Hermenuetics

Comments

Great observations, Sarah.

It seems like in our quest for personal stories, we are so consumed with reading and reflecting on our own lives, that we miss what we can learn from reading and reflecting on others' lives.

I strongly believe that good personal essays--or memoirs--take the material of everyday life and connect it to larger meanings. Bringing in historical or broader cultural perspectives, as Bill Bryson does, is one way to do it.

Posted By: Hannah | August 16, 2010 7:08 PM

Thanks, Hannah. I hope I don't appear to diminish memoirs, as I do think they can be valuable. I worry that they tend to replace biographies in our lists of nonfiction books to read.

Posted By: Sarah Pulliam Bailey | August 16, 2010 7:49 PM

Sarah , I loved your post. This summer I read the three books you mentioned: A Walk in the Woods, Eat Pray Love, and the Bonhoeffer bio. I enjoyed all three immensely, but by far the Bonhoeffer bio was the highlight of my summer. It will be at my bedside for some time to come. I got swept up in his life and the times, and by the end felt like I had lost a loved one. I’m still not over it.

Posted By: dana | August 16, 2010 8:06 PM

Dana, good to hear. I'm looking forward to it.

Anna, that is a great question and I hope I didn't push any buttons by my comparison. I've enjoyed Donald Miller, Anne Lamott, etc., so I don't want to diminish those authors. Some memoirs/autobiographies are absolutely fantastic (The Glass Castle, for example, is one I always recommend). Others feel much more self-focused almost by their nature.

Chris Armstrong writes of biographies: "But the dawn of the past century brought the values of efficiency, objectivity, and tough-mindedness to the forefront of American culture. Reading novels and biographies suddenly seemed marginal in a technocratic age of rugged individualism." One of the values I see in biographies is that it generally paints a picture of someone's entire life, while memoirs seem to capture general themes or maybe one time of one's life.
I don't necessarily think one is superior to another, but it seems like the spiritual memoir genre is so much more popular right now than biographies.

Posted By: Sarah Pulliam Bailey | August 16, 2010 9:48 PM

No, no buttons pushed, Sarah. :) Honestly, a memoir was certainly not what I set out to write, but in my case, the subject matter (sex and chastity) sort of drove me to it. I've always thought more in terms of fiction or at least third-person non-fiction, but I got to a point with some of the things I wanted to say about sex, where it seemed like a lot of people would just reject that as being too harsh—easy to prescribe, hard to do. So, in an odd way, the choice of medium was sort of about credibility.

Leaving aside my own book, though, I can see potential pitfalls and strengths for both types of books. With biographies, it seems to me there's a potential pitfall in trying to order a life to fit a particular notion of its narrative arc (an assumption of order/trajectory that some might attack as specious anyway). Or, you can be limited by uneven source material and forced to construct a narratively important part of someone's life from sources that may inadequately convey your subject's humanity or leave significant questions unanswered. Hard to tell a story well when you have to sometimes admit there are gaps and thin spots in it. I've also read "novels" that came across as half-baked memoirs which, for various reasons, the authors didn't feel quite comfortable writing as straight-forward non-fiction (though I can certainly imagine some of the reasons for that).

But when I think about the original quote on biographies you used, it makes me think of how good books sometimes show us how to live, or inspire us to live particular challenges well. Other times, they can serve as a valuable record of certain times, events and communities. Even though it's probably one of her lesser works, and I read it years ago, Kathleen Norris' memoir of her New York years, The Virgin of Bennington, still has a vivid hold on my memory, particularly for its portrait of the New York poetry world in the late-60s, early-70s. Coming it as a then new-to-New-Yorker, it was the first account I'd read of someone leaving the city, and there was something kind of interesting, and ultimately valuable, in that.

Posted By: Anna Broadway | August 16, 2010 10:54 PM

"I got swept up in his life and the times, and by the end felt like I had lost a loved one."

Dana, this is perhaps the highest praise one could have for a biography. Eric Metaxas's book hasn't been on my to-read list, but after this comment from you, I might just need to try it.

Posted By: Katelyn Beaty | August 17, 2010 4:26 PM