What is allowed to become public and what is kept private in any given transaction will depend on what needs to be taken into collective consideration for the purposes of the
transaction and what would on the contrary disrupt it if introduced into the public space. (Nagel, p. 13)
If everything has to be avowed, what does not fit the acceptable public persona will tend to be internally denied. (Nagel, p. 17)
Recently as one of the requirements in my Masters in Writing program at one of the major universities in North America, I took a workshop in memoir writing. It came as a bit of shock. We were required to submit a piece of "personal" writing each week, and to comment on each other's work. What followed was a concatenation of casually submitted horror stories and tales of woe, seemingly competing to outdo each other in their unselfconscious detailing of trauma, heartbreak, loss, and painful comings of age. I was expected to do the same.
I am a psychoanalyst, and perhaps it was for that reason that I grew rather troubled about the dynamics that were developing in this small writing group. I could see that my classmates were revealing much more about themselves than they were aware. Attending class quickly began to feel like a busman's holiday. Of course, I was bothered by all the offhand self-disclosure, but there was something more to my sense of discomfort -- something to do with the question of what it means to say that a piece of writing is 'literary.' The scholar Daniel Mendelsohn captured very well my sentiment at the time:
Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern istory, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction) -- spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends -- motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention. (p. 1)
The workshop experience led me to wonder about the whole category of memoir, raising questions that became more interesting to me than the process of writing memoir itself. I decided that I would try to get at these new questions from a broadly psychoanalytic point of view. The following essay is the result.
An obvious first thought about memoir writing today would have something to do with the paradox of writing itself, or any telling of a story. There has been a running joke in the defiles of literary modernism to the effect that ultimately, in some fashion or another, however indirectly, writers are always writing about themselves. One only has to stretch this argument a little bit to arrive at the idea that to tell any story at all is in the final analysis to tell one's own story -- that everything is memoir! The fact that I began this essay by narrating something about how I came to write it is itself a case in point. It indicates just how inescapable, and therefore how fundamental, certain memoiristic actions may be in any pursuit of the literary ideal.
It seems to me that there has always been a dialectic in literature between 'public' and 'private'; but this plays out nowhere more plainly than in the writing of memoir today. The very interest of memoir is to reveal what has been private, or to reflect publicly on largely private matters; yet one would think that to be successful, this kind of revealing would have to be done in a way that preserves an aura of privacy. To put this another way, the attraction of another's self-revelation ought to be inversely proportional to its metaphorical 'nudity.' If we feel that the narrator lacks any sense of privacy, then their presentation of themselves will surely seem less credible, only interesting in a prurient or voyeuristic sense. But if that is so, then the current situation of memoir seems to me to be a little different, at least in terms of the traditional literary norm. We are now much more prepared to be entertained by literary 'streakers' who bare themselves in public only to attract a momentary kind of attention.
These reflections suggest that the ideas of the private and the public are deeply interdependent, mutually defining concepts; and that memoir takes us back and forth across the boundary between public and private, always playing ambiguously with the boundary between them. The writer of memoir has to make decisions about what to include and what to exclude. There is no doubt that these decisions will be determined at least in part by the climate of the culture in which they are writing. Does one connect with readers through self-exposure? And if so, what are the forms of exposure that qualify as legitimate in literary self-expression? Perhaps there is something about one's personal involvement in the act of writing itself that can facilitate intimacy with an audience? As I shall try to show, these kinds of questions are all the more urgent today, given the relentless spread of commercialized mass culture and the rise of digitized social media.
The Ambiguity of Privacy and the Nature of Memoir
Paul Federn, one of the next generation of psychoanalysts after Freud, is credited with introducing the term "boundary," in the sense of delimiting what is inside and what is outside a person.1 It has become a truism that a person needs to develop and establish these personal boundaries, that it's a good thing to keep some matters just for oneself, or for chosen others. Contemporary psychologists talk a lot about the importance of maintaining personal boundaries, not allowing others to trespass on one's sense of self. But they also talk a great deal these days about how important it is to share and express our deepest feelings and concerns. Each of these perspectives seems intuitively valid, but are they compatible? There appears to be a contradiction here - perhaps a confusion in our culture.
