Is it too eager to please its readers, swimming in vapid bromides designed to give sad sacks the delusional comfort they need to carry on with their crappy lives? Or is it literally self-help, written primarily for the author’s sake, to come to terms with some old trouble? Well, what makes you think anyone’s interested in your one-woman therapy sessions? Some readers understandably doubt the intentions of a trauma memoir.
(One of the many, many small pleasures of The Art of Memoir is tracking the gentle but firmly dissuading instruction Karr directs at students who come to the task seeking to settle scores with those who have wronged them.) That’s one reason memoir has a complicated relationship to the bastard genre of self-help, another factor contributing to its lowly rep.
(Can this be true? I’m having a hard time thinking of any that are mainly fond and sunny: Perhaps Cider With Rosie or Growing Up.) It’s clear, at the very least, that the students Karr teaches at Syracuse University have tales of suffering and transcendence they want to tell. “Let’s say something pseudo-awful has befallen you-a safe bet for any human unit thinking about a memoir,” she writes. Karr (who wrote her own recovery memoir, Lit ) seems to take it for granted that the aspiring memoirists reading her book want to wrestle with some trauma, though she tries not to encourage self-pity. Notably, her most contemptuous reviewers were men, who were seemingly oblivious to the misogynistic element to their insistence that some life experiences ought to remain unspoken-especially the painful sexual experiences of women. Yardley deplored The Kiss (in one of three pieces pummeling it) as a “slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical” offering to the “gods of publicity.” Harrison was dunned for not making her memoir sexy enough in Vanity Fair, while the New Republic scolded her for transmitting her father’s abuse to her own children by daring to write about it. Harrison’s was a book people talked about for months and about which every person in the book business felt obliged to take a position. As Bennett pointed out, a very similar story, recently published on Jezebel, went viral, but still garnered nothing in comparison to the uproar that greeted The Kiss.
It’s almost impossible to imagine such a response now, when equally or even more shocking revelations appear on the Internet on a weekly basis.
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