There is a large camp of writers who swear by the tactic of writing what they know. But ask if their life is interesting enough to write or read an entire book about, and the responses will undoubtedly fall flat. We are, after all, a pathetic, wearisome lot, doomed forever to spending long nights in front of our computers, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, creating lives and characters out of thin air that are undeniably more interesting as human beings. This is exactly why anyone with the justified intrigue and masochistic desire to write a memoir needs to be cut from just the write kind of cloth – or at least, cunning enough make it seem as though they have been. All the elements necessary for a good piece of fiction have to be there: plot development, layered characters, subtext, conflict and drama. There’s something terribly off-putting about a life story written by someone who isn’t just boring and ordinary, but brash enough to actually think that their sub-par existence is worth your precious reading time. Luckily, contemporary memoirs of late can serve as certifiable sources of inspiration, some coming in the form of personal essays, bordering on non-fiction short stories. Naked, a collection of personal essays by David Sedaris, is the perfect example. The book reads like a novel, but functions subtly as a memoir. Besides the ridiculously dry and cutting wit, Naked contains no trace of self-indulgence regardless of whether Sedaris is discussing licking mailboxes to satisfy his obsessive-compulsive disorder, spending a week in a nude trailer park, or his early inability to deal with homosexuality. This achingly obvious use of reverse psychology leaves a reader’s attention absolutely unshaken.
The day after graduating from college, I found fifty dollars in the foyer of my Chicago apartment building. It occurred to me then that if I played my cards right, I might never have to find a job. People lost things all the time. They left class rings on the sinks of public bathrooms and dropped gem-studded earrings at the doors of the opera house. My job was to keep my eyes open and find these things. I didn’t want to become one of those coots who combed the beaches of Lake Michigan with a metal detector, but if I paid attention and used my head, I might never have to work again.
Humor, then, could very well be the key, especially when it’s tempered with highly sensitive, emotional issues. The opportunity to bust a lung while laughing at someone else’s pain, all the while empathizing with them directly, is let’s face it irresistable. Dave Eggers spends more than 30 pages prefacing the points and problems with his memoir, aptly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers bounces back and forth from being completely immersed in the stories he relates the loss of both parents at 22, leaving him with a younger brother to raise and a head full of screws to contend with to jumping outside of his own skin in order to comment on the absurdity and self-conciousness wrapped within the book itself.
The author feels obligated to acknowledge that yes, the success of a memoir-of any book, really-has a lot to do with how appealing its narrator is. To address this, the author offers the following: a) That he is like you. b) That, like you, he falls asleep shortly after he becomes drunk. c) That he sometimes has sex without condoms. d) That he sometimes falls asleep when he is drunk having sex without condoms… One word: appealing. And that’s just the beginning!
Being wise and funny, though that often requires an author with several life lessons under his belt. Roger Rosenblatt, an essayist for Time magazine and ‘The NewsHour with Jim Leher,’ has produced Anything Can Happen: Notes on My Inadequate Life and Yours. He uses short snippets and longer, flowing personal stories and essays to reflect on the flip side of life, and all of its randomness and quirky twists and turns. In the half-page ‘Don’t Take Your Soul to New England,’ Rosenblatt writes:
Your mind, yes. You can take your mind to New England without doing it any great damage. But your soul-up there in the dark pines and the frozen water and the lengthening shadows of small mountains over empty fields and suicidal cows, it’s no place for a soul. Read Hawthorne, the Mathers, and the Lowells, if you don’t believe me. Spars, spires, white clapboard Congregational churches screaming murder in the night. And Harvard Square at twighlight, when the zombies hang around the bookstores before they head for your porch. Do not speak of it. Makes one’s blood freeze.
When it comes down to it, the formula seems rather simple that is, simple enough for a few choice authors to grasp. Be interesting, cool, witty and talented as hell and profit wildly upon it. Or, just stick to fiction.