Henry Alford

Kathryn Harrison’s recently published book, “On Sunset,” in which she describes being reared by her wonderfully eccentric grandparents in Los Angeles in the 1960s, is her fifth memoir. “Typically, when people hear the phrase ‘serial memoirist,'” I said to Harrison recently, “they think of Maya Angelou, who wrote eight memoirs, or Shirley MacLaine, who has written 11. How do you feel about being in that company?”

Harrison, who has also written seven well-regarded novels, two biographies and a book of true crime, but who is best known for “The Kiss,” her controversial memoir about her four-year consensual romance with her father, replied, not uncheerily, “I’m OK with it.” But Harrison then recounted walking the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in northern Spain which is the subject of memoirs by both Harrison and MacLaine. At one point during her walk, Harrison had fallen into conversation with a British man who was offering refreshments on the side of the path. “When he found out I was a writer, he said, ‘You must be here because of Shirley MacLaine.’ It was so insulting! I was not looking for my past lives!”

A different combination of motives and inclinations prompts every serial memoirist to return repeatedly to the keyboard’s well-worn “I” button. If the searing emotionalism found in the work of most repeat memoirists (Angelou, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, Jamaica Kincaid, Joyce Maynard, Frank McCourt, Lauren Slater) would seem to have been generated by forces other than those fueling writers who, at the end of, or well into, their careers, tack on a few autobiographical works to their oeuvres (Diana Athill, Gore Vidal), one quality unites all these writers. Their lingua franca is candor.

That said, outside of “stunt journalists” (Henry David Thoreau, George Plimpton, A.J. Jacobs) and famous or notable personages compelled to leave behind a historical record of their existence on the planet (any celebrity or politician with a pen), serial memoirists would seem to fall into two main camps — those who simply want to capture life as they themselves experienced it, and who happen to have more than a book’s worth of material; and those for whom an additional memoir or memoirs is a form of repudiation or correction.

At first blush, the phrase “serial memoirist” seems distinctly postmodern: Before the self-empowerment boom of the 1960s and 70s, writing a memoir was thought to be the province of a reflective senior citizen. “Whether I serve one or two terms in the presidency,” John F. Kennedy said in 1961 at the age of 43, “I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age — too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” But if we take a broader view, we see not only that St. Augustine started writing his “Confessions” in 397 at the age of 43, but that this early example of memoir can also qualify as serial: Each of the 13 books was composed as a discrete unit (meant to be read aloud, each taking about an hour to perform.)

Of the two main camps of serial memoirists described above, Harrison falls into the former. Although Harrison’s agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban, will sometimes try to coax her client into writing something for commercial reasons (on the heels of Josephine Hart’s novel “Damage,” Urban tried, “How about a little book about adultery?”), Harrison said she needs to be thinking about, if not obsessing about, a topic in order to take it on. “'The Mother Knot’ is typical,” she said, referring to her fourth memoir, in which she achieves equanimity over her long-troubled relationships with her parents by sprinkling her dead mother’s remains in the sea. Harrison said she had not been planning to write “The Mother Knot.”

“It was only when I was on the phone with the funeral director out in Los Angeles, asking him to dig my mother up, burn her up and send her to me, that I thought to myself, ‘You’re behaving weirdly now. Perhaps you should start taking notes.'”

Writer Dani Shapiro’s upcoming work, “Inheritance” — her fifth memoir — can be classified in the repudiation or correction category. After blithely submitting her DNA to a genealogy website in 2016, Shapiro discovered that her father — son of the founder of the Lincoln Square Synagogue, brother of the former president of the Orthodox Union — was neither her biological father nor Jewish. (Coincidentally, in New York magazine last month, Elizabeth Wurtzel recounted her own recent discovery that her birth father was famed photographer Bob Adelman.)

That Judaism is matrilineal seems, in Shapiro’s case, to take a back seat to the fact that Shapiro, over the course of her memoirs, has not been shy about positing herself as a Jewish person who doesn’t look Jewish (she is blonde and Californian-looking). In her first memoir, “Slow Motion,” Shapiro recounted how her Holocaust survivor neighbors in New Jersey would tell her, “We could have used you in the camps, little blondie. The soldiers would have given you extra bread.” In her second memoir, “Devotion,” she refers to herself as “the blond sheep” of her family. Thus, “Inheritance” can be viewed as a kind of crisis management of the Dani Shapiro brand.

