Are we sick yet of memoirs?

I have been really taken by what writer Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in a recent New Yorker essay: ‘memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of literary family’.

Mendelsohn compared memoir to a drunken guest at a large gathering. Embarrassing, loud, prone to spilling drinks and other people’s secrets, the guest is cursed with a desperate and, it seems, little-justified need to be the centre of attention. In the interest of disclosure, I must tell you that to date Mendelsohn has written two books in that “so-much-more-than-simply-a-memoir” genre – The Elusive Embrace on identity and desire (haven’t read it) and Lost on looking for members of his family who perished in the Holocaust (a masterpiece).

My third book Otherland is, in many ways, a memoir. It is precisely that kind of a rambling, carpet-staining clown that Mendelsohn evokes. I love the restraint and sobriety of reportage and the exacting dignity of great books of history, and I recognise that they make perhaps for better, more considerate, more adult guests. Yet, at the same time, I am desperately fond – both as a reader and a writer - of the unsteady legs, the sweeping hand gestures and the wildly fluctuating voice of memoir (and so is D. Mendelsohn btw). At (metaphorical) gatherings I tend to gravitate to precisely this kind of high-maintenance, indecorous guests - defenseless to the point of comical in their pursuit of genuine warmth and of moments of real, non-sanitised human contact. Mendelsohn’s Lost is an altogether different creature though, nothing unsteady about it. No one in English can do these virtuoso page-long sentences like he does: Mendelsohn is like a singer, who in one musical phrase, without stopping for a breath, can take us from peace to war, from a small pebble outside the window to the outer rings of Saturn (yes, I am thinking about the German writer W.G. Sebald and what he could do in one sentence…).

 Anyway, I was initially uneasy about Otherland being seen as a memoir, but after reading Mendelsohn’s essay I kind of like it. I am in a good company after all.