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Contemporary Non-Fiction is Decadent and Depraved

2008-07-06T18:04:00.003-04:00

For a brief moment in the 1980s, with Hunter S. Thompson relegated to a cartoon character in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” Tom Wolfe known more as a chronicler of his fictitious Masters of the Universe than of the real universe’s less fortunate sons and daughters, and Joan Didion holed up like a brooding intellectual Rapunzel in the top of the ivory tower that is the New York Review of Books, for a brief moment there it seemed that the American tradition of literary nonfiction was falling from grace.

Not that it was altogether gone; there have always been fine writers making fine contributions to the canon of literary nonfiction: Charles Bowden and Tracy Kidder and many more who have written books of great distinction and importance. But, in the overall, the market for nonfiction became less and less literary. The 1980s were the time of big biographies of rich men, such as “Trump: Surviving at the Top” and the ubiquitous best-seller “Iacocca: An Autobiography,” of diet books (Judy Mazel’s “The Beverly Hills Diet” and Richard Simmons’s “Never Say Diet Book” stand out), and of self-help guides celebrating puerility, such as Robert Fulgham’s “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” and “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life.” There was scant room, it seemed, for literary nonfiction in the hearts and minds of American readers.

And then came David Sedaris.

In the eleven years that have passed since he was spotted at an open-mic night at a Chicago café by National Public Radio’s Ira Glass, Sedaris has, almost single-handedly, breathed new life into the chilly corpse of American literary nonfiction. His five collections all dominated The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list since his first book was published in 1995, his work appeared anywhere from the New Yorker to Esquire, and his radio debut, a humorous recollection of his time working as a Christmas elf in Macy’s, was the second-most requested tape in the history of NPR. Sedaris has also been honored with laurels usually withheld from men and women of letters: audio recordings of him reading his essays have all sold in the hundreds of thousands, and, in October of 2002, he performed in front of a throng of adoring fans at Carnegie Hall; tickets were sold out within three days of going on the market. Finally, Sedaris’s greatest accomplishment may lie not in his own accolades but in his success at spawning a crest of imitators, all of whom have been catapulted into instant recognition by association with the Master: David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell, Meghan Daum, Cynthia Kaplan. The list is long.

Despite the apparent renaissance of literary nonfiction, however, something was lost when the Sixties were translated into the Nineties. The poet Adrienne Rich, writing in 1991 about the previous decade, captured it with great precision:

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing
became silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

While Didion and Thompson and Wolfe and their contemporaries bore witness to revolutions and disillusionment and social upheaval and moral outrage and generational gap and the birth and the death of rock n’ roll, Sedaris et al bear witness to themselves alone. And while Didion and Thompson often wrote in the first-person, using it to analyze, detect and deconstruct their surroundings, Sedaris and his followers turned the first-person into an end in of itself. In the thirty years that passed between Didion’s heyday and Sedaris’s, the nature, and the very meaning, of the first-person narrative, of the all-seeing I, has changed dramatically.

To trace this shift, one needs only to compare Sedaris to the literary nonfiction writers who preceded him, mainly Didion and Thompson. The comparison is not far-fetched: all three are writers who enjoy, or have enjoyed, great popularity in various media, from magazines to books; all three tend to write in the first person; and all three frequently explore the social milieu, albeit with radically different styles. Still, all three craft their writerly personae in divergent ways; and, oddly enough, the painfully shy Didion and the painfully boisterous Thompson end up – on paper, at least – looking remarkably similar, while Sedaris portrays himself as something else altogether.

Didion’s I is the most elusive of the three. She is clearly present in almost every one of her pieces, whether she is observing El Salvador or Las Vegas, Joan Baez in Monterey Country or teenage runaways on San Francisco’s Height-Asbury. And yet, her first-person reads more like an out-of-body experience than a monologue; she offers her self as a prop that her characters use to punctuate whatever point they, not she, are trying to make.

