Remember when Oprah got herself all in a twist about James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces? Do you recall her outrage over how Frey made up some parts of the book and exaggerated others? Can you think back to her righteous indignation at having been “duped,” and how she authorized her book club readers to feel the same sense of having been “used”? I recall all this and also how it strengthened my conviction that Oprah shouldn’t be allowed to be the arbiter of American literary tastes. There are some good books that have shown up in her book club, but doesn’t mean their are being discussed with anything approaching critical acumen. Just take Frey for an example. A memoir might not be entirely true? It might be misleading? It might be self-serving? Let’s not confuse the exceptions with the rule. If we read memoir with the belief that, by reading, we gain a pure, unvarnished truth into the core of a writer’s mind and soul, then we are already starting out by misreading the book. If we believe that an autobiography is going to give us a pure and incontrovertible insight into its subject, then we are beginning with the wrong reason for reading autobiography.
Some memoirs are better than others, but how they measure up on the “truth” scale is not the primary criterion of their worth. Frederick Douglass wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his life, and the final one — the one, I might be tempted to argue, that might hew closest to many historical facts and engage in fewer obfuscations and distortions than the earlier versions — is the least popular and studied. Yet we are porrer in our culture and our individual humanity if we do NOT read, at least the first memoir: 1845’s My Bondage and My Freedom. There are plenty of good reasons for strategic omissions and distortions in all Douglass’s narratives, but they don’t discredit the view of slavery he gives us, nor should they render Douglass a fraud. Even if there weren’t good reasons (and how we rate a reason as “good” or “bad” is a matter more involved than a blog post can handle; it’s some serious grad school seminar shit) for them, bad reason can give us just as much insight as good ones. You’d be a fool to read any book that Donald Trump “wrote” and think that you are getting much superficial accuracy about his life. After all, we know he gift for mendacity and its appeal to him. However, we can still look at Trump books and learn a great deal about how and why the distortion of truth, and the appeal of misrepresentation, lead us to our particular cultural and political moment. We get there, dear Oprah, my doing the work of reading, rather than thinking that the writer is the one who does the work while we sit back as passive verbal tourists.
I feel the need to lay out this rather cumbersome literary preface, because I just finished a memoir by a man who used to be a guard at a federal prison. Regular readers of this blog will likely anticipate what I think of the book, and will likely be correct, but I want to point out that, for all my criticisms, there was still something for me to gain by reading it, no matter how painful the experience was. Was this autobiography of prison life self-serving bullshit in many places? You bet. Was it accurate in others? It was spot on. Did it make me feel any empathy for prison staff? Not in the least. Of course a lack of empathy is more a failing on my part than his — that feeling has to start from within me — but the book reinforced my prejudices, and so what’s left to me is to figure out why and to try to learn something from that distancing.
One benefit and simultaneous failing of this book is that it was self published. The clear lack of editorial intervention on any level provides a genius level of stream of consciousness narrative without requiring genius on the part of either writer of editor. It would have taken years for an editor to coax that onto a page, and the author certainly has no idea what that even means. All the writer’s hobby horses, prejudices, and misprisions tumble out in a glorious mess that, paradoxically enough, likely leads to more verisimilitude than a “thoughtful” book might have. Is there toxic masculinity? It’s beautifully unfiltered. Homophobia? Indeed, and in the amount which makes a reasonable person start to wonder what, exactly, the homophobe might be uncomfortable with. Sexism? Yeah, well, that just goes with the the toxic masculinity and homophobia, right? Sanctimony and arrogance? Absolutely, but I don’t want to put these down as character flaws; rather, I prefer an interpretation of memoir that shows how these traits are nurtured and esteemed by the criminal justice system. Are there self-contradictions and illogical conclusions drawn from frequently misunderstood premises? Plenty, and as tempting as it might be to try to clean up the inconsistencies, they are very illuminating, providing that you take them time and effort as a reader to recognize them. All this led me to real, but depressing, insights; prison staff are, in fact, just as lackadaisical, inhumane, embittered, selfish, ignorant, uneducated, and brazenly unselfconscious as I had thought before I read their “inside story,” making them, more of less, the absolute equals of us inmates.
All this might make a book unreadable, but in matters of content, the unreadable is always a choice made b. y the reader. In matters of mechanics and grammar, the question is slightly different. After years of reading prison documents written by staff who verge of the illiterate, I have become convinced, thanks to this book, that a bare minimum of functional literacy is a prerequisite for working in corrections. If a copy editor got within 25 miles of a copy of this book, she would probably go into convulsions. The author says he want to college and studies corrections; God help our educational system from pre-K to university. If I have to state a primary reason for not giving you, dear reader, the name of the author and title of this memoir, it’s because I want to spare you the panful challenge of slashing through prose that should embarrass every high school graduate who didn’t earn a diploma via social promotion. Run-on sentences. Fragments (see? I know how to use them). Ridiculous diction. The love, use, and even defense of clichĂ©s. Misspellings. Misquotations. I’m already hyperventilating, and I’m not even going back through the text to give you examples of these. The irony, however, is that were an editor to correct these, the writer might plausible reject such edits as the marks of the effete elite who is trying to keep the working man down. The style matched the substance, God help us, which I suppose does make for a kind of good book. Or at least it might be worthwhile to try to make something meaningful of that match.
There is plenty in this book that might or might not be true, but that’s really not the point. I could argue, from an inmate’s perspective, that there is both a lot of overstatement and understatement of events and attitudes that commonly occur in prisons. To get back to Oprah, it’s not fundamentally significant whether the writer’s anecdotes, attitudes, and insights are independently verifiable or not. Memoir isn’t so much about precision as it is about verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the appearance of truthfulness, not truthfulness itself. As far as appearances go, this memoir look more of less like what it is, for better or worse. Writing is about representation, and representation is a second order rendering. What we represent is not the thing itself, but a version of the thing that is filter through our own biases, loves, and omissions. Memoir is a kind of art, and we would always do well to remember that “art” is the root word of “artificial.” In Latin, it connotes the idea of a skill that is not naturally occuring. Now this leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. I can’t go so far as to say that the corrections officers is a skilled memoirist. If there is anything that is chillingly natural, it just might be his narrative of life as a prison guard. Still, all stories are constructed with some skill, whether consciously or not, meaning that we are obliged, if we want to be good readers, to analyze them with an eye toward both their willful and naive attempts at manipulation. Our memoirist says that he learned as a guard not to trust anyone, and we should be perfectly comfortable not trusting him, either. We do, however, have to trust our intellects to dissect what is said. There is artistry even in the inartful.
Of course, all this goes for what I write, too. I don’t apologize for writing with perspective. Oue memoirist certainly wouldn’t, either, though he might be more likely to insist that his perspective is the only accurate one, such is the privilege of prison power. Still, whether he likes it or not, whether he agrees or not, I can’t write any other way. Which of us can, dear Oprah, even if it makes for some distortions?