this story for evangelical purposes.  The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies!

In the end, we gave this book 2 stars out of 4 and had a wonderful conversation about our own spiritual experiences, heaven, hell, miracles and religious backgrounds.  The book may not have been a great one, but we had a great time talking about it.

Coincidently, most of the members of the book club stayed on to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination of the Democratic party for president.

It occurs to me that evaluating memoir and judging political candidates is a similar kind of process.  How much have you suffered and what have you done with that suffering, is one of the questions we ask the protagonists of any story, including potential president protagonists. The women of the Stratford Woods book club, listening to Barack Obama, were not just listening to one man tell his incredible story.  No, we were listening to the song of  transformed pain of all who have suffered, which is all of us.  And we were inspired to become better people here on earth.   We were part of the music, and, for us, it was a foretaste–90 minutes worth–of heaven.

Written in 1995, when Obama was a mere 34 years old, this book amazes me with its psychological and spiritual insight even though I have only reached p. 46. Willa Cather once wrote that the most exciting thing in the world was to get inside the skin of another person. Obama does in this book what he did in his famous speech on race earlier this year–he helps us get inside the skin of “the other.” He has been the “other” himself all his life. His very existence occupies the space where other’s dreams had been. This process began in his own family, and it is a large part of his “rock star” appeal today. When we look at him, we see a deeper version of the American Dream than the one peddled by advertising. Hidden under American bravado are deep wounds, doubts, and guilt feelings for atrocities committed in the past and still continuing.

While the book is about an absent parent, his father, Obama writes movingly about his mother. How many male authors have written convincingly about what it is like to be a woman? How many men in their 30′s have curiosity about their mother’s inner lives, let alone empathy and insight? Obama may struggle with arrogance, as his critics claim, but that very arrogance may be rooted in recognizing that the average person does not perceive, intuit, and ponder the same way he does.

To illustrate my point, here’s a scene from the book. Young Barry and his step father Lolo are outside talking about “man things.” Barack’s mother is watching them, not hearing them, but imagining their conversation: “She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet, filled with a sudden panic.

Power was taking her son” (p.46).

I will read on to discover how power, cultural and religious differences, mother love and a childhood full of journeys molded the man who may soon become our president, but first, I want to savor what this passage tells me about him. His language is powerful, succinct. The verbs sing on the page. The outward motions convey inner realities. And the author, the “I” of the story, is outside the action. The details tell the story–for example the grass flattened where the older man and younger boy had been. The theme of the presence of absence is all contained in that one image.