Tayari's Blog: Why? Oh, Why?
Posted by TayariJones on March 5, 2008 07:27 AM
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Current Events
Yesterday, in the comments, Sarah asked why people like Margaret Jones just don't publish thier stories as novels. Why do they feel compelled to call it "memoir"? I don't know, but there are a couple interesting hypotheses out there in the blogosphere.
Maybe Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press is right when she emails that this whole fake memoir trend points to a dysfunction at "New York commercial houses." As she analyzes the situation, "Bookselling is all about categories, and the Memoir category sells better than Fiction. Agents know this, Editors know this, Publishers know this. Authors learn this... Blame it on reality TV shows which give the illusion (though they're scripted) that 'true stories' are somehow more appealing than fiction." (That said, it should be conceded that Misha Defonseca's phony Holocaust survival story was published by an indie press.)
Yxta Maya Murray, who reviewed Love and Consequences for TruthDig (she loved it), has this to say:
The answer? Because we don’t value the novel anymore. The coin of the realm is Reality: blogging, biography, Web confessions, “The Real Housewives of New York City.” We have learned to so diminish the importance of the imagination that we no longer pay sufficient attention to the “ecstatic truths” (Werner Herzog’s much-repeated maxim) that may be gleaned from fiction. Thus we have created a market that demands “true crime” and “authentic” tales of woe, which are easily exploited by frauds.
Anybody else got a theory?
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There are 2 comments on "Why? Oh, Why?". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.
Comment #1, by Honoree ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
My theory is that reading about the pathological Black community is the only way that some folks can deal (on the page) with the Black community at all. Yes, we have pathologies. God knows we do. But to paraphrase Brother Langston (last name not needed), "We are beautiful and ugly, too." We aren't just pathological or just perfect. We're just, uh, normal.
And since most good Black writers depict the members of their community as real, normal people--with lovely qualities, and ugly pathologies, and everything in between--instead of depicting sick, strange creatures who eat their young, Miss Margaret Jones took it upon herself to feed the Black pathology addiction of some folks in her "memoir."
Now that's my theory.
The last thing I want to say is that, the point is not that Jones wrote a memoir when she should have written a novel. The point is, why are there Black writers out there not being given a chance to publish our stories about the full, complex range of the Black community--our OWN community--but there was a non-Black woman passing for Native American who was given that chance and paid in full for it? This is a sticky point, but it's the proverbial elephant in the corner of the room--maybe it's waiting to eat its young, and then somebody can write a fake memoir about it!
March 5, 2008 05:51 PM
Comment #2, by Michael Fischer
I read a great article a few years ago in AWP Chronicle that defended the memoir genre against condescending attitudes (i.e. you know, the typical smug chauvinistic “confessional” crap that some idiot blowhards like to spout). Anyway, the author (wish I could recall her name) stated that the memoir is bashed in this manner because it provides a medium for people in positions of power to be “outed.” For instance, there is nothing “confessional” about outing a sexual predator in an artistic manner, by revealing the victim’s side of the story when she’s been told her entire life that she better not tell anyone.
So what’s interesting to me is that this great medium—when done right—is now being exploited by a bunch of damn frauds. The same medium that provided access to people who lacked a voice is now being defrauded by people like Seltzer.
The worst part of all of this is that the folks who are committed to the genre will now have to listen to the same blowhards jump all over cases like this one in their next round of “confessional memoir” bashing.
March 5, 2008 10:25 PM