A Tale of Three Memoirs

I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, and they highlighted something I already knew: reading tastes differ. This is a statement I’ve made before, but my point then was that a writer shouldn’t be discouraged simply because someone doesn’t like that person’s work. This time I have a different point: don’t feel that something is wrong with you simply because you don’t enjoy a book that your friends or the newspaper critics rave about.

I’m going to illustrate this with my recent experience. Although my reading covered a broader selection, I will limit this discussion to three memoirs written by white women, including two from my own generation. All of these books received both popular and critical acclaim, but I enjoyed one, struggled with another, and couldn’t make it through the third. (They are discussed below in the opposite order.)

CAVEAT: All of these books are well-written. Don’t treat my analyses as traditional reviews or assume that you will share my opinion. If you do, you have missed my point.

I’ll begin with The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. It started out well enough with the aftermath of a seemingly dramatic incident and a few hints about the incident itself, but then the author says, “Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while.” Unfortunately, I never got there. Karr may have thought it was a carrot, but she dangled it so far from my eyes that it wasn’t any motivation at all. I don’t understand why she did that, either. Memoirs don’t have to be chronological, and Karr plays with time elsewhere in the book, so why not here?

After the opening, I found The Liars’ Club boring and dull. Yes, I know those are synonyms, but it deserves to be said twice. I heard or read at some point that a reader should give a book fifty pages before giving up, but I quit at page 46. The story was riddled with profanity, but my main problem was boredom. I simply couldn’t get interested. And yet, according to the back cover, The Liars’ Club was “selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.”

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard also started with an intriguing story and then stalled. In many ways, her childhood is the most like mine. Yes, there were some obvious differences: Dillard was a city girl and I a small town one, she was fearless and popular and I was timid and tolerated, and her parents had a substantial income while mine learned to wring the most from their more limited funds. But we both grew up in the same era to loving parents who gave us plenty of freedom, and we both had a privileged childhood, although I didn’t realize how privileged mine was until much later. Even so, the book stalled because of the passages where she describes her growing consciousness of self and the world around her. Unfortunately, I can’t find the right words to describe them. Metaphysical? No. Philosophical? Closer, but still not right. Even abstract doesn’t work because Dillard is masterful at using concrete images to describe her abstract thoughts and perceptions. Whatever you call them, I found those passages tedious because they didn’t match my own thought processes or emotional experiences.

Still, there were two differences between An American Childhood and The Liars’ Club that made me give Dillard’s book a chance. First, she completed her opening story right away rather than leaving me feeling unsatisfied. Second, sprinkled among those problematic passages were events that I understood, such as her fear of the glowing monster that traveled around her bedroom walls at night—a fear that continued but could be controlled after she discovered the monster came from the headlights of a passing car. There were just enough of these latter scenes to keep me reading to the end. I am not sorry I finished it but am unlikely to read more by the same author.

My tepid reaction to An American Childhood doesn’t match the back cover blurb from The Chicago Tribune, which states: “An American Childhood more than takes the reader’s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that when you have put down this book, you’re a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood.” And I wouldn’t have guessed that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

My favorite of the three memoirs is Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The book’s subtitle is “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” and it tells the story of her three-month-plus hike along the rugged trail. As she takes us with her, she weaves in the events that lead her to the mostly solitary journey and the lessons she learned from it. Like The Liars’ Club, Strayed begins—in the Prologue—with a story she doesn’t finish until later, but this time we know what happened and it is only the consequences that are left hanging. That difference made the incident intriguing rather than frustrating.

If you are expecting a hiking manual or a pure wilderness adventure, you won’t get that from Wild, but as a memoir it resonated with me. The Wall Street Journal called it “vivid, touching, and ultimately inspiring,” and this time I can understand why it was voted a best book of the year by NPR, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue.

One word of caution for some of my Christian friends: there is some profanity in Wild, although it is far less obtrusive than in The Liars’ Club. There are also references to sex and drugs, but those experiences are necessary to show who Strayed was at the time, and the story would be incomplete without them.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, you may not feel the way I do about one or more of these books, and that’s okay. In Wild, Strayed mentions that James Michener was her mother’s favorite author and Strayed liked him too while she was growing up. Then a college professor called Michener an entertainer for the masses and not worthy reading for a serious writer. Strayed passed that opinion on to her mother at the time but regretted her arrogance after her mother’s death.

Every reader is different. Trust your own taste, and don’t let anyone make you feel inferior because yours differs from theirs.