by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

New York Times: Memoir Is a Catholic Art Form

     “Why not say what happened?   All right, then: St. Augustine stole some pears.   Kathryn Harrison had sex with her father.  Tobias Wolff didn’t do much of anything to disturb his sleep, it would seem, but he still managed to turn his boyhood into beautiful, reflective music.”

That’s just the first provocation in Gregory Cowles’ review of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir in last Sunday’s Times Book Review, a review that has the range and freedom and generative quality – and spirit of provocation – of an essay.  You really could just say what happened, Cowles seems to suggest – and all the rest is hoo-ha and window dressing.

The boldest provocation in the review is Cowles’ straightforward declaration that “it is, alas, not a very good book.”  The title, probably suggested by the marketing department, has suggested as much to me for months.   Cowles’ report that Karr “pads the book with chipper lists and pop quizzes and general encouraging bromides” (did this too come from marketing?) deepens the suspicion.  So do two brief passages he quotes, one (“Every writer worth her salt is sui generis”) a double cliché, the other (“Deceit in memoir irks me so badly . . .”) overly stylized tough talk.

But the provocation that really caught my attention is Cowles’ suggestion that memoir is in some way a distinctly Catholic literary form:

Given the inherently confessional nature of memoir, it may be no coincidence that so many of its most successful practitioners have been Catholic to some degree – Karr, Wolff, Harrison, and of course Augustine, but also Mary McCarthy, David Carr, Mary Gordon, Patricia Hampl, Frank McCourt – or that even non-Catholic memoirists slip so easily into the churchly narrative of penitence and redemption.

My first thought is: no, no.  For one thing, there are just too many memoirs for the generalization to fit.  For another, Catholic culture post-Vatican II has scarcely more to do with confession than society at large.  

But my second thought is: yes, possibly.   Cowles was the editor of my TBR cover essay on faith and fiction, and with this piece he furnishes part of the answer to the essay’s question of why Christian belief doesn’t figure into contemporary American fiction as much as we might expect.

It’s that it figures into memoir instead.  I suggested as much at the end of the essay.

And why is that?  Not, I think, because Catholicism is markedly confessional, but because the question about religion in our time – the question as framed by Catholics, at any rate – is whether it is true or untrue, and because memoir, with its affirmation that “this really happened,” may be better suited to that question than the novel is.  

I put the point a little differently in a lecture at Georgetown a few years back, characterizing the strong American Catholic writers post-Vatican II to commence our Faith & Culture series.   

It sometimes seems that any pulp novelist can crack the code of Christian past and get a bestseller out of it.  But these writers work in essay, memoir, narrative history, and the like in a recognition that the church’s claims are “related to truth” – in the belief that the gospel, for all its difficulties, is a work of nonfiction.

Now to Karr’s The Art of Memoir, which is full of provocations, I’m sure.  

  1. etr-gu posted this