Stuff I’ve Been Reading: July/August 2013

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I—Roger Shattuck
• Passing—Nella Larsen
• Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–1941—Lynne Olson
• How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like—Paul Bloom

BOOKS READ:

• A Natural Woman—Carole King
• Bedsit Disco Queen—Tracey Thorn
• Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece—Ashley Kahn
• The Garrick Year—Margaret Drabble
• The Summer of Naked Swim Parties—Jessica Anya Blau

Carole King and Tracey Thorn are both singer-songwriters. They have never done anything else for a living, because they haven’t needed to: they were both teenagers when their careers in music began to take off. They are both mothers, and they have both had children with the cowriters of some of their most famous songs. They have both been politically active. And yet it seems to me that Carole King has written an autobiography, whereas Tracey Thorn has written a memoir. Can that be right? Is this even a useful distinction to make?

The most helpful attempt to distinguish between the two that I have come across appeared in the Guardian ten years ago, and was written by the wise and thoughtful British writer Ian Jack, the former editor of Granta. (Jack is Scottish, so he probably hates being called British. There is a lot of artfully disguised malice in this column.) “An autobiography is usually a record of accomplishment,” Jack argued. “All kinds of people, more or less famous, can write them or be helped to write them: footballers, politicians, newsreaders. Deeds, fame and an interesting life are not necessary ingredients of the memoir.” My first book, then, is a textbook definition of a memoir: nobody had ever heard of me, and I had achieved nothing, when I decided to write it. I now see that it should be required reading for every writing course, although I suppose you could argue that it would be enough if the teacher merely waved it around in front of the students. “Look at this idiot! He’d done bugger all, and he wrote a book about himself! Memoir!”

The memoir’s ambition, Jack continues, “is to be interesting in itself, as a novel might be”—oh dear—“about intimate, personal experience. It often aspires to be thought of as ‘literary,’ and for that reason borrows many of literature’s tricks—the tricks of the novel, of fiction—because it wants to do more than record the past; it wants to re-create it. If a memoir is to succeed on those terms, on the grounds...