What they're saying (about Memoir, Neil Gaiman, and James Patterson)
Sunday, January 24, 2010
I chose to spend my two stolen hours of the week not with The Girl with Glass Feet (a glorious-seeming book that I hope to finish reading during my train ride to Manhattan tomorrow), but with recent issues of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek.
Or The Three News, as I think of them here at my house.
I have (and I'm more surprised by this than anyone else could be) written five memoirs and one autobiography of a river that is more memoiristic than a casual reader might guess. I therefore began my readerly escapades with Daniel Mendelsohn's "But Enough about Me," which appears in the January 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker and uses as its diving platform Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. The second paragraph begins thusly:
"Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupcon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family."
I'm not pretending that the black sheepedness is news to me, but let me just say this: what a line-up of adjectives, adverbs, and accusations we have here, all in one place. In my own self-defense I might say that my memoirs are not of the juiced-up, slicked-down, you can't-top-this-one, commercially successful sort (I'm too boring a person to even attempt such a seige). Still, wow. That's some mirror to find oneself staring into. (Read the whole article to see how Mendelsohn, who has also published memoir, adjusts and alleviates this description by the end of his piece.)
I moved on, in the same issue, to "Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's Fantasies," by Dana Goodyear. Neil Gaiman, I'm thinking. Love Neil Gaiman. Was even voted one of the top five author bloggers alongside Neil Gaiman. Gonna love this story. But, well, I'm not certain that my idea of Neil Gaiman has been well-served by meeting this particular version, in which Goodyear quotes Gaiman as saying, among other things, "I have at this point a critic-proof career" and Coraline is a "beloved text," and "When I try to explain that I attracted more attention than [Angelina Jolie at a convention], people say, 'Oh, ho, he's being funny.' I'm not." We also learn that, whenever Gaiman Twitters fans telling them to buy a certain book on a certain day, they readily comply. "It means I'm nobody's bitch," Goodyear quotes.
Update: Karen Mahoney, a dear reader, indicates that Gaiman has perhaps been misquoted re the "nobody's..." business. I am fervently hoping so.
Onto the Jonathan Mahler "James Patterson Inc." profile in today's The New York Times Magazine. The story of the ad-man with the stable of co-writers (five co-writers!) who produces up to nine new books each year (an increasing number of them in the YA category) and has several Little Brown employees dedicated just to his brand is familiar fodder. I did not know, however (did you?), that since 2006 "one out of every 17 hardcover books bought in the United States was written by James Patterson," nor that he has had (to date) 51 books on the Times bestseller list. "Each of Patterson's series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who read everything he writes," Mahler tells us. "His books all share stylistic similarities. They are light on atmospherics and heavy on action, conveyed by simple, colloquial sentences. 'I don't believe in showing off,' Patterson says of his writing. 'Showing off can get in the way of a good story.'"
My Sunday reading has come to a close, and I'm feeling a bit bashed up and bruised. I will, nonetheless, still be reading the gorgeously literary Glass Feet on the morrow, I will not give in to any urge to command my friends to purchase my books right now (or ever), I will always be second to Angelina Jolie, and when I get to write again (I hope I'll get to write again), I'll try not to think of a well-formed sentence as simply showing off.
Unseemly, mendacious, meretricious, and unpalatable, I am also, as it turns out, impossibly stubborn.
