The memoir starts, as most do, with his rocky childhood, this one in Long Island. A scrawny kid called "Xander," he grew up with his five siblings in a tense home where money was a constant headache for his father, a high school teacher, and his mother, a homemaker.
While Barnouw's memoir hardly constitutes a narrative of disillusionment, it nevertheless charts an increasing personal and shared cultural awareness of the political implications of the media. The book repeatedly returns to the relationship between illusion and the media: Barnouw, who wrote The Magician and the Cinema, notes that in the 1790s magicians anticipated film by projecting images onto smoke, in a sense lighting the fires that ultimately consumed live performance.
Nevertheless: A Memoir
Barnouw is able to be provocative without belaboring the point and to entertain while informing. Although he has arranged this memoir chronologically, beginning with his early forays into drama and then progressing into his film involvements, each chapter reads comprehensively like its own little world. This work withstands browsing, allowing readers to dip into Tallulah Bankhead before backtracking to child star Billy Halop. Equally enjoyable are interesting morsels of historical trivia, such as the failed introduction of camels into the American western desert. Barnouw also offers an insightful look at Tony Wons, a pre-Oprah radio personality who garnered a huge following reading poems and philosophizing over the air. His female audience listened, swooned, wrote in, and smoked, proving that psychological seduction predates the media's shift towards the visual.
Whether discussing the complexities of making law documentaries, J. Edgar Hoover's influence on the granting of FCC licenses, or actors' temperamental quirks, Barnouw eloquently demonstrates his memoir's underlying theme: To communicate, whether individually or en masse, gives lives shape and, ultimately, significance. How great, then, the responsibility of those who would speak.
Never, it seems, has the venerable injunction to write what you know been taken so literally, by so many. Bookshops are devoting whole sections to memoir-it is selling, after all, and briskly-and while once those shelves might have contained little but the gin-tinged reminiscences of harrumphing ex-generals and former politicians, now browsers will encounter a far more eclectic mix: male and female, old and young, seasoned authors rubbing shoulders with fresh-faced neophytes. What is going on? Why are so many writers abandoning the third person, discarding the figleaf of fiction, exposing their miserable childhoods, their failed marriages, their sordid addictions for all the world to see?
Not that novels cannot successfully tackle these questions. On the contrary; many a wonderful novel has been written around the themes of self and identity, of family life, its vicissitudes and sometimes florid pathologies. But the reaction of the reader is different from that elicited by a memoir. A novel, even a very good one, requires of the reader a suspension of disbelief; even though the imagination, the intellect and the emotions may be powerfully affected, there cannot be the same sense of direct involvement with the actual experience of another which a good memoir can provide.
First, content. To write a good memoir, the author must be prepared to abandon his grievances, forgo the sometimes overwhelming urge to settle scores, fight the inclination to paint himself in saintly and glowing colours (it is a memoir, not an apologia), and resist at all costs the temptation to preach. He must try never to raise his voice: polemic is the kiss of death to good memoir, just as surely as it is to the novel. All of which is a tall order, but by no means an impossible one.
Will the memoir boom last? It is hard to say. Probably some of the current crop will endure; some may even become classics. Literary success is impossible to predict. Nevertheless, it is fair to hazard a guess that those which do achieve lasting affection among the readership will be the ones without a cause to campaign for or a score to settle. The rest will probably disappear without trace, much as most novels do.
Look at it this way: there is a memoir out there that has outsold any other book in publishing history. It has not been out of print in-literally-hundreds of years. It has been translated into every language known to mankind, from Inuit to Tagalog and points in between. It is available in almost every bookshop in the western hemisphere and it has never, ever been remaindered.
It is a great memoir by any standards, the story of a man who was born humble and died young, but who in his short life turned out to be a mesmerising orator, whose influence, amazingly, can still be felt today, almost 2,000 years after his death. The book is a collaborative effort between four major authors and a smattering of minor ones, and of course, wherever you get two or more people reminiscing about the same events their versions will always differ, sometimes wildly. That is the nature of memory: one witness says this, the other says that. But on one thing they all agree: the central character of the memoir, the man who emerges from the page with such colour and clarity, was tried by a kangaroo court, found guilty and executed as a common criminal. Powerful stuff. Odd choice of title, though, The New Testament. n
A fearless debut memoir by beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims, Real American pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a biracial black woman in America.
The author of the New York Times bestselling anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims has written a different sort of book this time out, but one that will nevertheless resonate with the legions of students, educators and parents to whom she is now well known, by whom she is beloved, and to whom she has always provided wise and necessary counsel about how to embrace and nurture their best selves. Real American is an affecting memoir, an unforgettable cri de coeur, and a clarion call to all of us to live more wisely, generously and fully.
You might have reason to believe that Boutros-Ghali was politically incorrect not only after completion of his mandate, which is most desirable especially when one wants to sell books of memoirs, but also during it.
Every writer who sits down with the intention to write a memoir is haunted by a single question that threatens her progress: Who cares? The great events of our lives are, of course, important to us. The characters that people those events are dear. But unless we are Katharine Graham, or Keith Richards, how can we reasonably expect people to engage with our personal dramas?
While the U.S. Socialist Workers Party has been covered in books published by the SWP before its degeneration, and more recently in my own political memoir about my time in the SWP from 1960 through 1988, the Canadian movement has not received the attention it deserves.
For readers, memoirs can offer a unique insight into seeing through their eyes. They can help us to see how they felt in office and their views of their own triumphs and, more rarely, their tragedies. They do come, however, with a rather big health warning. Like all memoirs, the reminisces of prime ministers can be flawed by poor memory, often sharpened by the politics of revenge and the need to be shown well in the light of history.
Ben Worthy is giving a talk on prime ministerial memoirs at Birkbeck College, University of London on 23 May 6pm London as part of Birkbeck Arts Week with Birkbeck Politics Writer in Residence Sian Norris. You can book tickets here. 2ff7e9595c
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