Hey folks. I'm teaching an introductory creative writing class in the spring, and I need to round out my reading lists with memoirs that would be helpful for college level CW students. The two I was going to use, and have used before, our either out-of-print or out of stock, not to be reprinted until the summer. There are a lot of great memoirs out there, but I'll need a certain kind. For instance, as great as they are as historical documents, and even as well-written as they are, the memoirs of U.S. Grant or Winston Churchill are not what I have in mind, as they won't provide the models for beginning CW students. Same with literary memoirs I consider ass-kicking, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Similarily, there are many, many memoirs published every year, but I don't really want "dysfunctional childhood" memoirs, primarily because I want the focus to be on writing, and not on a competition to see whose life is the most ********-ed up. I have several ideas. I'm thinking, for instance, of some Henry Rollins tour diaries, which are largely fake, as an example, so that students can explore the "fake memoir" genre. Or maybe (I'll be looking at it this weekend) I'm With the Band, which is a memoir of a groupie that they might find interesting. Hell, since I work at a Catholic college, and he turned out an album called Catholic Boy, I'm even considering Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. Basically, I'm looking for autobiographical prose/essays, etc., that college students can relate to, and which are well-written, but not wayyyyy beyond their wildest hopes of ever matching. Any suggestions? Thanks for reading to the bottom of this.
That's too bad - the first person I thought of was Augusten Burroughs, who is a fantastic writer, but he had the most ********ed up childhood in the history of childhoods. I'm thinking Toby Young's "How To Lose Friends and Alienate People".
Which brings up something I left out in the original... it should be in the 200-page range or thereabouts It should also be episodic rather than driven by a sustained narrative, so Flash's recommendation does work on that score... re: skip's suggestion: I'm actually going to look at A. Burroughs this weekend this weekend, too, because if there is enough humor in it, then it could work. The problem I want to avoid comes out of those thoroughly humorless memoirs in the "my childhood was more ********ed up than yours" school of autobiographical writing. Because if there are elements of humor in it, then students in the class can compete over who's the funniest, not who's had the worst childhood, which leads to better writing, in my experience.
I taught Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life with great success several years ago. Fun book, that. (True story: at my request, Wolff inscribed a copy of this book I got for a friend with a line from one of this stories. The inscription read, "Dear Charlie, Fuck with me again and you're history, capiche? --Tobias Wolff.") Better than the movie, but that goes without saying. Or you could teach the book that pretty much invented the modern memoir, Frank Conroy's Stop Time. I haven't read the entire thing, but James McPherson published part of Crab Cakes as an essay with the same title. I can't remember offhand where it appeared, but it's truly wonderful. It's one of the most brilliant and moving memoiristic essays I've ever read. I'll see if I can find it. It's definitely worth hunting down. EDITED TO ADD: "Crab Cakes" appears in The Best American Essays from 1998 (ed. Cynthia Ozick). One of the reviews on amazon.com says of it, "James Alan McPherson's "Crabcakes," a stunning transcendental meditation on returning to the author's former home in Baltimore on the death of his tenant, is one essay (originally published in Doubletake) that most readers will not have seen before." EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: "Crab Cakes" is also very inventive--lots of switching around of perspective, all of which is to great effect.
I'm not sure if Burroughs will pass your test, but he's definitely funny, in a dark, matter-of-fact, dry sort of way - not unlike David Sedaris, but not as well adjusted. His first memoir, "Running With Scissors" is about growing up with a psychotic mother who gives him up to be raised by her, um, quirky shrink. "Dry" is about his bout with the occupational disease of advertising, substance abuse. He has a third one out, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Would William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways qualify as a memoir? edit: How could I forget: Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods Twain: Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi And howzabout: Jane Goodall: In the Shadow of Man and Through a Window (although neither has much humor at all, come to think of it). Nigel Barley: The Innocent Anthropologist : Notes from a Mud Hut
Why not one of Frank McCourt's books, then? Angela's Ashes is a ****ed up childhood memoir, but it's also funny as hell. If you wanted to avoid the childhood aspect, you could go with 'Tis, although I've never thought it to be as good as Ashes.
