Reflecting on A.O. Scott's new book, BETTER LIVING, in the Chicago Tribune

Who doesn't love a good A.O. Scott film review? (Well, I mean, who besides those directors, writers, actors, costume designers, or dialect coaches A.O. Scott might not be loving at that review moment?)

And who didn't love A.O. Scott and David Carr during the era of the New York Times video segment, "The Sweet Spot"?

Last week I had the chance to read Scott's new book, Better Living Through Criticism, for the Chicago Tribune. In what often felt like a very meta experience (critiquing a book about critiquing), I had this to say.

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In today's Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, I'm talking about photographs in memoir.

Several weeks ago, I tore most of my memoirs off the shelf to research an idea I had about those who use photographs to amplify their memoirs. Dorothy Allison, Patti Smith, Michael Ondaatje, David Carr, Orhan Pamuk, Calvin Trillin—the list is long, and it made me happy to sit for a while and work the details out.

That essay runs today in the Wall Street Journal blog, Speakeasy. Many thanks to Beth Parker at Gotham for helping me find its right home.

This essay, on photographs, is part of a series of essays I've lately been writing about the memoir form. Today, in the The Millions, for example, I write about the conversational in memoir. Last week, I wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the students I love.

Thank you, Beth Parker of Gotham, for finding a home for me at Speakeasy, and thank you Speakeasy.

More of my thoughts on the memoir form can be found on this dedicated Handling page.

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can you tell the truth? (The Night of the Gun)

My respect for David Carr, the New York Times reporter, bestselling author, and (with A.O. Scott) Times video celeb, has been reported here.  What you've not seen on this blog is talk about Carr's reportorial memoir, The Night of the Gun.  By his own admission, Carr was a substance abuser of the very first order—a "maniac" who went from handling whiskey and cocaine (barely) to not handling crack to smacking women he loved with an open hand to raising twins while failing at rehab to carrying a gun he doesn't remember, or didn't remember until he started tracking down his own past. 

Like the scrupulous Times reporter he miraculously became, Carr sought out and interviewed those whose lives intersected his during his wilderness years.  He weighed his idea of things against police records and the recall of old friends.  He sorted, sifted, and spun in an attempt to understand not just who he was, but who he is, and how the was and the is somehow survive inside the same knocked-about skin.

It's fascinating reading, memoir painstakingly stitched. It has a lot to say not just about Carr's life, but about what truth is and what to do with all the stuff we can't rightly remember.  Here's an early paragraph that wisely captures one of my pet peeves (we shall read more about this in Handling the Truth)—memoirs filled with dialogue from hazy childhood days.

I read some of the classics of the genre, debunked and not.  After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it.  No I didn't.  I knew he made it up.  It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth.  Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history—the facts of what happened—is both immutable and mostly unknowable.  Can I somehow remember enough to type my way to an unvarnished recitation of what happened to me?  No chance.

A note for the curious:  I use Lana Roosiparg's gorgeous face as my photo of the day for no other reason than that it is a singular, and therefore, true one.  Lana is one of the four talented and lovely people recently featured in my husband's art.  This is an outtake from the photo shoot that yielded those hallucinatory worlds.

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Sarah Hepola on lighting ourselves on fire

This morning I did that thing that relaxes me most of all—tapped into my iPad, read from the New York Times, watched the weekly A.O. Scott and David Carr Times video.  (Have you watched them?  Do you like them?  How can I explain my addiction to this reliably circumlocutory conversation?)

Tucked into the Magazine was an essay on Cat Marnell by Sarah Hepola.  Hepola, among other things, selects and sometimes writes those often controversial, lightning-rodesque personal essays for Salon.com.  Years ago, when the internet had not yet become so prone to anonymous nastiness and viral cat fights, I wrote for Salon—occasional essays and reviews.  I shared a community there with its early founders and creators and co-writers—Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Camille Peri, others.  I stopped when the stakes grew too high, when I could no longer see the value add of putting one's life up for grab by the increasingly ridiculing masses.  I have watched friend after friend get burned in that forum.  Insta-fame, yes.  The costs:  high.

Hepola's entire piece on Marnell and Marnell's own unfiltered confessions makes for fascinating reading.  But it is this penultimate paragraph that should, I think, be required reading for us all.  I share this as memoirist and as a teacher of memoir and, also, (does this make it better or worse?) a writer about the making of memoir—how it gets done, what happens when it does (the themes not just here on my blog but in my forthcoming book, Handling the Truth). 

Here is Hepola:  

I worry about anyone who is lighting themselves on fire for our enjoyment. I worry about the bloggers and viral stars who have burned up so much of themselves for the prize of a few thousand followers. Our attention span is so short these days. One minute you’re a meteorite lighting up Google Trends, the next minute you fall back to earth, another piece of ugly, busted-up coal.

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