No, YOU shut up
In the coming Sunday New York Times book review, Neil Genzlinger uses the occasion of reviewing four memoirs to trash the whole genre and call upon would-be memoirists to just STFU and go do something else.
This kind of wholesale dismissal of first-person writing - calling it solipsistic, boring and too easy - is itself such a solipsistic, boring and too-easy position. As in, I don’t like memoirs, and so therefore they suck, which, thanks but that’s been done before.
You know what? (And I’ve said this in the past.) If you don’t like memoirs, don’t read them. I like them. I read them. I am happy. Fuck you.
(I also ghostwrite them, and interview memoirists about how they find the courage to write them.)
And you know what else? I hate this argument that unless you’ve accrued some huge list of remarkable achievements or survived something awful, you shouldn’t write about your life. Some of the memoirs I’ve liked best were those by people who’ve mostly lived regularly lives, but have a unique way of naming and defining certain common experiences that helps us to understand our own.
And another thing… (Nah, I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead.)