I remember a patient, a lovely, gracious woman raised in the deep South. One of her favorite phrases was "Least said, best," delivered in an appealing Southern drawl. Sitting in my consulting room, she related how her female relatives had taught her to be a lady. That phrase epitomized her training. "Don't make others uncomfortable; don't tell secrets; don't talk about shameful things." The "Me Too" movement had bypassed her. But she knew now, in the privacy of my consulting room, that "Least said, best," would no longer serve her well if she wanted me to help her work out her problems.
As a psychoanalyst, I don't believe in "Least said, best," quite the opposite in fact, at least within the confidential space of my office. But perhaps the aphorism does hold value in other contexts. The expression "TMI - too much information," has become popular today among young and old; nonetheless, the same person whose heyday was in the 1960's might espouse the opposite philosophy now: "Let it all hang out."
As I grappled with my ambivalence about self-exposure, I found a sympathetic companion in Sven Birkerts, the author of The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. Like me, Birkerts has little regard for those tell-alls that paint the author as victim, often written for readers who thirst for lurid scandal and that make their authors and publishers money. He disparaged memoirs that were simply sensational gossip.
But not all memoirs are of that ilk, not all are empty confession. Many are introspective and make efforts to go deeper. In this more serious kind of life writing, the author is attentive to the demands of the good novelist, less concerned with getting a rise out of the reader than with the problem of how to bring the reader into a credible world that is not only remembered but also deeply imagined and reimagined. For clarity I shall call this special category of life writing "literary memoir."2 It is my contention that what distinguishes memoir in this sense from the "tell-all" stories of the rich and famous is indicative of the basic ingredients of literature as such. One important aspect of this lies in the author's intuitive sense of appropriate boundaries. As de Bres has pointed out with regard to the art of memoir, too often memoirists do not consider the duty to oneself, and how too much self-disclosure may affect them. A key to this genre is the tension between imagining a world and reflecting on it. Literary memoir invites readers into their own freedom of thought, beginning a conversation with the author and also with themselves. Birkerts says it well:
... 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... What makes the difference is not only the fact of reflective self-awareness, but the conversion of private into public by way of a narrative compelling the interest and engagement of the reader. The act of storytelling... is by its very nature an attempt at universalizing the specific; it assumes there is a shared ground between the teller and the audience. (p. 23)
This assumption of a shared ground suggests that there can be a kind of reciprocity between the memoirist and her reader. In her exquisite memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi recounts her experiences teaching Western literature to a private class of seven young women in revolutionary Iran. She exhorts her readers to do what Birkerts suggests to authors:
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us. (p. 6)
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco follows Birkerts' advice about giving her readers the here and now of the past through her writing style. In Things We Didn't Talk About When I was a Girl, a memoir of a sexual abuse experience in her late teens, Vanasco pushes this novelistic dimension of memoir a little further, examining the methods by which she painstakingly constructs the world of her memories, as if she were in the very act of retrieving it. Indeed, what Vanasco produces can be described as a memoir of a memoir; a narrative dramatization of the process of life writing in all its dimensions - personal, ethical, investigatory. Part of the process for Vanasco involves a difficult ongoing series of interviews of the male friend who had sexually abused her at a party 15 years previously. The interview process itself becomes a part of the memoir. She invites the reader into the room as she is writing, trying to bring us as close as she can to the here-and-now as she remembers her thoughts and feelings, both while speaking to him and immediately afterward. To achieve this sense of intimacy, Vanasco used complex metanarrative to construct the persona in which she tells her story.3 Although it may seem in the nature of "meta" to create distance, she believes that this technical device actually brings author and reader closer together.4
While Vanasco's writing gives the reader the impression that we are in the process of writing with her, of course we are actually not. What we are reading is a prior construction in order to achieve the effect of presence. Vanasco has had to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out, how to sequence the dramatic events, and so forth. Our feeling of direct experience arises from Vanasco's skill in inducing us to identify with the persona who explores past experience through the imaginary present of the writing experience.
All literary memoir incorporates an evocation of the past melded with present reflection, the "double vantage point," as Birkerts puts it. The double vantage point presumes psychologist William James' idea of the self as paradoxical, having both an unchanging aspect that endures over time and a consciousness that is always changing.5
The question inevitably arises, what is the nature of the self in whose name we deem privacy important? Is it a process or a substance? Or, are we simply an amalgamation of identifications with all those who have impacted us in some way? Is it legitimate to think of the self as being something private, or is it in reality socially constructed?
