In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story Gornick claims that the power of memoir does not lie in particular types of events or life experiences, but rather from the growing awareness a writer is able to solidify throughout the course of their book. A good memoir, in my opinion, offers unique, subjective experiences and connects them to a clarifying, objective perspective.
[Memoir] is not navel-gazing, as Melissa Febos suggests in her craft book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Febos believes that what qualifies a person to write a memoir is their insight, and the ability to tell a story of the past that contains dimensions.
I am a hairstylist, and I hold Febos’s words close to heart as I spend my off-hours at work on a memoir. Most of the money I make comes from irregularly styling hair or regularly writing about hair. It does not come from my “real” writing, though that’s what really gets the better of me and my time. Which is also to say, if I weren’t married, I’d be broke.
For me, the hairstylist, to take ownership of working on a memoir is convoluted, to say the least. I did not graduate with a writing degree, or even finish schooling for that matter. So what qualifies me to write a memoir? Answering this question alone is a narrative I am constantly working on alongside, scratch that, within, the book itself.
Nearly every craft book on the genre of memoir is going to touch on the idea of disconnection. Sven Birkets, author of The Art of Time in Memoir says “[memoirs] are about circumstances becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove.” It’s a search for patterns and connections beyond ourselves, Birkets goes on to say, that proves the real point and glory of the [memoir] genre.
Most of us writers, I’ll venture to say, are floating various jobs at once. We’re Parents. Designers. Entrepreneurs. Project Managers. Publicists. Florists. Because writing is not an art form that our economy deems profitable for more than a select few, placing its societal value and, at times, our own individual sense of worth, on the bottom of the totem pole. To write a memoir specifically is to partake in a type of care work of the self, and care work is largely invisible. It happens when we remove ourselves physically from the world around us, put our heads down and get to the page. But the work is also happening off the page. When we’re in therapy. Walking. Driving. Cooking. Showering. Reading. Sleeping. Working (at our day jobs, that is). Memoir writing is a body of work taking shape within the writer at all times. So personally, I’ve grown very interested in the ways that other memoirists have been able to transform the hours they put toward one of their seemingly separate “jobs” and transform that time into the bloodline of a great book.
In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, Karr observes how every form of writing has what I’ll call a pulse. She says, “novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir… books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.”
Below are four memoirs that serve as a guiding light of inspiration to me as a memoirist, not only because the authors were able to effectively give stunning narrative and profound perspectives, but because they’ve found a way to use their time, largely spent in separate day jobs that don’t involve writing, to inform the work that is constant and essential to any memoirist: the work of the self.
Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan
As someone who is personally intrigued by any writer or author with a non-linear trajectory, Iliana Regan (a Michelin star chef) released her second memoir Fieldwork earlier this year and it quickly caught my eye when I found myself “foraging” for narratives in and around the “natural world” like a moth to a flame. Full of lyrical prose and eloquent metaphor, Regan explores the multitudes of her identity — in gender, career, family, food — and the collective origin story they hold in the landscapes she has inhabited. After leaving her post at her Chicago restaurant Elizabeth to open up a small bnb called The Milkweed Inn with her wife in Northern Michigan, Regan manages to reflect back on her upbringing while still moving her narrative forward. This intergenerational and interpersonal story traverses the intertwined existence of trauma and tradition, grief and growth. Foraging, the act of searching widely for provisions, is Regan’s creative channel to do just as Febos suggests: tell a story about the past in both dimensions. The most inspiring part is knowing, by Regan’s example, that what we do in our writing —hunt, gather, nurture, cut out —can also be done in our daily lives off the page, be it in our day jobs or just our general way of life.
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land
Stephanie Land’s memoir is one of the most important books I’ve read in the last ten years. She chronicles her experiences as a young mother with very little support, suffering through domestic abuse and struggling to sustain a life for her and her daughter on ridiculously low-paid jobs. Land manages to take the narrative far beyond herself in posing questions and solutions around the types of government-based systems we have in place to assist those in poverty. She uses her story to illuminate a broader one: a national perspective on poverty and the working class that remains poor. Land clearly illustrates one does not need to grow up in poverty to end up there; that one does not end up in poverty because they are lazy. This devastating read will have you questioning the indignities that others are up against; the invisible context behind appearances. And on top of all that, there is so much beauty in her writing, on a sentence level. Her detailed prose of how to clean a home or disperse a paycheck was rhythmic, like the bedtime routine she attempts to offer her daughter for a sense of stability during such fraught times. Land characterizes the ordinary in an extraordinary way, and it serves us as readers, to better understand a viewpoint that isn’t always accessible; the classic advice of “show, don’t tell” in a profoundly unique and powerful way.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner
When Anna Weiner traded day jobs, leaving the publishing industry for tech, I don’t think she initially set out to write about the culture shift she experienced, but we can all be thankful that she did. Our author is a generally tech-ambivalent literary enthusiast who details her new day job(s) with all its hilarious start-up employed characters and a relatably healthy amount of greed in a brilliantly laid out bildungsroman. The author witnesses herself with that certain remove essential to memoir, living within the blurred lines of objectivity and subjectivity as she chases the brighter future tech promises its employees, and all the rest of us. In search of work-life balance, and all the other idealisms that are essentially sold to us, the complicity Weiner strives for is also the type of ignorance that makes her (and many of us) the perfect prey to her newfound industry. Before you thoughtlessly pick up your phone tonight to doom scroll, I invite you to use your device instead to call your local library and put this book on hold. It will haunt you in a similar way as that Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma but with all the literary merit you could possibly want along the way.
The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu
“Stepping into a system doesn’t mean it becomes you,” is the claim 23-year-old Francisco Cantu makes to his mother when he joins the US border patrol. Cantu, a descendant of immigrants, takes this job at the border in an effort to better understand a place he’s only known through reading and hearsay, questioning what he could actually, possibly, know about a place he’s spent no time at firsthand— admirable, right off the cuff. I haven’t finished reading this memoir in its entirety but I couldn’t resist putting it on this list. The premise alone left me eager to know the shape of how his time unfolds, and reveals more than enough intrigue about our narrator’s reliability and character. His story fascinates me, and as a fellow Mexican American his writing makes my heart stir and my stomach clench for those on both sides of the border war. Cantu’s memoir made this list because his writing is a catalyst to my own understanding of the culture I belong to, and I think it’ll do the same for you dear reader, for better or for worse.