Flynn doesn’t write his memoirs as much as he assembles them. They are accumulations of fragments, sketches, musings on books, confessional vignettes, scraps of unfinished prose poems, descriptions of family photographs, memories of his parents, chopped-up pieces of a story only he knows. His go-to move is to find some gem of mysticism from a film, from a student’s poem, from a spiritual leader, from a myth, some koan, and turn it over and over, remark on all the facets of it, and then put it down. He finds meaning in everything.
This is essentially an essayist’s move. Joseph Epstein calls this a “magical trick,” as writes in the Norton Book of Personal Essays.
Turning the small into the large has been well described by the essayist Phillip Lopate in a nice reversal of an old metaphor. “The personal essay is the reverse of that set of Chinese boxes that you keep opening, only to find a smaller on within. Here you start with the small … and suddenly find a slightly larger container, insinuated by the essay’s successful articulation and the writer’s self-knowledge.” (20)
It is a “magical trick.” So you have to wonder whether Flynn is a mere illusionist or a conjuror. Have we been fooled? Or has there been a real transformation?
And I wonder, too, if Flynn’s books are about him or about the world. Does this display of personality make the reader feel pity and awe for the displayed personality? Or does it make the reader feel pity and awe in general in a new way?
This might have more to do with a reader’s generosity than it does with a book’s quality.
I’m torn. I can’t help thinking of Sylvia Plath, right now. Do we learn something about the world, when we read her poems? Or do we learn something about her?
But isn’t learning something about her learning something about the world? A writer like Plath who can articulate in strange and inventive ways her interior life helps others articulate their own interior lives. Before we had her poems we had fewer ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves.
Does it follow, then, that before we had Flynn’s memoirs we had fewer ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves, our families, and our place in the world?
Logically it follows. Logically. But. But!
Flynn’s books, I realize, make me confront something I feel squeamish about already. It is not clear to me that memoir, autobiography, and personal essays aren’t inherently and finally selfish, narcissistic exercises. It is not clear to me that writing about oneself is for others and not just for oneself.
This is something E.B. White touches on in his introduction to his Essays. He writes, “Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.” He goes on:
I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor. (x)
This was in 1977! Imagine what White might have thought in 2007. It’s as though we’ve all broken off a piece of Montaigne’s mantle and keep it in our underwear drawers. And maybe we’ve reduced the whole project, chipped away the original nobility and made it smaller and shabby.
It is a live question, of course. But invoking Montaigne, the grandfather of autobiographical writing, shirks it. As though we are all excused from having to answer just because others never answered. This feels like the inverse of original sin. Not: Don’t eat that. But: Go ahead and eat that.
I did, and it was delicious.
Do Montaigne, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Woolf, White, Orwell, Mailer, Didion, Rich, Steinem, Lopate, Franzen, et. al., et. al., give us permission to write nonfiction about ourselves?
What about Whitman, Auden, Stevens, Eliot, Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman?
It might be a false dilemma. But either a writer invents who he writes about or selects who he writes about. (If I may invoke Aristotle.) Of all the ways we can persuade, of all the materials available to us, we can either invent new ones for our purposes or select given ones. We can make it up, or we can write it down.
Which will it be?
The truth is that as we write it down we make it up.
But I refuse to reconcile the dilemma, and I refuse to invoke Montaigne (at least until I read all of him, if I ever managed to do so) to let myself off uncritically and unjustifiably. I don’t have a defense of either choice. Is making it up frivolous, when there is so much that is so real that is worth reporting and writing about and reading?
But then I wonder whether writing it down is a way of capitalizing on other people’s lives. Thanks for the interview. Good luck with all your hardship!
Can it be braver, more noble, in the face of all this criticism, to make yourself the object of this? To report yourself? To make yourself vulnerable? To say, This is my story, and it is mine to tell.
I don’t know.
Ann Bib 