According to Arnold Modell in The Private Self, Donald Winnicott was the first contemporary psychoanalyst to recognize fully the existence of the private self, the psychological reality of a unique identity. Winnicott stated his case in quite a radical way: "[E]ach individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact, unfound. ... At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation."6 Winnicott believed that privacy was essential for someone to become a person, to have "a room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf put it. One needs a boundary between inside and outside that allows for private space so that imagination can flourish, for thoughts to be able to come to mind, for the person to feel fully alive. By the same token, without that sense of a robust private self, as we shall see in Nafisi's examples, the vitality of public life itself can be undermined.
I share Winnicott's intuition that an important part of our sense of who we are includes something like a unique self that needs to remain private and accessible only to ourselves. We can share this aspect of ourselves only so long as we feel there will be no doubt of its uniqueness. Nabokov put this last point more lyrically:
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap. (p. 25)
I'm inclined to agree that something like this sense of privacy and uniqueness is necessary for us to develop as individuals. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described it in terms of the existential quality of 'natality,'7 rooting our individuality in the utter novelty implied in every birth. She saw this attitude as the social root of individual freedom. There is an obvious sense in which the presumption of individual uniqueness might also be considered the basis for literary memoir, but only if we factor in the need for a witness to our 'natality' -- an other: a mother, a reader? - who can recognize in us, if not precisely know, the singularity of our being. Winnicott, a pediatrician before he became a psychoanalyst, put this simple psychological fact in the form of a now famous chiasmus: "There is no baby without a mother, and there is no mother without a baby." He elaborates on this insight when he writes that the capacity to be alone, to have a private self, depends on the paradox of "being alone, as an infant and small child, in the presence of mother."8 In other words, the proverbial baby, in the sensitive beginnings of a unique private self, requires the presence and empathy of another in order to come into being and ensure the continuity of the self. No stretch of the imagination is required to think that this intriguing concept of needing an "other" to be present is relevant to our experience of reading literary memoir.
This leads us to the question of how the sense of a private self can be violated. Neil Richards, a professor at the Washington University School of Law, explores the ways in which private space is being breached in our culture. A leading expert in privacy law, information law, and freedom of expression, he has developed an interesting perspective in his book Why Privacy Matters. Richards defines the issue in terms of poor boundary practices which he develops into three different categories. He describes the first as "'identity forcing' [which] happens when our social or cultural environment defines us, forcing our identities into boxes we might not choose or may not even have been drawn in the first place."9 The second category is "filtering," in which boundaries are also forced, not by stuffing a person into some stereotypical box, but rather by limiting a person's access to information, such as being in filter bubbles, echo chambers, or being extremely polarized.10 We see in these two ideas already that the development of the private self depends in large measure on the quality of public dialogue and exchange of ideas. The third boundary transgression is the one that especially troubled me in my class: the practice of "oversharing sensitive ideas, beliefs, or aspects of our identities," a tendency that is ubiquitous on social media. Richards believes that the long-term effects of exposure drive our unique identities towards "mainstream homogeneity" and are "stultifying and chilling to the personal and social ways we develop our senses of self." He also touches on exposure as trauma when he writes that exposure can be devastating to identity.11
As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has observed: "The public-private boundary faces in two directions -- keeping disruptive material out of the public arena and protecting private life from the crippling effects of the external gaze."12 So, the question naturally arises: does memoir, even in its more sophisticated forms, feed off this tendency to overshare private life in our mass media culture, or even contribute to its deleterious effects? Or can it be argued that literary memoir actually provides an important antidote to it? With some qualifications, I shall argue the latter.
My argument will rely on the assumption that individual self-expression depends both on the security of private life, including the right to self-determination, and the freedom to express oneself in public space. I shall be trying to answer the question, what happens to the person, but also to the society as a whole, when the necessary and fruitful tension between the security of private life and the freedom of public life is dissolved? If privacy and freedom of expression are in fact interdependent principles, as both Nagel and Richards argue, then how might we envision the consequences if one or both of them is destabilized or breached at the cultural level?