Consider, for example, the following passage from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion’s famous exploration of the Sixties. Standing around the Panhandle, a section of the Golden Gate Park, Didion is talking to a young acid aficionado named Norris:

Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle, and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes, but Norris rises up to it. “Don’t worry,” he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”

Talking to Norris, Didion is an observant-participator, but her participation is limited to the scene, to the theme, to the moment. By introducing herself – her age, her wishes, her mental condition – she allows Norris, in two paragraphs, to embody the entire zeitgeist of the particular moment she is trying to capture. Rather than simply interviewing Norris, she, the older reporter, interacts with him, the young hippie, thereby allowing him to make his point in an unmediated way; in one sentence Norris expresses the entire generation gap that had caused Didion’s young subjects to become lost, dazed and confused. Such a point could have only come across so lucidly and succinctly when made so casually and comfortably, between one person and the other, when the traditional barriers between journalist and subject had been eroded.

Often, Didion manages to achieve the extraordinary feat of expropriating her I for the greater good. She, the journalist who admits herself to being so shy that her technique of interviewing consisted mainly of remaining silent until her subjects took pity on her and opened up, uses her first-person as an observatory, inviting the reader to step in and see the world for themselves through her eyes. In “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles,” for example, Didion seeks to understand that address’s occupant, the quintessential recluse Howard Hughes. Several paragraphs into the piece, she writes:

As it happens, I live not far from 7000 Romaine, and I make a point of driving past it every now and then, I suppose in the same spirit that Arthurian scholars visit the Cornish coast. I am interested in the folklore of Howard Hughes, in the way people react to him, in the terms they use when they talk about him.

This is an odd approach for a reporter as crafty as Didion. Obviously, she could have discovered better entryways into Hughes’ elusive persona than depicting herself futilely circling his house. But as she drives around 7000 Romaine, the reader is right there with her. And as she talks to people who boast of their various, convoluted ties to Hughes, her futile circling becomes a metaphor for everybody’s relation to Hughes. Didion doesn’t do anything anyone couldn’t have done by themselves; she therefore becomes an everywoman, indistinguishable from her readers, lacking the journalist’s halo of privilege and access. Her I, therefore, becomes a spacious path along which her readers leisurely stroll uphill, to a place with a better, clearer view of the scenery.

In light of the above, Hunter S. Thompson’s I, drug-addled and delirious, appears, at first, to be the polar opposite of Didion’s reserved, almost egoless self. Thompson’s pieces, unlike Didion’s, often appear to be so full of the author and his carefully constructed persona that they leave little room for others, and he has often been accused of stepping dangerously close to the line that separates first-person reporting from monomania. A closer look, however, reveals that Thompson may have applied radically different techniques, but the destination he had in mind, one he had often reached, was the same as Didion’s.

Putting aside Thompson’s bravado, as well as his latter-day self, trapped in an imagery of his own creation like a living man in a sarcophagus, it is interesting to consider not how he uses his I, but why. For although, unlike Didion, Thompson constructs a self few people can identify with, he, like her, uses his first person as a conduit through which his readers can glimpse an otherwise hidden reality.
In his famous essay about the Kentucky Derby, for example, the Hunter S. Thompson persona is ever-so-versatile. For one, he is the usual wild man, riffing off his straight-man companion, the British illustrator Ralph Steadman. When, on one occasion, Steadman wonders why his habit of handing his creepy caricatures to the subjects who inspired them is met with what Thompson, using his trademark phrase, describes as “fear and loathing,” the father of gonzo journalism delivers a mock-deadpan explanation, dwelling on the differences between his America and Steadman’s native England:

“Fuck England,” I said. “This is Middle America. These people regard what you're doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult. Look what happened last night. I thought my brother was going to tear your head off.”
Steadman shook his head sadly. “But I liked him. He struck me as a very decent, straightforward sort.”
“Look, Ralph,” I said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. That was a very horrible drawing you gave him. It was the face of a monster. It got on his nerves very badly.” I shrugged. “Why in hell do you think we left the restaurant so fast?”

Thompson, the shining knight of gun-toting machismo, is patient and deliberative in setting Steadman up as the perfect sidekick, to great comic effect.

The most important role which Thompson gives his I, however, is that of a mirror. Throughout the entire piece – as is true, in some respects, for many other Thompson pieces – he searches for the one face that represents what he calls the inbred decadence of the upper crust southerners who populate the derby, debauching and drunk and depleted of morality. When he finds it, the face turns out to be his own:

I barely heard him. My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him--a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God – a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature...like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for--and it was, of course, my own.

