Top 10 Memoirs: If You Show Me Yours, I’ll Show You Mine!

Let me begin with an apology for slacking off on blogging this past week. I probably will continue a low profile until June 30th, after an important board meeting, and after I have finished a book review to send to Christian Century.

But how lovely it would be if we together could make some progress toward the ultimate book list we want to construct here–a list that amounts to the top 100 memoirs in our collective opinions.

You could be enormously helpful by submitting names of memoirs you love and why you love them. They can be classic or contemporary. If you can come up with five or ten names, that would even be better. To get you started, here’s one list of 40 already published online.

But this short video and blog entry from CBC are even better. Watch/read it, and you will see both some great suggestions and outstanding memoir short reviews–and a methodology I would like to copy.  The CBC Top Ten List was created by readers and viewers, not by any one single “expert.”

What is your favorite memoir? Why? Do you have a top ten or top five list to share? While I write my review, you can be reviewing your own bookselves and memories.

Prize alert! I will give away another memoir from my shelf–this time I will  judge instead of asking for votes.  Criteria? The most complete and insightful list.

100Memoirs.com Reaches 100 Posts: A Mini-Memoir

Time for a little history report. My first blog post ever was written for the Fetzer Institute Campaign for Love and Forgiveness website. The subject was the week-long volunteer opportunity I was given to help with Katrina recovery in New Orleans. March 24-April, 3 blog posts appeared, and USA Today published my op-ed article about the experience on March 20, 2008.  June 1, 2008, wrote my first blog post on the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference website, where I learned to upload photos and place links into posts. I wrote 62 posts there and made some writer/blogger friends who are still reading and writing with me.

July 30, 2008, was my 60th birthday, and my son Anthony gave me the wonderful gift of setting up this website. On August 9, 2008, I wrote my first post on 100Memoirs.com. Today, ten months later, I am posting #100.  Beginning in January I began to be active on fb, which has broadened the readership of this blog.  Maybe Twitter will do the same if I can get to the next step of where to do my updates, how to make tiny URLs, and all the other little tricks of the trade.

I have not reviewed 100 memoirs yet, partly because the readers seem to enjoy a different mix of reviews, commentary, and mini-memoir. Following the advice of readers from the last post, however, I will try to start a list on the home page, building to 100 memoirs eventually.

I would never have imagined how much fun blogging would be. Thank you, readers, for your comments, critiques,  and words of encouragement. I thrive on them!

Top 100 Memoirs: Which Ones are Essential?

Embarrassing story:  When I was a newbie grad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I turned in a review of a book that my professor did not recognize.  He asked me why I chose this book to review.  I responded, “Because it was on my shelf.” He looked horrified.

As Paul Newman might say, “This was a failure to communicate.” I thought I was bringing the value of simplicity and economy to the process.  My professor saw only shoddy thinking or academic sloth.

I named this blog 100 memoirs because of the advice given by Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter to read 100 books in the genre you aspire to. I have several thousand books in my basement library, collected over many years of being an English professor and avid reader.  I knew I had read 50-100 autobiographies and biographies. But I began buying new ones.  My future daughter-in-law works in the publishing industry, so new memoir began pouring in. Thanks, Chelsea!

So the question now is.  Which ones are best?  If reading forms the mind, and if reading takes precious time, then surely one wants to read the best 100 memoirs and not just 100 memoirs!?

When a form becomes popular enough long enough, a canon emerges. That may be happening in the memoir genre right now.  Perhaps you and I can contribute to that process by defining what we admire most and selecting memoirs that fit those criteria.  Or, we could flip the process by naming the books and then describing what makes them great. More and more courses are being taught about autobiography and memoir. Professors are creating reading lists and these eventually become the canon.

The beautiful sentences contest taught me that asking for the best without describing the criteria can produce frustration.  So let’s start with criteria.

I will throw out one criterion and give an example. Then I hope you will follow with your own examples or another criterion.

Criterion:  Authentic voice.  Agents and publishers love this word. And I do too. Voice on the surface looks like personality.  For example, Julia Childs’ memoir of her years in Paris and America as she built her career sounds just like her distinctive voice on the air–a little breathless and patrician without sounding pedantic.

Haven Kimmel’s voice in her breakthrough memoir Zippy is down home and mystical and amused (therefore amusing).

Classic memoirs earn their status in part because of the unique voice of the author. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, for example, takes you far, fast. You move with him through the quotidian details of the day with energy.  When he is hungry, his readers are also. He gets you to the destination rapidly, but your senses are more alive than if you had lingered for hours on the path.

Natalie Goldberg’s newest book on memoir contains a list of her favorite memoirs at the end.  Some Amazon reviewers have made lists of their best ones.  I would like to create my own here. But I need your help. I may also need Anthony’s help with the technology.  I think I need a list on the home page of this website. That way, readers can see it emerge.  There are books I reviewed in the blog that I would not put on the list of 100 best. And there are many on other people’s lists that I have not yet read.  There are also lots of books I have read but not reviewed.

Are such lists helpful to you? Would you like to see a list on the home page?

Is authentic voice a useful criterion for selecting high quality memoir?

What one memoir (or other book)  stands out for you because of the voice of the author?

Ava’s Man: A Review And A Question for You

The top 100 memoirs list we are constructing here is not a scientific one.  At the rate we are going, 81 posts in 9 months, and only 18 reviews so far, it will take five years to get to 100 memoirs! I’ve read many more than I have reviewed and have an entire bookcase of read and unread memoir waiting to be revealed to my gentle readers.  But since Ms. Memoir is already 60 years old, she needs some guidance about what subjects readers most want to know about.

Originally I thought I would review books almost exclusively.  Now, however, I have developed a whole list of other diverting memoir topics–see categories on the right-hand side.  The political campaign provided more grist for the memoir mill than I could every have imagined.  And then there’s life.  I notice in the tag cloud that mini-memoir has become the largest category.  I also notice that I seem to get more comments on mini-memoir than on reviews.  Hmmmm.

Since this is the second Rick Bragg book I read in a little more than a week, I won’t write as much about this one as I did his first memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’. The bottom line:  this one is just as good as the first.

You can tell a lot about a book by the kinds of review excerpts gleaned from other writers and printed on the back cover or opening pages of a book.  Here’s a sample.  Notice how many people try to come up with Southern witticisms to match Bragg’s own style:

“As toothsome as a catfish supper: [Bragg] is every bit the equal of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.”–People

“Rick Bragg has once more gone to the well of his family’s history and drawn readers a story that goes down like a long drink of sweet spring water–with a little taste of whiskey on the side.”–Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Rich in the raw materials of character and local color, enhanced by language marked with extravagance and economy–and the born storyteller’s gift for knowing when to be lavish with words and when to be lean.”–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Bragg writes like his grandfather drank. . . .He cuts loose with wonderful flowing descriptive floods. . .that can cripple another writer with envy.”–The Miami Herald

It’s as though these reviewer’s remember their own granddaddy telling them to avoid a pissing contest with a skunk–but they can’t help themselves.  And in fact, they admire the skunk’s perfume.

So, this “review” is not much more than a teaser this time.  All you need to know is that Rick Bragg tells a great story and that his innovation in this book is to “create” a grandfather he never knew out of family reunions, photographs, and interviews with his relatives and friends.  He illustrates one more motive for writing a memoir–getting to know the ancestor you never met in life.

Readers, I’d love some feedback to the categories on this blog:

Is the mix of reviewing, reflecting, and commenting on the news:

A. About right

B.  Too much reviewing

C. Too little reviewing

D. Too many mini-memoirs

E.  Not enough mini-memoirs

F.  Too much social commentary

G. Not enough social commentary