There is an interesting exploration of these questions with respect to memoir in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, which may be read as a trauma memoir, but also as a profound meditation on the paradoxical inter-relation between privacy and freedom of expression. Nafisi explicitly notes: "Now that I look at those times, I see how many of their [her students] most private stories, their confidences, were told in public places: in my office, in coffee shops, in taxis and walking through the winding streets near my home."13 With respect to the issue of trauma, Nafisi recounts the convulsions of a large population, particularly of women, in the throes of state repression of personal and cultural freedoms. What she describes is nothing short of what Leonard Shengold, a psychoanalyst, calls "soul murder." Writing about Nabokov's Lolita, Nafisi uncannily echoes Shengold's psychoanalytic argument: "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another."14 It is no accident that Nafisi chose Lolita for her students to read, for she sees a correspondence between Lolita's soul murder and that of one of her students, Yassi (not to mention the soul murder of a whole nation). Here is Nafisi's recounting of one of their conversations:
All her life she [Yassi] was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write ... Could she ever live the life of someone like me, live on her own, take long walks holding hands with someone she loved, even have a little dog perhaps? She did not know. It was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she would be lost. She had always worn the veil. Did she want to wear it or not? She did not know.... (p. 32)
This is surely an instance of what Richards calls "identity forcing." With little to no privacy, Yassi's personal development and sense of who she is has been truncated, hidden "under the veil," so to speak. Yassi does not know who she is, and has had no opportunity to find out. Nafisi concludes "... that this regime had so penetrated our hearts and minds, insinuating itself into our homes, spying on us in our bedrooms, that it had come to shape us against our own will."15
Nafisi's private class, held in her home and hidden from public view, eventually became the container/metaphorical womb for Yassi, indeed for all the young women, to nurture their exploration of themselves, their feelings and thoughts, enabling them to evolve into being their own person. Nafisi describes Nassrin, another student, who articulated a similar sense of not knowing herself. But during the class she changed dramatically:
One day she [Nassrin] came to class without her usual robe and scarf ... When Nassrin walked around in her chador or veil, her gait was defiant; she walked as she did everything else - restlessly, but with a sort of bravado. Now, without the veil, she slumped, as if she were trying to cover something. It was in the middle of our discussion of [Jane] Austen's women that I noticed what it was she was trying to hide. Under the chador, one could not see how curvy and sexy her figure really was ... Now that she was unrobed, I noticed how the chador was an excuse to cover what she had tried to disown - mainly because she really and genuinely did not know what to do with it. She had an awkward way of walking, like a toddler taking its first steps, as if at any moment she would fall down. (p. 296)
In this passage, I think Nafisi presents us with a complex fact about the psychological work that needs to occur around the social presentation of one's "self," which is a much more arduous process than we may want to admit. What was the difference between Nafisi's class and the discomfort I experienced in my workshop? I think it has to do with the fact that Nassrin was struggling against powerful inhibitions, both internal and external, to discover her own sense of who she was. In her situation, the cultural system seriously restricted personal self-expression, and in some ways, even the existence of a "private self."
The opposite was the case in my memoir workshop. The act of self-revelation met no resistance from my classmates; in fact, it was encouraged without any caveats. The assumption seems to have been that self-disclosure is something natural and automatic, and that something is wrong if a writer feels conflicted about doing so, or makes a decision to keep certain matters private. Thus, a lack of tension existed around the question "Who am I really?" Absent was any sign of struggle and reflection concerning who the writer is and what meanings to make of his or her memoir piece. As in the case of Nassrin becoming her own person, memoir cannot properly come into being without painful choices, selections, and conflict.
The Precariousness of Identity: Is Excessive Self-revelation the Antithesis of Memoir?
The rise of what has been referred to as the "boom" in personal essay seems to have coincided with the explosive growth of social media, aided by the ubiquitous smart phone. The smart phone is really a small handheld computer that allows all manner of personal information, including one's physical location, to become easily accessible at any time of the day. The relationship between the growth of memoir and phenomena such as personal home pages, blogs, microblogging services, social media platforms, and social networking services is complex and not necessarily one-to-one, but around the time that both phenomena became obvious (circa 2008, according to Jia Tolentino), self-disclosure in the public arena really took off.16 At the same time, the boundary between public and private grew progressively more and more blurred, just as it would for me in my class. In a sense, as Michael Waters has argued, the very concept of a boundary is a consequence of these social changes. "Boundary" now replaces the fixed rules of etiquette; paradoxically, there is no consensus about where these boundaries actually are. Facebook is an obvious example of the way in which the circumference of private life has become radically destabilized. Participants create a false persona of who they are with a curated public simulation of their social life. Competition sometimes arises as to who can accumulate the most "likes." Other social media outlets allow participants to show moment-to moment photos and commentary of events in real-time, creating a kind of abstract hyper-visibility, in which one is constantly in an anonymous crowd, always escaping the experience of being alone.
