IEEE Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 2000 Book

I just finished reading the NY Times Problem with Memoirs and think that Genzlinger weighted his review with the three worst examples of memoir he could find, while Birkerts made me want to run out and grab a whole stack of other memoirs. So I would respond to Genzlinger, that I know and am persuaded by Birkerts that no life is interesting in and of itself, but in the hands of her that writes well it is interesting. Or something. That formulation doesn't quite work. I did like Genzlinger's rule of thumb about "If you didn't feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don't publish it." I suspect that that much Birkerts would agree with, since he writes For example, I may reflect in therapy on an unhappy period of my adolescence, testing memories and looking for insights that will help me understand why I did what I did then. To convert this into memoiristic material, however, I need to give the reader both the unprocessed feeling of the world as I saw it then and a reflective vantage point that incorporates or suggests that these events made a different kind of sense over time. This is the transformation that, if done well, absolves a memoiristic reflection from the charge of self-involved navel-gazing. What makes the difference is not only the fact of reflective self-awareness, but the conversion of private and public by way of a narrative compelling the interest and engagement of the reader. The act of storytelling -- even if the story is an account of psychological self-realization -- is by its very nature an attempt at universalizing the specific; it assumes there is a shared ground between the teller and the audience. Storytelling fails when the narrative cannot coax sympathetic resonance from the listener.

What I'll take away from this book, besides the reading list, of course, is an awareness in reading memoir (and yes, probably in writing the occasional memoir-flavored blog entry) of the interplay of time perspectives, the interaction of present self and past self. That my natural gravitation toward the "lyrical memoirists" that Birkerts lists -- Nabokov, Dillard, Woolf -- has something to do with the fascination with memory and sense of self and not merely my own memories or my own self -- I have a squirmy relationship with that sort of attention, in fact, but that in any kind of writing done well specific instantiations point towards universal truths in a more vivid (truthful?) way than trying to speak in generic or abstract universals could. And I try to keep in therapy the things that belong in therapy, but it was a bit of a relief to discover that to use the present as a safe platform from which to dive into the past doesn't in fact require that the present self has everything all neatly stitched up and resolved but that it can offer a part of the truth to the past self just as the past self holds clues to understanding the present self, and the quest after truth and wholeness wants a veritable congress of past and present selves.

Says Birkerts "The point -- the glory -- of memoir is that it anchors its authority in the actual life; it is a modeling of the process of creative self-inquiry as it is applied to the stuff of lived experience. This really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir, and the fascination of the work -- apart from the interest we have in what is told -- is in tracking the artistic transformation of the actual via the alchemy of psychologica insight, pattern recognition and lyrical evocation into a contained saga." This is the perfect rebuttal, I think to my husband's assertion "Isn't memoir just the reality tv of literature?"
Memoir returns to the past, investigating causes in the light of their known effects, conjuring the unresolved mysteries of fate verus chance, free will versus determinism. To read the life of another person put before us in this way is inevitably to repossess something of ourselves. The writer's then and now stir to life our own sense of past and present. So long as we believe ourselves to be living in the direction of meaning, memoir will never not be coming into its own, fresh and startling.

yes.