Overheard on NPR: Memoirs

While driving back from a seminar on negotiation today I overheard something fascinating on NPR - fascinating for several different reasons - and please forgive me for not remembering this guy's name, but it doesn't really seem that important after all and if I'm meant to discover the book I'll come across it at some point, but apparently some guy wrote a memoir about addiction during his teenage years and the length of time that he stated that he was in jail proved to be completely bogus.

As in: a lie.

Now, what IS important is that this man's memoir was part of Oprah's Book of the Month Club, which, if you don't know about it, is the Holy Grail for writers. You get mentioned, you got an instant best seller, even if your dogwork had been out of print for years, you suddenly got yourself international stardom.

I thought perhaps that this might be a smirch on the armour of Oprah - like, she got snowed (which is not something that I would revel in, I assure you, I highly respect the work that she has done, but to snow Oprah I feel would be a shock, and definitely newsworthy) However, I thought she put an interesting spin on it by calling into Larry King Live when the writer was being interviewed and defending him, in that she stated that the important thing was that this memoir could help other people steer away from addiction, or get themselves some help, which is more important than determining whether his details were factual or not.

Nice spin - still, that's belaboring the point, and of course it's trying to shift the focus, essentially buying into the somewhat Machiavellian argument that "The truth doesn't matter, so long as it achieves a desired result - whether for good or ill."

And then, that naturally led into a discussion about the difference between memoir and autobiography, which I felt was very interesting, and in fact I had never really made any distinction before today, but basically it breaks down like this:

An autobiography is pretty much a linear narrative from your time of birth until the time you type "The End."

A memoir is a recall of a specific period of time in your life, or centering around a central aspect of your life: i.e. your stint in the army, or - as in this case - your dealing with addiction.

Then, of course, we get into the discussion about how much a memoir is coloured by personal perception, and how much distance an author has from the subject - what "good" memoirs are (the reviewers feel that "good" memoirs are those wherein the author slams themselves as much as they slam others - a point which I agree upon, but only because I've found in my life that people who don't have one bad thing to say about themselves are in general pure psychopaths.)

Got that? Not sure if I did, but I'll move on to my last point, which is:

Not withstanding the argument that nobody can ever be "truly" objective, the reviewers mentioned that perhaps a NEW genre of literature might be on the rise, that in which a memoir is coloured intentionally by certain "fictionalisation" of events, and eventually we might have something that is a hybrid of fiction and memoir.

Then they asked what such a genre might be called.

My first resposne would be, "That would be called bulls%!t!"

But then, a moment later, a less sarcastic name popped into my head:

Simmoir. Or even Sym-moir.

A "simulation memoir." I think that the secondary spelling of "sym" would even work better, but only because it looks cooler. That, and I've got Welsh roots. But that's for another time.

Any other offers on the table?

I'll check back in a year or so to see how the name has taken off. Then we'll see if I'm a good "prognosticator" . . . (if that's the correct word!)

VG