My Life as Myself: A Memoir

I’ve been using the winter break to finish my nonfiction book, and after working all day every day on this project for two straight weeks (and beginning four years ago), can I just say that I am so sick of me? I’m sick of my thoughts, what I see, how I describe it, the people I meet and what I say to them. I’m sick of my observations, my musings, my jokes, my interactions and my interpretations.

Now I know why I write fiction. I want to be somebody else. Because I am freaking tired of me.

People tend to think of fiction writers as the egotists, but consider the ego it takes to write first person nonfiction. The writer has to assume that the world can’t wait to read her thoughts on whatever she feels like writing about.

This is my first book-length experience inhabiting the same narrator. Before I’ve written essays or stories from different POVs. Well, right now I don’t know that I will ever, ever want to spend over 300 pages with no one but myself again.

I’m going to Columbus tomorrow for a little road trip, Thai food and gourmet ice cream. It’s for the best.

Dave Eggers, You Make Me Feel Inadequate

I picked this story up from fellow New Orleanian blogger and MFAer (LSU), Emilie Staat. Dave Eggers has a nonfiction book about Katrina coming out soon, that relays the story of a Muslim family in Uptown. The profits of Zeitoun will be given to the poor. You probably heard about the movie already. And he's putting out a newspaper, in the traditional style, this September.

After working through feelings of jealousy and low self-worth, I find my curiosity is most piqued about the paper, because I'm also of the theory that newspapers are failing because there's no reason to purchase a print version of the cheesy wire service stories posted on Yahoo. Eggers is going with the radical concept that publishers should pay quality journalists to write in depth stories.

We Heart Ira Glass

In MFA programs, creative nonfiction is often linked with memoir. I find this irritating. Nothing against memoirs, there are many I love, but I am not writing memoir and memoir is not my primary NF interest. There was also this NYT bestselling phase of the trauma memoir, which seems to have passed, but the lingering stink that memoir = my crappy childhood remains.  Again, not that crappy childhood memoirs can't be fantastic. But all memoirs are not about people's horrible trauma (think: David Sedaris). And again, none of this has anything to do with what I'm writing. 

One of my NF profs, after a few, would bemoan his undergraduate nonfiction class.

"Oh god," he would moan, one hand clutching a glass of wine and the other his head, "I can't read anymore about the bulimia."

I understand this impulse to want to make sense of painful experiences. But what I want to say to young writers and to the fiction profs who equate NF with memoir is "think less My Father Raped Me and more This American Life."

One great quality about Ira Glass is that he is all about sharing information. He doesn't obfuscate what he's looking for in a great story. He's not one of those pontiffs who claims you can't explain "Art." Glass is unafraid to outline what he wants in great, specific detail. And I have learned as much from him as anyone. If you listen to Ira Glass and then go back to your favorite writers you will learn muchly. 

A story is a series of anecdotes building to a point. Along the way questions are raised and answered. These answers should surprise us. 

Easy, right? 

Ha.