With his depraved, irreverent and madly courageous I, Thompson takes the reader into the heart of America’s most decadent milieus, whether they be presidential campaigns, law enforcement conventions, or horse races. He turns himself into a sort of observation deck, from which his readers can peer safely into the abyss as they watch him – not themselves – descend into it.

If, then, two authors so radically different as Didion and Thompson both display similar, albeit not identical, methods of using the first-person to serve their readership, it is reasonable to expect that their modern successors would use themselves to do the same.

It takes one page of David Sedaris’s work to realize that is not the case.

Sedaris, to be sure, is a hardly a stranger to the first person. Not only are all of his stories told through his own eyes, but that amorphous letter, I, or variations on it (my, me, mine) appear in virtually every opening sentence of virtually every piece. Here’s a random selection from “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” his 2000 mega-bestseller: “My childhood friend Alisha lives in North Carolina…,” “I’d been living in Manhattan for eight years when my father called…,” “When I was young, my father was transferred and our family moved…”

And yet, Sedaris’s I is a whole different beast than anything anyone writing literary nonfiction in the Sixties would have fathomed; it is I in that letter’s narrowest sense. Unlike Didion and Thompson, Sedaris’s I is the end, not the means. He uses society to explore himself, rather than the other way around.

Examples abound. In “City of Angels,” to name one, Sedaris begins by appearing to turn a visit by an out-of-town friend into an opportunity to examine the machinations of life in New York City, then takes a sharp turn and reverts back to his favorite topic: himself. The story makes no comments on the dynamics of life in the city, its challenges and tribulations, nor does it touch on the way the city’s many visitors see it – odd, given the premise of the piece. Instead, the story reaches its peak in one simple scene: Sedaris is walking down Fifth Avenue when he is overwhelmed by the mass of Midwesterners flooding the street, doing obscene things like taking photographs and being polite. “I hobbled off toward home,” he concludes, “a clear outsider in a city I’d foolishly thought to call my own.” End of story. No examination, no reflection. If the city doesn’t fit the I, it ceases to be a viable subject.

Sedaris’s point here, somewhat shifty on its own merit, becomes clearer when considered in context. For one thing, there are his topics. In the eleven years of Sedaris’s career, the country in which he lives underwent three elections, two wars, a great economic boom and an even greater recession, and one devastating attack. Yet, to read Sedaris’s essays, one would know none of that. Here are some of the topics that concern him instead: being an Elf at Macy’s, a turd floating in a friend’s toilet, a runaway parrot, and the “Stadium Pal,” an exterior catheter marketed to “sports fans, truck drivers and anyone else who’s tired of searching for a bathroom.”

Obliviousness to one’s surrounding, however, is not necessarily a grievous sin; malicious condescension, however, can be. In his description of the few characters in his book who are not himself, Sedaris reminds one of a schoolyard bully, making up funny insults that he knows will get a cheap laugh, regardless of the consequences to his target’s feelings or wellbeing. This, again, is a new development; both Didion and Thompson often go to great lengths to describe even the most unsympathetic of characters in a way that at least allows them their humanity. Didion, for example, describes a conservative young woman who objects to Joan Baez’s presence in a farm nearby her home as a “plump young matron with an air of bewildered determination.”

This is no flattering description, but it seems to unlock, in a few words, the woman’s soul, a young and traditional wife resisting change and shunning what she perceives as encroachments on her basic values. Likewise, Thompson, while often a tad more tart, uses description to evoke and unleash a character’s nature; a rental car clerk, therefore, is succinctly described as a “moon-faced young swinger.” The description sets up the young man as a naïve oaf who nonetheless seeks approval and popularity, and comes in handy when Thompson is trying to persuade the man to give him a car.

Sedaris, on the other hand, has no use for allowing anybody their humanity. The only justification Sedaris seems to need for making the effort to describe other people is the chance for a chuckle. His drug dealer, for example, is a “jittery, bug-eyed typesetter whose brittle, prematurely white hair was permed in such a way that I couldn’t look at her without thinking of a late-season dandelion.” Similarly, an unsophisticated woman from North Carolina is a “dour, spindly woman whose thick girlish braids fell like leashes over the innocent puppies pictured on her sweatshirt.” Sedaris, of course, is a humorist, and as such may be forgiven most exaggerations; still, these exaggeration serve one end only, the maniacal egocentrism that is his sole agenda.