Reality television shows such as The Bachelor/Bachelorette, may be described in Mendelsohn's words as "dramatization without illumination,"17 in which the ostensible subject of searching for a mate serves more to conceal the absence or disappearance of intimate social relationships than to represent the complexities of romance. The purpose of shows like this seems to be more about manufacturing than portraying emotion: they involve a process in which the boundary between audience and medium collapses into a general simulation of social life. The only nod to privacy in this particular show comes near the end of the "courtship" when each couple decides to spend one night together, and the door to the "fantasy suite" closes, leaving the audience to imagine what happens.
All this self-revelation and lack of privacy has, to me, created a culture of near compulsory self-exposure. To give a generalized clinical example, when helping patients learn to be more assertive, it is often a novel thought to them that they only have to say "no" to something and not give an explanation as to why. We might speculate that excessive self-exposure has become part of the Zeitgeist of Western culture. Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst who writes about the psychodynamics of culture, associates culture with "frames of mind." When a state of mind, such as the assumption that all self-disclosure is good, becomes generalized in a society, i.e., turns into a "frame of mind," it eventually becomes an unconscious axiom that leads to the normalization of antisocial forms of behavior, such as a group of people gazing at their phones while meeting to eat in a restaurant.18 Taken too far, the newly 'axiomatic' frames of mind can become destructive.
Cases of personal breakdown after excessive self-disclosure are notorious, like the cases of Emily Gould, a well-known blogger in the early 2000's; Emma Chamberlain, a YouTube star; and Heather Armstrong, a pioneering "mommy blogger" who engaged in a high degree of self-revelation. All became famous for the exhibitionistic documentation of their everyday lives, eschewing any privacy in exchange for celebrity and financial renumeration. All paid a price in the form of self-administered soul murder. But the point here is that the media culture of confession and self-exposure lured them into this trap. Gould lost relationships; Chamberlain became depressed and anxious, fearing for both her physical safety and psychological safety: "[T]he internet is constantly witch-hunting ... Feeling out of control in my identity has caused psychological harm. It's caused severe perfectionism." And Heather Armstrong died by suicide.
The excesses of interaction on social media have revealed and magnified, perhaps to a pathological degree, another paradoxical truth about the self. William James' observation that self-experience is not a unitary process implies that the self is in large measure socially constructed; it also implies that the self tends to become even less unitary and more socially constructed in a culture that does not provide strong support for privacy.
There is no end of stories about unself-reflective individuals, including children and adolescents, falling prey to the seductions of predatory social movements, ideological fads, and online media that feed off the hungers of unformed individuals. More troubling is that self-exposure seems to have become an inherent cultural value, penetrating even into the highest reaches of thought and culture. There seems to be an imperative to challenge, if not quite dissolve, conventional distinctions between intimacy and social life, private and public. Tracing this tendency to its origins would be difficult and beyond the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, until recently it would have been rare, I think, to find it in the "halls of academe," particularly in a field so arcane as ancient philosophy -- which brings us to the interesting and thought-provoking example of Agnes Callard. For Callard, intimate self-exposure is a kind of aspirational ethical act, whose philosophical value can be traced all the way back to Socrates.
Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a specialist in ancient philosophy and ethics, has become something of an icon of high-brow psychological self-scrutiny, as profiled in publications like The New Yorker, where she has become a contributor herself. The basis of her intellectual notoriety, apart from a stunning philosophical eloquence, is her practice of using the intimate details of her ongoing daily life (including her marital difficulties, divorce and subsequent marriage to one of her students, and her ambivalence about a pregnancy and consideration of an abortion), as teaching material. This usage of self is not confined to the classroom, or even public lectures. It is the substance of her writings and her media blogs. Callard has gone so far as to say that "If you're a real philosopher you don't need privacy, because you're a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep, even in your dreams."19 At times, Callard's self-exploiting homage to the idea of transparency can seem a little too innocent to trust, as in her letting it be known that she has been diagnosed with autism. While some echoes of Temple Grandin can be detected in her public persona, there is a difference. Grandin's use of self falls squarely under the heading of memoir as "counter-narrative." 20 Grandin performs a public service by correcting widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of the nature and social reality of autism. Perhaps the same can be said of Callard, but her motive for self-exploitation seems much more rarified and theoretical -- bordering on the questionable claim that in order to become a better person, everyone should be doing what she is doing.
