Whole words, whole sight

If you’re writing a memoir, you must decide from the outset: do you want to be a camera, or a person?

If you’re a camera, you’ll see everything that happened and relay it to your readers in great detail - but you’ll feel nothing and admit nothing. This will allow you to make your version of events and people as crazy as you like, without taking responsibility for your own involvement, either back then or now.

If you’re a person, on the other hand, you’ll have to admit that yes, you participated actively in your life: you not only saw what went on, but you made decisions, you had choices. This will apply not only to the story of back then, but to the here-and-now, where you as the flesh-and-blood writer have feelings and thoughts and opinions about what you’re telling us.

Confused? Let’s look three writers as examples: Joan Didion and Augusten Burroughs, who tend to write like cameras, versus David Sedaris, who chooses to write like a person.

Whose scissors are these?

To start with, here’s a description from the second chapter of Burroughs’s “Running With Scissors”:

In this chapter, the narrator is supposedly giving us an account of his life at the age of 10. Yet clearly a 10-year-old boy couldn’t have written the above. That must mean it comes from the mouth of Burroughs as he is now - yet nowhere in the course of the narrative does Burroughs step into the light as an adult, as himself, someone writing a book. So what is going on?

Maybe we are meant to think it is the child who speaks, after all, giving a truthful account of every particular. Yet nowhere in the book can we find an actual child, with a child’s thoughts and feelings; there is only a child-sized ventriloquist’s dummy, with a mental life consisting of lines fed by Burroughs the adult. In this scene, the mother has just asserted she will someday be famous; here is the dummy’s response:

“I know,” I said. The idea that someday we might have our own stretch limousine parked in the driveway instead of that awful brown Dodge Aspen station wagon was so thrilling that I almost couldn’t stop myself from screaming. “You will be famous,” I told her. “I just know it.” I also knew I wanted tinted windows and a mini-bar in the back.

And here is the dummy’s response to meeting his mother’s friend, Dr. Finch:

I liked him . . . He certainly didn’t seem a real doctor, the kind of doctor I worshipped. He seemed like he should be in a department store letting kids pee on his lap and whisper brand-name bicycles in his ear.

We can laugh at this sort of thing, of course—and that gives us the answer. That is what is going on; that’s why this memoir is told the way it is. The author wants only two things from us: that we laugh, and that we approve his contempt for the people he has made fun of with such rage. Yet if we think about it, there’s no humor here, only the sadness of an empty narration. Somewhere in Burroughs’s past there was an actual 10-year-old boy - but we don’t know what that boy saw and felt, because Burroughs the angry adult has gotten in the way. Nor we do know why the adult is still angry, or what he may feel besides anger. It’s entertaining only so long as we stay in the same shallow space Burroughs has squeezed himself into.

Selectively selling out

By comparison, Joan Didion is a far better writer than Burroughs: her style can warm us with pleasure even when the tone or subject is grim. Yet as a story-teller, much of Didion’s power derives from the adroit use of the camera point of view to mislead us. In fairness, she seems to have misled herself as well.

I haven’t read late-period Didion, so I can only speak of the early writer who produced such celebrated pieces as the essays in the collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” The title essay in that collection makes a good example. The following is a complete scene from it—quite short, but otherwise a fair representation of how the author constructed all her scenes:

Apparently we are supposed to see Barbara as an airhead. But notice how the effect has been achieved. Barbara apparently said several things in this short conversation, most of them quite normal—but only the repetitions of “Groovy” have been left unparaphrased, so as to make the maximum bad impression on us. Meanwhile, Didion presents herself as the relatively sane half of the conversation; she is the one who says it’s a beautiful day, for example. Yet what is really missing in this and all the other scenes in “Slouching” is Didion herself: Didion as a person rather than a camera. What did she think of Barbara back then? What does she think of her today? If Barbara was just an airhead, why did Didion bother to stop and talk? And if she wasn’t just an airhead—if she was also compassionate or creative or any number of possibilities—then why did Didion paint such an incomplete picture of her?

The few reflections that Didion does share with us in “Slouching to Bethlehem” are restricted to generalizations, supposedly insights into history and society: “We were seeing the desperate attempts of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum,” for example. The problem with such pronouncements is that they depend on Didion’s selective eye, on her collection of distorted camera shorts. Any human being in any age can be mocked; it doesn’t have to be Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s.¹ By focusing her lens on only the worst moments of the “unequipped children,” as she repeatedly does, the writer leaves out the many other moments which must have occurred when these “children” said or did things that were brave, shrewd, caring, humorous, etc.

Why didn’t Didion write a fuller, less distorted version of what she saw, one that included her not just as shadowy narrator, but visible participant? Perhaps because it would have been messy and technically difficult; or perhaps because she didn’t believe it was possible. Her last sentence to the preface of this collection reads as follows: “There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling someone out.” The sentence is pure Didion: it sounds like it’s true because it lacks the qualifications of truth, which is exactly what makes it false. It would been more accurate and less self-dramatizing to say that some journalists and some memoirists sell people out, others don’t.

Being there

Finally we have David Sedaris. Like Burroughs, Sedaris has written funny and terrible things about his childhood - but he has never hesitated to implicate himself as participant and raconteur. Often you encounter both persons in the same paragraph. From “Full House,” in the collection “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim”:

How clearly it is the storyteller speaking to us about death; and how clearly it is his younger self in the line, “It was sort of embarrassing.”

In the end, it’s your decision as the memoirist: camera, or person? I vote for person. We do better for ourselves and for others to reject the idea that “writers are always selling someone out,” and instead admit and even celebrate our fallibility, the limits of our vision. As Montaigne put it, writing out his mind and life on paper centuries ago:

Suggested exercise: Go through either your own memoir draft, or a published memoir by a writer you admire. Is the implied author a person, or a camera, both back then and now? What are some typical sentences or paragraphs that signal this?