Now You Know Why I Write Fiction

The problem with writing memoirs is that you usually have to reveal secrets. I think the reason for this is that most of us live such mundane lives that no one in their right mind would buy a book giving the details of our lives--a book that would undoubtedly end up sounding like the diaries many of us kept at one time or another in our youth: Got up, brushed my teeth, went to school.

Before we had television to occupy all our waking hours not dedicated to work, people could write memoirs about wars they won, nations they founded, nations they betrayed. Even average people could write pretty interesting autobiographies because they went out and did things: one of my favorite books, long out of print, is a series of letters a woman wrote when she worked in France for the Red Cross in WWI. Courageous and deeply committed to her "boys," whom she followed to the front in the last days of the war, she published one slim volume and apparently felt that she had said all she had to say.

Today, everyone seems to want to write a book about themselves, call them what you will--memoir, autobiography. Oddly, rock stars and politicians seems to write the best books: Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton come to mind.

Unfortunately, that's not true of the author I just read, whose name--annoyingly, I'm sure--I won't give because I don't want to encourage anyone to read the book. On the one hand, the author clearly loved his larger-than-life parents, who loved him in return yet could not stop the whirlwind of their lives long enough to engage in mundane tasks most parents take for granted. They decided, for example, to eat lunch instead of sit through his college graduation, from which they walked out, leaving him to wander campus alone on graduation day trying to find his family.

I understand why he shared that and other stories. What I finally had to object to was his sharing the indecencies of old age, the humiliating physical and mental deterioration that we'll all suffer unless we get lucky and die in a good old age before we enter what might be called a bad old age.


I remember a drama professor telling me that Shelley Winters told things about herself in her autobiography he wouldn't tell about his worst enemy.

Memoirs or autobiographies should be reserved for those who've lived lives so interesting that they don't have to reveal more than the tip to fascinate the reader; otherwise, they're probably better left as a diary and kept in the family vault.

Now you know why I write fiction.