Never Trust a Memoirist
Never trust a memoirist. I can never believe the conversations delivered verbatim, especially if it's a first-time memoir. Was he thinking of writing a memoir and going home and writing this stuff down? If he were thinking of writing a memoir, doesn't that change his own behavior, the things he says, the way he interacts with people? I can never believe the self-deprecators, not knowing whether it's a tone adopted for a reader's maximum empathy. And every memoir has scenes in which other people say very flattering things about the memoirist, which always hits a discordant note with that modest tone, as if everybody else thinks I'm fabulous but I'm too shy to say so. And then of course there's the content, a seemingly never-wavering tale of parental abuse, neglect, alchohol and drug abuse, rehab, pink clouds, wagon-falling, the love of a good person and redemption. Let's face it- the only reason to pick one up is for the sordid tales of degradation, as each memoirist has to top the antics of the previous one. Personally, Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss" should have been the end of memoir history. She blew her own dad on a regular basis when she was in her early twenties. I mean, come on- she wins.

But they keep coming and you have to read something, so I picked up and consumed two of the best reviewed "my parents are fuck ups so watch me try and survive through the redemptive process of writing about it" efforts, and both were fairly entertaining. Augusten Burroughs' "Dry" is the follow-up to "Running With Scissors," which I have not read, but which apparently recounts in some detail how a pedophile fucked every orifice on his body with great intensity and frequency. "Dry," as you've probably guessed, is his story of alcoholism, his advertising colleagues' intervention, his subsequent time in gay rehab, his attempts to stay off the sauce, his conflicted relationship with a former lover dying of his AIDS, and well, you get the picture. Burroughs is funny and he closes stories well. He knows a good kicker and delivers on it. I didn't learn anything, but his yarn at least hints at verisimilitude, and that keeps you reading along without getting terribly itchy or turning on the Giants game despite their 6-run deficit. You could do worse.

I had read a long New Yorker excerpt from Nick Flynn's book, "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" and I remember thinking at the time that having your old man walk into the homeless shelter where you work was at least a reasonably original take on the "dad fucked me up by never loving me enough" theme. In all fairness, Flynn does tone about as well as you're gonna get in this genre. His mom blew her brains out when he was about 20, his dad roamed the city where Nick lived on a 40-year bender and the author had his share of physical, emotional and romantic maladie, but unlike Burroughs, we don't get collapses into self-pity. The brooding and torturously long nights of self-reflection with his own bottle of Nighttrain are kept mostly off the page. We get images, mostly delivered chronologically, from his parents' courting in the late 50's to 2003, never more than a few pages in length, as if memory can do no more than produce a few words here, a rumor there, a snapshot here. Flynn's father haunts him as a shadow, sometimes far from his conscious mind but never disappearing long enough to stop the chinese water-torture of longing and curiosity. When they finally do meet again there isn't an ounce of sentiment, which fits, given Flynn's almost poetic detachment to the onslaught of troubles that are his life. You get the feeling that his damage is quiet, and he has no grievances to file with the courts of wayward parents. Perhaps he just feels compelled to finish the book his father claimed was just about to come out of him his whole life. I don't know. But for a guy who started this by saying you shouldn't trust memoirists, this is about as close as I'm going to get to loaning one money.