Freud believed that the self consists of a series of identifications that the individual makes with significant others. Many agree that the self is partially comprised of bits and pieces of others and of the dynamics in relationships that the person has taken into themself as part of who they will become. My thought is that we need to live in the paradox that there is a private, unique aspect of ourselves, and a socially-based aspect that incorporates our interactions with others, all amalgamated into what we conventionally call our identity.
But none of us has an identity that is smoothly integrated into a homogenous unit. There is a sense that we are "multiple," making ourselves up as we go along, as Philip Bromberg maintained in his psychoanalytic classic, Standing in the Spaces.21 The late neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote famously of a patient who could neither recognize others nor himself.22 His amnesia did not allow him to remember any facts about his own life, that which had once made him the unique self that he was. To fill the void, the man continuously invented different narratives about who he was and what he had done in his life, believing they were real. This poor man, in losing his own identity, tried to make up for it by imagining who he was, telling a story, many stories actually, about his life. The coping mechanism of making up his life in the absence of any memories seems proof enough that we are story-making creatures, and that narrative is central to our sense of personhood.23 Here is what Sacks says:
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative - whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a "narrative," and that this narrative is us, our identities. If we wish to know about a man, we ask, "what is his story - his real, inmost story?" - for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us - through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique. (p. 130)
Sacks goes on to write:
To be ourselves we must have ourselves - possess, if need be re-possess, our life- stories. We must "recollect" ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self. (p. 130)
This centrality of storytelling in the formation and maintenance of individual identity suggests a strong motive for the writing of memoir, to be sure; but it also suggests an equal deterrence, which is summarized in Roy Pascal's comment that "Most of us love ourselves too dearly to be autobiographers."24 As Sacks pointed out, the salient feature is not just "having" a life-story, but "possessing" it. For many, including myself, the mere telling of one's life-story in public could easily become an act of self-dispossession, a loss of identity.
Birkerts has identified three main types of literary memoir: lyric, coming-of-age, and traumatic. Traumatic memoirs, which seem to be the most common currently, reflect upon those events that disrupt a person's life and development in a major way. Indeed, one might speculate that literary memoir has tended to take on a therapeutic caste. Some people might use the word healing, but the term "healing" is rather vague and there are different kinds of healing. How does it relate to the process of life writing?
Clifford Scott, a Montreal psychoanalyst, coined an apt phrase that alludes to a core element of healing: "Making the best of a sad job." He was riffing on a phrase from another psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion: "Making the best of a bad job."25 I like Scott's phrase very much, for it refers to the mourning process. It seems to me that memoir writing can be a form of mourning, a way of coming to terms with loss. Freud's famous paper, "Mourning and Melancholia," states that in order for mourning to be complete, we must go through all our memories one by one (not necessarily in a systematic, enumerative way), naming and detailing all that we have experienced with whomever or whatever we have lost.26 In our reveries, we learn not just about the obvious losses, but also the peripheral ones that radiate out from the major loss, plus the ambiguous losses that are harder to put into words, which are losses nevertheless. However, mourning is not only a process of reviewing memories but also of transforming them from the perspective of the present, as Birkerts writes. Writing helps us remember and also reevaluate our experiences, including those of loss. It can help us understand those losses in a way that makes sense to us and brings our need to mourn to a more satisfactory conclusion.
"Making the best of a sad job" often involves wanting to redeem a traumatic experience, by using it for good in some way. The purpose of self-disclosure in memoir may be to provide comfort to readers who have undergone a similar experience: to let them know they are not alone and that others understand.
Taylor Harris, a black woman living in the South, endeavors to "make the best of a sad job" in her memoir This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown. Her son Tophs was born with a life-threatening genetic malady that until this day defies a definite diagnosis. Among the many gifts of this book is Harris' courageous story of how she and her husband live in what I call "the not-knowing," a most difficult state of existence. Tophs has an uncertain prognosis; no clear answers are available; and his parents live in constant watchfulness because they cannot predict when his blood sugar will plummet to dangerously low levels. Harris and her husband cannot cling to a diagnosis that could help define treatment, but rather they must live with the opposite, an ever-lasting uncertainty, what Tod Chambers and Kathryn Montgomery term "aesthetic closure," with "no desire to bring order" and with "the expectation of nothing."27 We readers are left to measure the Harris' abilities to do so in light of what might be our own capacity to live in chronic ambiguity. In a letter to his brothers in 1817, John Keats coined the term "Negative Capability," which speaks to this ability to remain in an open-ended, undefined state of mind, defined as follows: "... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...."28
Arthur Frank, a professor of sociology at Calgary University, writes primarily about illness narratives. In his chapter "Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children's Disability" in The Ethics of Life Writing, Frank writes: "The writer of the illness narrative is primarily a witness, whose testimony speaks not only for himself or herself but also for a larger community of those who suffer."29 Harris is such a witness for herself and for all parents who must advocate for their special needs children.