As Sedaris’s writing is often dotted with whimsical bouts of self-deprecation, most contemporary readers seem to embrace his obsession with himself; so much so that his successors have followed his path. while Didion borrowed the title of her book from a Yeats poem, some of the contemporary titles currently available by the new generation of literary nonfiction writers include either self-centered phrases such as “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “My Misspent Youth,” or “Why I’m Like This,” or ironic ones offering the readers a wink and a relief from all pretense of seriousness, such as “Fraud,” “Running with Scissors,” and “Autobiography of a Fat Bride.”

The I, then, is alive and well in the present, but it has been abducted and mutilated. It is no longer a starting point for socially aware exploration, but a desired destination, a literary goldmine cleaned of all the pain and strife and anxiety of the real world. Literary nonfiction is thriving in America, but curiosity about anything outside oneself is not. A new generation has risen to replace that of the Sixties, but it does not appear that they will ever be able to abandon their solipsism long enough to leave behind them, as did Thompson and Didion and Wolfe, an impressive reservoir of insight and grace.

Gonzoed

2008-07-04T01:11:00.004-04:00

There are few people in the otherwise bleak wilderness of American journalism who fascinate me more than Hunter S. Thompson, so when Alex Gibney's new documentary, "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" played at BAM a few weeks ago, I rushed to get a ticket. The film is opening today, and the onslaught of publicity awoke what I felt then, and feel even more now, was both a mirthless movie and a missed opportunity.

The details of Thompson's life, at this point, are well-known: feverish motorcycle rides with the Hell's Angels, peyote-infused jaunts in Vegas, guns and girls and gonzo, which, loosely defined, is an attitude that frees journalism from all the demons that are dragging it towards irrelevance and ill-repute while at the same time slashing the veins that pumped its lifeblood. The film relishes in all that: using archive footage -- some new and delightful, other reheated -- and anchored by a gallery of sterling men, from Jimmy Carter to Jann Wenner, all singing Thompson's praise, the film is a fairly effective bit of cinematic hagiography.

Herein lies the problem: hagiography is precisely what killed Thompson in the first place, turning him from a fierce critic and a truly inspired writer (if you're new to the man and his work, you can see some of this luster in what I think is his masterpiece, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved") into a caricature, both figuratively and literally. The really fascinating thing about Thompson, I think, isn't that he shot up Jack Nicholson's house (a mad joke gone bad) or that he convinced many Americans that presidential contender Ed Muskie was addicted to a Brazilian hallucinogen named Ibogaine (a bad joke gone mad), but that he helped create a new genre of journalism that told stories by injecting the self into the previously dispassionate mixture of facts, quotes and other people's opinions, and then watched as his own personality grew to monstrous proportions and devoured his talent, his clarity, and his voice.

Gibney touches none of that. While I think that few things can be as obnoxious as writing about the film a director should have made instead of about the one that he or she did make, I couldn't shake the feeling, while watching "Gonzo," that the real story was slipping away.

Of course, Thompson himself took great pride in letting stories slip away, which usually meant that other, much more compelling stories were to be found in their stead: at the Kentucky Derby, for example, he famously ignored the horses and looked instead at the human beings in the stands; he had come, he wrote, to "watch the real beasts perform." But Gibney fails to pull a similar trick. Instead, he focuses on Thompson's political views and writing, a rich brew of rage, dissent and disgust that he happily poured on anyone from Nixon, his bete noire, to George W. Bush. In doing so, Gibney can't help but rob Thompson from one of his key charms, namely his savage humor: no matter how hard a documentary filmmaker tries, following someone else's jokes, quips and pranks with long minutes of interviews explaining the humor behind said jokes drains the life out of even the most shining of hilarities. This is especially true when the pundit doing the explaining is Pat Buchanan.

A mirthless and unselfconscious film: the otherwise talented Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") settled for a paean rather than a punk rock song. This only made me wish a Hunter S. Thompson would show up and, with a few proper stimulants and a few choice words, blow up whole thing up, giving us an account of the real beast instead.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

2008-06-27T00:47:00.002-04:00

For all of its abundance of rueful haircuts and runny hummus, Adam Sandler's new movie, "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" is, I think, one of the more poignant films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What it gets uncannily right is just how central all-things-physical are to both of the aforementioned nations, and how both made combat and copulation its twin rituals, killing every chance for contemplation, introspection or insight. I can go on and on, but I said it much better in an article published today by the incomparable Nextbook, available here.

