When Life's Private Twists & Turns Become the Stuff of Book Tours

CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly here [5].

Why do people write memoirs and first-person accounts? Why do we read them? And: Are they journalism or voyeurism?

These are questions I’ve given a lot of thought to, partly because I myself have perpetrated a memoir on an unsuspecting public. (More about that in a moment.) I’m also an avid consumer of this genre. Sometimes I emerge from my reading with the same feeling I had at the hairdresser’s this week, when I was leafing through a magazine and caught a recent photo of Arnold Schwartzenegger in a Speedo: Some things, you just don’t need to know. Other times, I’ve been moved and enlightened. In the best memoirs, there is a human connection that’s like the spark you get in really good live theater. It’s thrilling, and it can’t be faked.

What made me start thinking about this was the appearance in the past few weeks of three long memoir/essays – two from the pages of the New York Times Magazine and one from the New Yorker (and yes, I know, I need to get my mind out of Manhattan more.) Together and separately, they illustrate the limitations and possibilities of memoir as journalism.

But back to the first question: Why do people write memoirs? One answer might be “for the money,” and there’s always that, but my theory is that it boils down to one of two motivations: a sense of self-importance or the experience of humiliation. Some people write about themselves because they have done something important or lived through important events. Others write because something painful/embarrassing/scandalous has happened to them, and they are asserting the simple human desire to tell their side of the story. The two motivations can certainly overlap – Bill Clinton’s memoirs come to mind – and the desire to present one’s version of an embarrassing story can evolve into the desire the help other people in a similar fix. Still, I think those two categories pretty much sum it up.

Emily Gould’s cover story [6] in the May 25 edition of the New York Times Magazine is an example of humiliation as motivator. A former contributor to Gawker.com, Gould described how she started by keeping a personal blog for the amusement of herself and a few friends, went on to become a contributor to a Web site devoted mostly to mocking members of the Manhattan media elite, and ended up compulsively documenting the most private aspects of her life – her sexual encounters, even her gynecological issues – to the public.

“By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought  –  incorrectly, as it turned out  –  that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker co-workers and I leveled most often,” Gould wrote. “Maybe I was talentless, bad-complected, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite.” Actually, they could – and a lot of other nasty things. The online revenge exacted by an ex-boyfriend was especially brutal. And yet, Gould notes, what was done to her was only what she had done to many other people; it was only fair. Painful and sobering, but fair.

My first reaction to Gould’s piece was exasperation – with myself, for reading it. For pete’s sake, all these words to arrive at the conclusion that lettin’ it all hang out is a risky proposition? That you should be careful whose privacy you invade in the process of invading your own? But then this passage struck me: “The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible.” But as the Internet is teaching us, not every idea is worth immediately broadcasting to the world; incessant babbling about oneself is a surefire way to missing what’s going on around you – and let’s face it: Most of us are just not that interesting. The power of the response evoked by Gould’s self-revelation, both positive and negative, underscores the basic lesson she learned: If you’re going to show the world your vulnerabilities, make damn sure it’s for a worthy cause.

Gould’s story was about a relatively new phenomenon. David Carr’s memoir [7] of his long career as a manipulative drug addict in the July 20 issue of the New York Times Magazine (another cover story) covers far more familiar ground. There was nothing new in the contents of his story; we all know about the depths to which drug addicts can fall (his was leaving his infant twin daughters asleep in a car outside a crack house on a sub-freezing night while he went inside to get high). It also didn’t shed any new light on why some people are able to claw their way out of the hole while others fail. What made it interesting wasn’t so much the contents, but the technique.

Carr started off by noting a paradox: An eyewitness account of one’s own life may be the most unreliable form of journalism there is. “Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices,” he wrote. “Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict.” He dealt with that problem by meticulously re-reporting his own life: interviewing people he had known, tracking down old haunts, looking up hospital records, sifting through police reports. What he discovered was that things he knew for “certain” often did not happen that way at all – and if those things weren’t true, what else had he gotten wrong? It’s a point worth making, if only to instill a small dose of humility in anybody who practices the craft of journalism.

But I’m still not sure the story itself was worth telling. Carr isn’t, either. "I still feel uneasy about it,” he told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz [8]. “It may well be a mistake." The advance he got for the book he wrote about his experiences, however, will help pay for his daughters’ college tuition, so maybe that’s worthy cause enough.

Finally, there was Charles Van Doren’s account [9] of participating in a sensational television game show fraud more than half a century ago, as chronicled in the “Personal History” section of the July 28 New Yorker. Van Doren is the son of the eminent poet and critic Mark Van Doren, and for a few months in the winter and spring of 1956 and 1957, his fame eclipsed his father’s. The reason was a television game show called “Twenty-One,” in which Van Doren – then a telegenic but lowly instructor of English literature at Columbia University – allowed himself to be used by the show’s producers to rig the outcome, thereby boosting ratings for the show and pocketing $129,000 for himself. The deception eventually came to light, leading to a congressional inquiry and professional disgrace for Van Doren.

The idea of a congressional inquiry into a rigged “reality” show may seem ludicrous now  – I am shocked! shocked! to think such things go on – but this is about more than a game show. Van Doren’s piece is really about the seductions of easy money and celebrity, the subtle but profound difference between celebrity and true fame, and the cost of selling one’s integrity – lessons that took many decades to become completely clear to him (he is now in his 80s). You can’t read it without thinking, “What would I have done?” – and, as seductive as these offers were, not knowing for sure what the answer would have been. It used to be that nobody wrote a memoir until he or she was on up in years; this essay, and the wealth of experience and insight that informs it, made me think we ought to re-institute that old-fashioned rule.

But where would that leave me? I wrote a book about my experience with depression 13 years ago, when I was a mere child of 39, and my motivation was definitely the experience of humiliation. I was only months into my new job at the Washington Post, and in the middle of an extremely important story on my beat, when I began behaving erratically, became suicidal and was checked into a psychiatric ward. This was 1990, and depression was not the topic of informed conversation the way it is today. When I came back to work, only one clueless individual asked me where I’d been, which told me that the other 449 people I worked with already knew. I wrote about my experience as a way of owning my own story, even though I was warned by a friend at the time that it would harm my career. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t; I’ll never know. I do know that my original motivation evolved into a belief that telling my own story could help other people who suffer from this illness.

And I’m pretty sure I did, though I’m a little fuzzy on the details. I haven’t read my own memoir in years. I’m afraid to look.