In this second category of serial memoir, the theme of repudiation or correction is often more overt than it is Shapiro’s case. As Joan Wickersham pointed out in Harvard Review last year, Emily Fox Gordon and Karen Armstrong are notable examples. In her 2010 personal essay collection, “Book of Days,” Gordon writes of her 2000 therapy memoir, “Mockingbird Years,” “The narrative of my memoir was a lie,” referring not to factual accuracy but to context and scale: “I presented what was only one of a multitude of possible autobiographical stories as if it were the story of my life.”

Similarly, Armstrong has explained the existence of her third memoir, “The Spiral Staircase” — partly a rewrite of her second memoir, “Beginning the World,” describing the ex-nun’s trials with depression and temporal lobe epilepsy — by saying that the second memoir “did not tell the whole story!” The publisher of “Beginning the World” didn’t want Armstrong to be perceived as an intellectual, so the book has no discussion of theology or the purpose of prayer; but in between the publication of this book and “The Spiral Staircase,” Armstrong wrote her international best-seller “A History of God” and became a celebrated religious historian.

The impulse to repudiate or correct also fuels what might be termed the call-and-response memoir. After literary critic Anatole Broyard wrote two memoirs that neglected to mention that he was African-American, his daughter Bliss Broyard corrected the score in 2007 with her own memoir about her family’s secret; two years after Sean Wilsey cast his gimlet eye on his socialite mother in “Oh the Glory of It All,” she fired back with “Oh the Hell of It All.”

In the end, serial memoirists, regardless of what categories we file them under or what motives we ascribe to them, serve as a litmus test of a reader’s humanity. If memoir is, according to serial memoirist Mark Twain’s friend and adviser, William Dean Howells, “the most democratic province of the republic of letters,” then it makes a certain kind of sense that critics and cognoscenti often sniff at writers who repeatedly offer up literature’s answer to fried dough. Consider the editor faced with whittling down the notes that H.L. Mencken appended to the three memoirs he published during his lifetime, from 1,200 pages to 200.

But aren’t serial memoirists expressing something deeply human? In 1971, psychologists Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett conducted an experiment in which they asked subjects to rate a series of individuals — their fathers, their friends, Walter Cronkite and themselves — in terms of traits like aggression and generosity. If the subjects wished, they could choose “depends on situation” as a rating. To a large degree, the subjects chose “depends on situation” only for themselves, while positing more definite character traits for the other three categories of people. While we tend to think of other people as having fixed personalities and traits, we view ourselves as inherently flexible. A cottage industry is born.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/books/serial-memoir-writer.html" id="6cfbde6c-a092-314d-acc1-e95c14991f9c">The New York Times</a>.

(Reader’s Notebook)

Let Me Tell You the Story of My Life. Again.

But ask today, and you might get a different response. A response betokening focused individuals and the intelligent chatter they make in the presence of their own kind. A response betokening a literal interpretation of the E.M. Forster dictum “Only connect.”

“I like the routine of revisiting the homogeneity of homosexuality — the shared references, the social graces, the minor outrages,” said Ned Martel, the former style editor of the Washington Post turned writer and producer for “Glee” and “ American Horror Story,” who, a year ago, joined an all-male, gay-themed book club in Los Angeles peopled largely with interior designers and tastemakers. “Gays are so assimilated now, and gay bars have lost their, I guess, centrality.”

“It’s a book club of political junkies.”

Janette Sadik-Khan, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation who is now a principal at Bloomberg Associates, is in an urban policy-themed book club which is full of political operatives and former members of Democratic administrations. It has been graced by visits from speakers such as Jimmy Carter and historian Robert Caro.

“It’s a book club of political junkies,” Sadik-Khan said. “Political junkies like to be around other political junkies and talk.”

Mystery writer Harlan Coben loves how “old school” it feels when he joins up with fellow writers Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Amor Towles, Dana Perino, John Stossel, Cristina Alger, Joseph Kanon and Douglas Brunt for their non-themed book club, which has read books like Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach,” Imbolo Mbue’s “Behold the Dreamers,” and collections of female-authored crime novels from the 1940s and 1950s.