Thanks for the help so far. I checked a few this weekend. McCourt is pretty good, but probably a bit too long and not episodic enough(this is a creative writing class, and no one is going to write a 300+ pager). Augusten Burroughs... well, funny as hell, with short chapters of the sort that students could model their essays on, but... well, there's also anal intercourse with the pedophile, and that's not something I'm prepared to teach at this place. In fact, while David Sedaris seems to be anal-intercourse free in his writing, I'd just as soon not have to waste time dealing with the consequences in the event there's a homophobe from a wealthy donor's family in the class. I'll be checking some of the other ones, plus some anthologies I've just heard of. In other words... bump.
I really enjoyed Henry Morgenthau's Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Could be a bit controversial though as it deals with the Armenian genocide. Morgenthau was US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916. It's fairly long though at about 400 pages. I don't think the version I read was that long, the one I looked at on Amazon.com must have some lengthy appendices or something.
Jim Carroll was one that came to mind. And I'm sure you've considered it, but why not A River Runs Through It? The short logging stories/memoirs after it are also good. I'd imagine Young Men and Fire would be too long. What about some of James Baldwin's stuff? James Agee Rick Bragg Would any Hunter S. Thompson stuff count as "memoir" for your purposes? (seeing as you're considering Henry Rollins...)
...Holds out the olive branch... I really liked Pete Hamill's "A Drinking Life." If you go here: http://www.petehamill.com/ and click on "Recent Books" you will see it and can even read a bit of it to see if it interests you.
... beats El Toro over the head with it (triple ) Thanks for bumping this up, actually. I had to put my order in on Friday, and I wound up going with a collection of essays instead (The Next American Essay edited by John D'agata (http://www.graywolfpress.org/compon...f1901b3e2f2376627dd7f8c0d/option,com_phpshop/) which a friend of mine had good luck with. However, the prof in charge of CW is thinking of adding a memoir/autobiography course for next fall, so the lists of recommendations so far is helpful. I haven't read Hamill's memoir, but the excerpt from his website suggests it would work pretty well. And be worth a read. Thanks again, all.
Was "Dry" worth the read? I enjoyed "Running with Scissors". Even thought it's fiction, one of my favorite memoir-style books is "Memoirs of a Geisha". I couldn't put that sucker down.
I hated Angela's Ashes. Unrelenting without a point. Much better for the genre is Russell Baker's Growing Up.I would also second the Conroy book already mentioned...
"Dry" is definitely worth the read. It is in the same warts-and-all style as "Running...". I found it difficult to read at times because I knew what was coming and I was cringing, yet I had to keep reading. Though I have heard that his new one, "Magical Thinking" is better than the first two.
Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford. An astonishing book. Kids at the age of military service will find it compelling. My understanding is that he wrote this book as his MFA project the University of Iowa Writers workshop.
I've heard that it's great. Does it have chapters that would be worth reading on their own in, to take a completely random example, a class on post World War II American history? I don't know if anyone's mentioned The Things They Carried, which seems to be almost canonical, but it might be interesting to assign, especially in the way it intentionally blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. Don't you love all these suggestions that come in after you've submitted your book order?
Actually, yeah. I'll probably need to fill out lists again in the future. And some of the things I haven't read, so, no harm there. Keep them coming if you think of something.
Not really -- chapters aren't numbered, and this is really a very personal memoir, though it does have some broader implications. There's a brief, very brief, history of snipers in the military. It's also very narratively complex, and it does a lot of flashbacks. You should take a read of the Amazon reviews; some ex-Marines have come on and said basically, yeah, this is how it is. Others have come on and accused him of making stuff up -- such as one little set piece in the book, a video of a wife's infidelity, what some considered an "urban legend" type myth. Anyway, it's a great read, and a college student, for example, could finsh it in less than a day, at about 250 pages.
I've had students recently who think that's too much for a semester, let alone a day. But I do my best to encourage them to go waste their money and time elsewhere.