A Memoir Shouldn’t Boss You Around

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The temptation for a writer to turn their memoir into a self-help book must be strong. The author has looked back at her life, her choices, her blunders, her triumphs. And through this process of retrospection, she might see lessons learned that apply not just to her, but really, to everyone. This is a big mistake, writes Lily Meyer, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, in her assessment of This American Ex-Wife, Lyz Lenz’s new book about her divorce.

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What memoir needs to succeed is “specificity and perspective,” Meyer writes. Lenz, instead, has written what one of the book’s blurbs correctly calls a “memoir-meets-manifesto” that extrapolates a society-wide conclusion from her own experience. Because her marriage needed to end, she seems to suggest, everyone’s marriage needs to end—taking what was her own hardship, which Meyer says she writes about well, and generalizing wildly until the institution is doomed for all women, even the ones who might actually like to stay married. “Almost without exception, her personal stories give way to exhortations to readers, addressed alternately as ‘we’ and ‘you,’ to free themselves (ourselves?) from the ‘pyre of human marriage.’” These exhortations begin to sound, Meyer writes, devastatingly, as if they are being delivered by a “TED Talker.” I hadn’t much considered the peril of autobiography overstepping into advice before, so I decided to chat with Meyer, who writes regularly for us, to see if she had recommendations for books in which authors discuss themselves and their lives without falling into this trap of preachiness.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: You put Lenz’s book in a category of memoir that slips into self-help, to its detriment. What are some books—you mention Cheryl Strayed’s Wild in the review—that you think manage to avoid this trap, and that are particularly dear to you?

Lily Meyer: My all-time favorite memoir is Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett’s book about her friendship with the poet Lucy Grealy. It’s a very outward-looking memoir, which may be why I like it: Patchett is its narrator, but Lucy and her love for Lucy are its subjects. (Also, its portrait of the artists as young women enthralled me when I was in college and dreaming of becoming a writer.) I tend to like memoirs by visual artists: Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Sally Mann’s Hold Still come to mind. I also love Ruth Reichl’s memoirs about her life as an eater and food critic. If there’s a theme here, I guess it’s that I prefer memoirs about work—though you could put Julia Child’s My Life in France in that category, and I found it shockingly boring.

Beckerman: I’m also interested to know if there are good memoirs more specifically about marriage that stand out for you, since this is the subject of Lenz’s book.

Meyer: Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life is a fabulous portrait of marriage as collaboration, intellectual and otherwise. I also love the Brazilian publisher Luiz Schwarcz’s The Absent Moon, a memoir of depression that is also an ode to his wife, Lili. And I am in awe of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy—three memoirs that read like novels, and that deal with addiction, ambition, and the darkness of romantic love.

Beckerman: Since self-help comes up in a disparaging way, are there any artful books in this genre that you’d actually recommend?

Meyer: I have a baby, and I have to say, I love Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé—not technically self-help, but she seems to have helped herself in writing it, and it has helped me! But real self-help is not for me. It’s a bossy genre, and I can’t stand to be bossed around.

Beckerman: And to escape memoir, finally, what about fiction? Favorite fictional marriages or divorces?

Meyer: My favorite fictional divorce is Madeleine and Leonard in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and my favorite fictional marriage is Jane-Louise and Teddy in Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over. No one writes happy marriage better than Colwin did. I also love reading about the many marriages and divorces in the English writer Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-part family saga known as the Cazalet Chronicles. I wouldn’t want to be in a Howard marriage, but I could read about them for eternity.

A Grim View of Marriage—And an Exhortation to Leave It

By Lily Meyer

This American Ex-Wife vividly describes the liberating power of a divorce but falters when it tries to persuade readers to follow suit.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Giving Up the Ghost, by Hilary Mantel

Mantel is best known now for her Wolf Hall trilogy. But I prefer her earlier fiction—and also this book, her memoir. After a childhood in which she was sarcastically called “Miss Neverwell,” Mantel, in her early 20s, visits a doctor because of pain in her legs. This reasonable and low-stakes decision plunges her into a medical nightmare for which the term Kafkaesque is frankly a little too mild. Mantel is put on antidepressants, Valium, and, eventually, antipsychotics, the last of which have the effect of making her unable to sit still. By the time she is able to diagnose herself with her actual illness—endometriosis—her disease has progressed so far that the only possible treatment is a hysterectomy she very much does not want. The earlier sections of Giving Up the Ghost detail her feelings of childhood helplessness; the later pieces showcase a kind of adult helplessness that is familiar to readers of Mantel’s fiction. In her novels, she frequently explores how people are both powerless in the face of circumstance and completely responsible for their choices. She is, it turns out, just as kind, and just as unsparing, when it comes to herself. — B. D. McClay

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Your Weekend Read

How a Middle-Aged Everyman Actor Won Everyone Over

By David Sims

[Paul] Giamatti has played plenty more villains, desk jockeys, cranky sidekicks, and emotionally volatile indie heroes. He’s enjoyed a lot of his greatest success on TV, doing understated work as Ben Bernanke in Too Big to Fail and then screaming his head off with jolly aplomb on Billions. And though he’s never stopped working, The Holdovers does feel like the meatiest character he’s been handed in years. Paul Hunham is filled with the bluster that Giamatti is very good at channeling, barking insults with glee and often grimacing at the very thought of human interaction. But Giamatti lets his dormant wounds and curdled empathy come to the surface without a whiff of contrivance. A lesser actor would make the reveal of Paul’s heart of gold feel ill-earned; with Giamatti, the viewer recognizes from scene one that he’s been a secret sweetheart all along, even as he snaps at his truculent students and joyfully hands out detentions.

Read the full article.

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