“I feel like we should be wearing tuxes when we meet,” Coben said. “It’s one of the easiest time-machine portals that I know.”

“My metric of success is not, ‘What did everyone think of the prose?’”

The presence of insiders at a book club heralds both pleasures and challenges. On the pleasure front: O, the schmingling. Yahdon Israel, the former editor of Brooklyn magazine who now teaches at City College and the New School, said of his club Literaryswag, which is open to the public and held in the vintage clothing store The Brooklyn Circus, “My metric of success is not, ‘What did everyone think of the prose?’ ” Rather, he hopes club members will make friends with one another, or talk about the book later.

To up the ante, Israel selects books you don’t have to have read in order to join the conversation because the subject matter is so rich (a recent pick: Margo Jefferson’s book “On Michael Jackson”), and he anoints at each session the Swaggiest Member (best-dressed) and the Littest Person (most thoughtful).

Some folks in book clubs enjoy the inside dope that an insider can bring. Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, said of his group, “People will ask for a little scuttlebutt from behind the scenes of publishing as to how this particular book came into the world, or what I know about the author.”

Or imagine the clarity and depth that Proust scholar Marcelle Clements must bring to sessions of the Proust-themed club founded by novelist Michael Cunningham, McNally Jackson bookstores owner Sarah McNally, and punk musician Billy Hough. Long, snakey sentences: parsed. The Vivonne river: more vivonné than ever.

At a recent session of Book the Writer — novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book club in which subscribers are given the opportunity to pay $35 to chat with an author — fans of playwright Sarah Ruhl and her book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write” thrilled to two of Ruhl’s confessions. (She is writing a musical version of the film “A Face in the Crowd,” with music by Elvis Costello, and sometimes ducks into the WeWork co-working space across from her children’s’ school in Brooklyn whence she can see them on the playground.)

On the challenges side of the equation, the increased level of sophistication that the influential bestow on a group can augur a decreased level of indulgence. One member of a children’s literature group said, “We would kick you out if you wanted to talk about ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ There’s no place for you here. We’ve had people who just have not lasted.”

Simonoff, the literary agent, added that though he tends to recuse himself from the selecting of books for his group, the group once included a member “who objected to one of my clients’ books being read by us. She is no longer in the group.”

Indeed, the selection of books can be a more freighted process when publishing professionals are present. Louise Grunwald, the widow of former diplomat and Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Grunwald, says the reading picks of her group’s leader, novelist John Burnham Schwartz, sometimes prevail over other members’ suggestions. “It seems like a democratic process, but it really isn’t,” Grunwald said. “In the end, I find, it’s by fiat. But disguised as democratic.”

“You ask yourself, Should I fake it, or should I just admit I didn’t finish the book?”

Conversely, Coben finds that the novelists in his group are egalitarian: “Sure, there are elder statesmen and younger bucks. But no one dominates the conversation.” However, the presence of literary luminaries in the room can make a member’s unpreparedness especially piquant. “You ask yourself, Should I fake it, or should I just admit I didn’t finish the book? All members have done that at one point.”

Does Grunwald feel that being among the last left of New York’s acknowledged great hostesses puts a burden on her or on other members when it’s their turn to host? “I see what you mean,” she said. “But no. Everyone does his own thing. And sometimes people even have fun with it. If we’re reading an Egyptian novel, we’ll have hummus.”

What about Martel and his interior designers: Are kale leaves being massaged and couches Scotch-Guarded as we speak? “Yes, but convention steers toward studied casualness,” Martel said. Nevertheless, he added, “Sometimes the table is set for a night of taste and restraint, and then the rosé happens.”

For some hosts, the pressure to make the rosé happen is more plangent. The public policy-themed club attended by Sadik-Khan is always hosted by the group’s co-founder Gary Ginsberg, the senior vice president and head of communications at SoftBank. The group, about 15 in size, occasionally invites authors it is reading. Given that the first three books the club read were by Caro, Ginsberg was understandably nerve-racked when the author agreed to speak at one of the club’s meetings.