Piracy and the Body of Cinema

2008-06-24T22:22:00.004-04:00

I have a friend whose greatest passion in life is screwing with systems. Hand him a Costco membership card, and he'll scan the fine print for ways to make a quick profit; give him a job, and he'll read every word of the manual in search of some scheme to squeeze every last bit of compensation from his new employers; buy him a gadget, and he'll hack it, mod it, and tweak it endlessly. It's not that the man is immoral, or thoughtless, or evil: he is just resentful of the large, cumbersome systems that have come to govern so much of modern life, and he takes great pleasure in being a nerdy ninja and using the corporate monsters' size and might against them.

Recently, he discovered a new plaything in pirated Hollywood movies. As he downloaded and watched "The Incredible Hulk" the other day, he was, as per usual, not without his arsenal of justifications: if the studios really wanted to fight piracy, he ranted, all they have to do is get rid of theatrical releases and offer their stuff for sale online, a la iTunes, giving people easy access to information and wide-ranging freedom of choice.

I was not listening to a word he said. As I watched the images float on the screen, thwarted and fuzzy and out of focus, the result of some unknown person sneaking a handycam into the movie theater, I realized that for all its flaws, piracy may have one unexpected boon: in an era of increasing digitization, the pirated film gives the movie its body back.

Consider this: as you watch a pirated film, you're seeing, in all likelihood, the work of an actual human being sitting in a specific location and pointing a video camera at the screen. What you see, then, is not only the film itself, crisp and and clean, but also the edges of the physical screen, the aisles, the backs of several of the spectators. And what you hear is not just the dialog, but also someone whispering and someone laughing, someone shrieking and someone rustling their candy wrapper. As digitization disembodies cinema, transforming it from the ancient habit of searing images with light onto film, piracy, in its odd and resistant way, reminds us of film's corporeal essence. And whereas digitization makes the whole communal notion of watching films in the theater obsolete, piracy replants the movie-watching experience back where it belongs, and where it was born, in an actual dark room with other people, all having the exact same experience at the very same time.

Of course, we still receive the pirated content digitally; but when we watch it, we have no choice but to acknowledge the presence of other human beings, and we can't help but share the moment with them. We may be on sitting on the couch or in front of the PC, but a small part of us is there in the multiplex, laughing at the same jokes and gasping at the same scary parts and recalling that what made cinema a truly modern and truly populist art form to begin with was the notion that whatever happens on screen, we're all in it together.

To be sure, I'm not condoning piracy, and have much else to say about its ruinous effects. But as I saw a green grainy Hulk stomp around on the screen, and caught a glimpse of some guy's hand scratching his head and then diving into a silhouette of a large bucket of popcorn, I felt as thrilled about the future of film as I have in years.

Inspired Once More...

2008-06-23T03:26:00.004-04:00

Nearly two years have passed since I last sat down and wrote a blog post, two years during which I oscillated wildly between viewing blogs as a simpleminded monster about to destroy my culture, and seeing them as a liberating force, giving voice to those who previously had none. Two years, and at this point, the discussion is probably pointless; no amount of resistance would ever change the inevitable advent of the digitally enhanced confessional culture.

But how to confess without being nasty, boring, brutish or insufferably self-involved? I've been thinking about this question a lot lately, and tonight found an immensely inspired direction in "My Winnipeg," the latest film by Guy Maddin:

There's no use in trying to describe what the movie is. If you must, imagine renting out your childhood home for a month, hiring actors to play members of your family, and then recreating your most traumatic memories and splicing them with surreal faux-historical montages, bits of agitprop animation and a voice-over that bounces between the sleepy and the howling mad, and the sheer scope of Maddin's ambition will begin to surface. Anyway, Maddin himself explained his project best. The movie, as he confesses at the very beginning, is his attempt to film his way out of his native Winnipeg, which means to make sense of his past and reclaim his memories and explore the city again with all the wit and wisdom no adolescent, alas, ever acquires until it's much, much too late. It's full of lies, of course -- the delightfully haunting B-movie queen Ann Savage presented as Maddin's mother, and a sweet pug cast as his childhood dog, a chihuahua -- but the facts are besides the point. What matters is the truth -- what Werner Herzog so poignantly refers to as "the ecstatic truth" -- the kind of truth that transcends the historically accurate and grasps at what is emotionally, universally, and essentially correct.

