Nearly all books, essays, and articles published in the last few years have collapsed further and further into one genre: memoir.
The personal narrative has trumped all other forms of storytelling, rhetorical persuasion, data analysis, or discourse. The memoir style has permeated everything from The Atlantic’s high-brow purple prose to the popularly catered shelves of Barnes & Noble.
The memoir form itself isn’t the issue. There are many excellent memoirs that ought to be read — among them stands Augustine’s Confessions, the cornerstone of the genre. The problem, rather, lies in the invasion of the first-person into all literary forms. The insidiousness of memoir’s ubiquity rests on the assumption that first-person experience is the only acceptable source of truth.
This is the same position of mind that establishes “my truth” as opposed to “your truth” — not too long ago, such possessive descriptors before the term “truth” would have been entirely incoherent. If truth is that which is always and everywhere true, “my” and “your” have no standing to describe it.
Authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones rely extensively on the genre, particularly for its built-in fail-safe of obfuscating criticism. If a reader disagrees with the implications woven into a memoir, the reader can simply be depicted as spurning the author’s personal experience — a modern mortal sin.
Identity politics thus rely on the irreproachability of personal narrative. From the Black Lives Matter movement to transgender advocacy, the Left often demands that others “shut up and listen” to the experiences of their selected storytellers. While the proper bestowal of empathy is everywhere good — the Victorians used to call this the virtue of “pity” — not all narratives ought to elicit affirmation.
How, then, is one to sort through these different stories? The narratives themselves do not offer a clear exposition of proper valuation. How does one judge which stories ought to be heard? Do the stories of those in the minority top the scales? (Pedophiles would make that list.) Perhaps the stories of the influential? (See: Mein Kampf.)
Clarity of principle must stand judge over personal narrative. Human beings are wonderfully capable of spinning narratives to justify almost any action.
A few recently published essays and articles have brought this phenomenon into sharp definition.
In “The Lure of Divorce,” published last week in the Cut, author Emily Gould offers a 5,500+ word look into the near-dissolution of her own marriage. The piece, while satisfying the voyeuristic impulse to look through the lamp-lit window of another’s home, presents a distorted vision of love, marriage, and self-purpose. The author works through her own experience of the last few years in the piece but neglects to present her own actions with due justice.
My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son.
In short, the piece is a description of a life lived — but certainly not a prescription of how a life ought to be lived. (The same goes for the infamous 2021 divorce story, “How I Demolished My Life,” by Atlantic senior editor Honor Jones.)
Charlie Cooke recently wrote on a mind-boggling, first-person essay about falling prey to a $50,000 scam, also published in the Cut last week.
A freelance financial-advice columnist named Charlotte Cowles weaves a story of credulousness and incompetence that is so absurd as to be nigh-on impossible to believe. Cowles’s piece is titled, The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam, and, somehow, its contents are more remarkable than that headline suggests…If you’ve ever spent any time wondering whether our elite class might be a touch misnamed, then this is the essay for you.
Such strange confessionals aren’t happening merely among the urbane Left — even the American Conservative has leaned into the form. In an article published last week, “What Does Marriage Optimize?” — the purpose of which was to review Brad Wilcox’s new book, Get Married — the author, Nic Rowan, offers a personal examination of his own marriage that left many readers baffled.
I have found that it is impossible to write honestly about marriage and family life without some personal disclaimers. So, I’ll get this out of the way first: I am 26 years old and I have been married for four years to a woman two years my senior. We met in college, where she was my editor on the school paper. Our relationship has persisted along those same lines ever since. I write; she edits…Am I happy? I have no idea. My usual line is that it doesn’t matter. I didn’t marry my wife for love. I don’t know why I married her. Sometimes we joke that my intentions must have been noble because I married down, at least in socioeconomic terms.
Did the rest of the article — which is smart and substantial — really require such “personal disclaimers”? This is not so much Rowan’s fault but that of today’s literary atmosphere.
Until memoir is re-ordered under reason, expect to read many more “I’s” in contemporary publications.