But Harris enlarges her vision of witness from only the personal aspect to a wider societal dimension. She reveals the racism and discrimination she and her husband encounter in both the medical and educational systems on which they and Tophs rely. I was especially moved by Harris' description of how she coped with school administrators developing an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for Tophs:
Around that time, I developed the mental hashtag #NotMyBlackBoy. I would repeat it in my head as I prepared to engage educators who would try to convince me that in Tophs's case, the bare bones would do. As Tophs's mother, I'm never just advocating for an undiagnosed child whose challenges don't follow any script; I'm also a Black mother advocating for my Black son in a room full of people who don't look like us. With an education gap between races that lingers at the threshold of almost every school building you step foot in, I have to hold both these truths close ... And what happens when a single parent working two jobs walks into a meeting? Or a parent who is stressed about making rent or has another child with more urgent needs" What then? (pp. 176 - 177)
Thus, Harris' memoir is also a "counterstory," as defined by feminist bioethicist Hilde Lindemann Nelson in Frank's chapter:
Counterstories, then, are tools designed to repair the damage inflicted on identities by abusive power systems. They are purposive acts of moral definition, developed on one's own behalf or on behalf of others. They set out to resist, to varying degrees, the stories that identify certain groups of people as targets for ill treatment. Their aim is to reidentify such people as competent members of the moral community and in doing so to enable their moral agency. (p. 178)
A counterstory par excellence is Chanel Miller's Know My Name: A Memoir. Miller reveals herself in the memoir as the victim/survivor of a chilling sexual assault at Stanford University. At the time, it made national headlines. Originally known only by the pseudonym "Emily," Miller decided to bring charges. The perpetrator, Brock Turner, was found guilty but given a light sentence. But Miller's victim impact statement, anonymous at the time, became a sensation, going viral. Both the victim impact statement and the memoir are told from Miller's point of view, a stark contrast to the narrative Turner related at the trial. The memoir, revealing Miller as much more than the stereotype that Turner and his lawyer tried to paint of her, allows Miller to lose her invisibility and readers to see Miller as she saw herself, not as others might be inclined to define her. Miller, too, is a witness for others who have had similar experiences, as Harris' memoir is, and her story stands as a harbinger of the "Me, Too" movement. In the social realm, a counterstory, as an emblem for all who have undergone similar experiences, heightens sensitivity to others' sufferings, and can indirectly serve as an instrument of social change, making prejudice visible in Harris' case, for example. On a more personal level, telling a counterstory can also be one way to assert one's autonomy and individuality, which helps the writer find out who he or she is. It also allows others to see you as you see yourself.
Conclusion
"A memoir is both elegantly naked and artfully clothed."30 In this eloquent parallel construction, Sara Mansfield Taber captures the essence of literary memoir, which is well illustrated in the works discussed in this essay. I have argued that sophisticated forms of memoir writing, though highly self-disclosing, actually contribute to maintaining the ethical values of individuality and privacy in our culture. In memoir writing, we bring the personal into the social sphere, creating a shift at the boundary between public and private. The shift is not so much from one side to the other, from the private to the public or the public to the private, but an expansion of both categories. Faith in the personal significance of private experience is enhanced and validated in a way that raises the level of public discourse and disseminates the value of reflective individuality.
What is it that lifts life writing to the literary level? In this category of writing, readers are not overwhelmed with their emotional reactions. Beyond prurient self-revelation, they encounter an invitation to reflect or to expand their thinking about life experiences. How writers like these have come to think about the content of their lives is as significant, if not more so, than the content itself. What they have made of their experiences opens the door to readers' reflections about their own lives and current society. Thus, the stories contribute to maintaining the ethical values of individuality and privacy in our culture, and also contribute to the integration of our concepts of individuality and of social responsibility by initiating conversations, both public and private. As such, they create potential for emotional growth for both reader and writer, and ultimately, the milieux in which all of us live and work.