What a shame that so many bloggers, memoirists, journalists and assorted others are so dull, so mindless, so silly, telling and retelling their own life stories, embellishing it when it is found wanting, and then performing acts of semantic contortion to stretch the boundaries between reporting and recollection. Seeing what Maddin does with memory -- turning it from solid to fluid -- I'm not so much enraged at these scribbling saps as I'm flustered at their lack of originality. And, seeing Maddin, I'm inspired to try and find a new approach to cure my own blogophobia, and transform my most immediate and mundane thoughts into morsels at least somewhat worthy of public airing. Here goes.

The Jewlicious Sessions

2006-01-30T17:23:00.000-05:00

The other week, I've had the pleasure of being interviewed, via email, by Laya Millman, co-founder of Jewlicious. The latter, in my opinion, is one of the most excellent blogs out there, and the conversation with Laya was terrific. As she herself so aptly put it, we had a "talmudic" conversation about anything from the state of Zionism to "hipster Judaism;" it was a thrilling experience for me, and the outcome is one I'm immensly proud of. There may be other posts to come -- our conversation spanned over many emails -- but the first post is available here.

No More Memoirs

2006-01-13T14:06:00.000-05:00

Last week brought about a confluence of two fascinating cases of literary malarkey.

The first, and better known, featured James Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces" and Oprah Winfrey’s most recent literary protégée. His book, a memoir of addiction, violence and redemption, was discovered by The Smoking Gun to contain gross exaggerations and outright lies.

In other news of writers gone wild, JT LeRoy, another memoirist who had become famous in the late 1990s after writing about his life as a teenage whore pimped around in West Virginia truckstops by his own mother, turned out to be altogether non-existent. He was, it is now largely assumed, invented by a San Francisco woman who used the LeRoy moniker as a way to win over celebrities, literary figures, and a fawning readership. And while LeRoy’s work was always presented as fiction, his appeal was always based on the assumption that his gruesome stories of depravity were his own thinly veiled recollections.

The most important thing about these stories, it seems to me, is not the sordid pleasure most media outlets took in the public humiliation of these previously-mighty literary lions, nor is it the debate - important, no doubt - about the boundaries of non-fiction literature and the liberties a memoirist may take when telling his or her own story.

Instead, I believe there is a different lesson altogether to be learned from the legacy of Frey and LeRoy. Bluntly stated, here it is: Stop writing memoirs. Stop right now.

Let me rephrase a little more compassionately: It’s alright to write a memoir if you’ve lived a life that justifies one. How would you know? Here’s a good primer.

Take Winston Churchill, for example. After helping His Majesty’s army reconquer the Sudan, covering the Anglo-Boer war, falling captive and escaping from prison, he went on to become a Parliament member, a Prime Minister, fought and won the Second World War, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing, among other classics, the definitive history of the English-speaking peoples.

If one’s own life experience equals or surpasses that of Sir Churchill, then, by all means, one should take the time and write his or her own life’s story for the greater public good. If, however, one’s greatest life achievement was not the decimation of Dresden with firebombs but rather half-heartedly kicking some habit one shouldn’t have picked up in the first place, I believe other creative venues, such as talking to a therapist, a significant other, or an attentive inanimate object, may be more appropriate.

To the writers and MFA crowds currently toiling over their biographies, I have this to say: Your lives are not interesting. They are not unique. They do not merit 300 words, let alone 300 pages. You may think you have a good story to tell; that might be true. You may also think that you can tell an otherwise trite story in a new, inventive, creative manner; that, too, is possible. But before you sit down and write, I urge you to ask yourself one question: Pliny the Elder said that one should either do something worth writing about, or write something worth reading; does your life and/or your memoir fall under one of these two categories?

The answer shouldn’t necessarily be negative; there have been writers - Marcel Proust being the most obvious example - who used the minutiae of their own existence as shovels with which to unearth the very secrets of what it means to be human. If you believe your own work of art possesses comparable powers, write furiously. If not, please consider another profession, or at least write a well-crafted piece of fiction that explores a canvass wider than your own self.
If not, you may end up like LeRoy and Frey, two miserable individuals so intent on becoming famous writers they had to peddle fictitious biographies to gain the right to be read.