“It was terrifying,” Ginsberg said. “He’s the one historian we all hold in awe. You want to get it right. You want to make sure the quality of the conversation is up to his level of writing and investigation.” Caro stayed for three hours and was, Ginsberg said, “mesmerizing.” Carter, who came to discuss Lawrence Wright’s “13 Days in September,” did not stay as long, but wowed the group with his “incredible, almost minute-to-minute recall” of the 1978 meeting with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Every age begets its era-specific book club. At the origins of the pastime — mid-18th-century England — women, shut out from most colleges and learned gatherings, opened their living rooms to male luminaries in an effort at intellectual autonomy. In the 1950s, the Great Books movement helped an economically robust postwar society flex its cultural and democratic muscles.

Inevitably, today’s book clubs mirror the everything-is-political ethos of our time: Here is Martel and company discussing the AIDS-era memoir “Fairyland,” there is Ruhl discussing whether the well-made play is essentially a patriarchal structure. In an age in which public discourse has been sullied, and political lines have been drawn in the sand, it makes sense that people would want to bond with the like-minded.

“You know these meetings are a tryout.”

Cassandra Lam is the chief executive of The Cosmos, a community of self-identifying Asian American women. A proud daughter of Vietnamese boat refugee parents, Lam said that many of the women in their 20s and 30s who are drawn to the group’s book club meetings grew up without seeing people who look like them in books or on TV.

Consequently, at the meetings, devoted to Asian American diasporic literature written by women, “Some people don’t have much to say because it’s so emotional just to be there. It’s like how so many Asian people cried during ‘Crazy Rich Asians’: that’s not a sad movie, it’s simply that these people had never seen themselves before. In that moment you realize the boundaries of what’s possible have expanded.”

For Israel of Literaryswag, these expanded horizons imply responsibility: “You know these meetings are a tryout. The people at them are gonna be your collaborators, your co-conspirators, the people you start businesses and families with.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="4961b284-c5ce-3345-ad9e-18e843131770" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/books/insider-niche-book-clubs-literaryswag.html">The New York Times</a>.

Four or five years ago, if you asked someone about her book group, your ears were likely to be singed with anecdotes about the overconsumption of pinot grigio or various club members’ foundering marriages. Half the group didn’t even finish reading Donna Tartt’s book, your interlocutor would grouse; the other half kept referring to it as “The Goldfish.”

Book clubs get especially clubby

<h1>Kathryn Harrison’s recently published book, “On Sunset,” in which she describes being reared by her wonderfully eccentric grandparents in Los Angeles in the 1960s, is her fifth memoir. </h1>

“Typically, when people hear the phrase ‘serial memoirist,'” I said to Harrison recently, “they think of Maya Angelou, who wrote eight memoirs, or Shirley MacLaine, who has written 11. How do you feel about being in that company?”

Harrison, who has also written seven well-regarded novels, two biographies and a book of true crime, but who is best known for “The Kiss,” her controversial memoir about her four-year consensual romance with her father, replied, not uncheerily, “I’m OK with it.” But Harrison then recounted walking the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in northern Spain which is the subject of memoirs by both Harrison and MacLaine. At one point during her walk, Harrison had fallen into conversation with a British man who was offering refreshments on the side of the path. “When he found out I was a writer, he said, ‘You must be here because of Shirley MacLaine.’ It was so insulting! I was not looking for my past lives!”

The impulse to repudiate or correct also fuels what might be termed the call-and-response memoir. After literary critic Anatole Broyard wrote two memoirs that neglected to mention that he was African-American, his daughter Bliss Broyard corrected the score in 2007 with her own memoir; two years after Sean Wilsey cast his gimlet eye on his socialite mother in “Oh the Glory of It All,” she fired back with “Oh the Hell of It All.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="94df9a1d-6315-4c52-a8a5-6851dc057eca" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/books/serial-memoir-writer.html">The New York Times</a>.

Let me tell you the story of my life, again

A different combination of motives and inclinations prompts every serial memoirist to return repeatedly to the keyboard’s well-worn “I” button.

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Henry Alford

Articles written by the author

Let Me Tell You the Story of My Life. Again.

Book clubs get especially clubby

Let me tell you the story of my life, again