“A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” So starts Neil Genzlinger’s essay about memoir in the New York Times Book Review.
Agree with him or not, he’s started an interesting conversation.
“The problem with Genzlinger’s argument, and most similar anti-memoir attacks, is that he is not arguing against the writing of memoir, he is arguing against badly-written memoirs….That doesn’t indict an entire genre.” — Dinty Moore via The Brevity Blog
“I’m just saying there’s probably one great novel for every 1,000 or 100,000. One great memoir for every 1,000 or 100,000. The stream of prose is beautiful because it is rich with voices. Are all genius, are all perfectly crafted? But for fuck’s sake, there is a value in it just as there is value in fiction, poetry, a box of recipes, a cache of letters. Each one means something whether is succeeds or fails in the marketplace. Whether it gets published or not. Of course, I’ve hated memoirs in my day and thought they sucked, and I turn them down for representation by the droves. The droves! But sometimes when you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Shut it.” — Betsy Lerner, author, literary agent and former editor
“The mistake that most of these errant memoirists make…is to view their life not as a text, but as the whole shebang. And there’s no way to distill universality from this; the nuggets of truth that can exist in human experience are diluted when blown up to overwhelming size.” –Rosie Gray, Village Voice
MAD about Words
is the brainchild (and heartchild) of
Mary Ann de Stefano
