Review
Reviewed Work(s): Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives.
2nd ed by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson: Memoir: An Introduction by G. Thomas
Couser
Review by: Margaretta Jolly
Source: Biography , fall 2011, Vol. 34, No. 4 (fall 2011), pp. 817-821
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press on behalf of Center for Biographical Research
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23540848
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REVIEWS
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for In
preting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 201
392 pp. ISBN 978-0816669868, $19.50.
G. Thomas Couser. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 201
216 pp. ISBN 978-0199826926, $18.95.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson are the unstoppable creators and charter
life writing criticism, and their second edition of Reading Autobiography is t
guide of guides. This journal's review of the first edition of Reading Aut
ography by Richard Freadman (2001) concluded that "this is the challeng
introductory book the field has been waiting for." The second edition is twi
as good. A monumental A straddles the chic black cover, and reflects a monu
mental breadth and depth inside as well. The book is cleverly organized f
a beginner's tastes, with a short opening section defining the field's cent
terms of autobiography, memoir, biography, and the more inclusive "life w
ing" and "life narrative," before laying out six concepts the authors consider
define the processes of autobiographical subjectivity. These are memory,
perience, identity, space, embodiment, and agency, and in the chapter "Auto
biographical Subjects," the authors disaggregate these concepts to show h
complicated the autobiographical performance can be. Space, for exampl
can mean Esmeralda Santiago's interrogation of the watery borderlands
her growing up tale When I was Puerto Rican, Virginia Woolf's memory of
pre-egoic sensation of grape-colored light, or Montaigne's arrièreboutique, th
backroom of his mind.
In the next chapter, "Autobiographical Acts," Smith and Watson surv
the wide range of potential reasons that a life story may be coaxed or ev
coerced out, from job-seeking to therapy. Helpfully using the narratolo
cal distinction between the narrating and narrated self, they leave us in
doubt that the "I" of autobiography is a multiple production, not only li
ally through publishers and paratextual editors, but more subtly, in the for
of ideological or psychological alter-egos.
Biography 34.4 (Fall 2011) © Biographical Research Center
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818 Biography 34.4 (Fall 2011)
They then offer a history of life narrative, including a new chapter on its
proliferating forms "in the wake of the memoir boom." This tours us through
the rise of human rights-based testimony and postcolonial bildungsroman to
narratives of mourning, illness, addiction, disabled and queered coming out
stories, age autobiography, post-ethnic family quests, and celebrity memoirs.
Of "new-model narratives of displacement, migration and exile," the authors
observe that contemporary readers seek cohesion in an outpouring of fam
ily quest stories, ranging from Barack Obama's post-ethnic dreams of a lost
father to the Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence, in which three indigenous
girls struggle to return to their community. A brief section on gastrography
(personalized recipe books) ends with one of the authors' flashes of imagina
tion, as they wonder whether the subjectivity of another can be "cooked up,"
reproduced, and tasted.
Smith and Watson's other key addition to the first edition is a chapter
on "the visual-verbal-virtual contexts of life narrative." These include graphic
memoir (from Maus to Persopolis), performance and the visual arts (Emin,
Sherman, Hatoum, Ligon, Kentridge), autobiographical film and video,
(Herzog, Apted, Chiten, Tajiri, Schnabel), and online lives. This introduced
at least me to Tumblelogs, a practice which adds to the welter of possibili
ties for digital self-invention by inviting people to express themselves through
digitally bricolaged images, icons, and texts from other people's sites—I note
that Wikipedia describes them as a "quick and dirty stream of consciousness"
or early "microblog." This, to my mind, appeals to Smith and Watson's in
terests in how media can disperse rather than solidify the self. They end the
chapter, however, by admitting that the growing digital archive of everyday
life may eventually prove to be a comforting record of the more interiorized
selves we may previously have been.
Two chapters on the history of life writing criticism follow, before we
come to a distinctive "tool kit" comprising "twenty-four strategies for reading
life narratives," which proved a lively talking point for the first edition, and
then three appendices: "sixty genres of life narrative," group and classroom
projects, and journals and internet resources. By the time you've got here,
you won't be a beginner anymore and will be inspired to try out sophisticated
reading strategies and teaching exercises of your own.
The index alone will be useful in this global map. But Smith and Watson
also offer a powerful analysis of how life narrative has become a vehicle of cul
tural participation and claim, often by those seeking public power, but also by
many who are simply looking for answers in a world of migration and social
flux. They take the history of autobiography beyond literary frames, contex
tualizing it in the projects of imperialism, patriarchy, and now globalization.
In their version, Americans continue to cleave to fantasies of the self-made
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Reviews 819
individual overcoming adversity, but others use life narrative to
impact of wars, cultural decline, or new national assertion. Th
features are multicultural inclusiveness and genuine sensitivity
place, as well as a glorious reminder of women's leadership in
duction and consumption of life narrative. The drawback is a
qualify all judgments, particularly aesthetic ones, and to stress t
ity of human life story makers. Indeed, Richard Freadman critiq
edition for its poststructuralism, which for him missed the esse
tinuing humanism of life stories. Smith and Watson are apparent
tant. We get a sense of why in the short and stimulating sect
agency, which they pointedly distinguish from Freadman's n
will. Here they describe how the narrating "I" is constructed in t
externalization, often little conscious of the forces that drive it.
ingly, they argue that precisely by acknowledging these conditio
unlock the power of life narrative to create imagined communiti
games, or a changed sense of self. Inspired by Judith Butler'
they see agency as deriving "from our willingness to narrate our
fragmentation, our limits of knowability" (58).
In this light, it is fascinating to turn to G. Thomas Couser's M
Introduction. Though Couser does not define himself as hum
post-humanist explicitly, he contends that life writing is defined
tion as a "fundamental human activity: the narration of our lives
terms." The book's central premise is that memoir, though relate
the novel, fundamentally differs from it, offering a quite diffe
than Smith and Watson's interest in the unstable fictions of self
though all three critics are interested in the work of genre—tha
writing "does" in the world—Couser is more attentive to its a
sis begins, then, with a chapter titled bluntly "What Memoir Is,
Is Not." In this, he shows how memoir has ironically eclipsed the
more lauded "autobiography" as the favored term for what h
genre based on the memory of actual living persons, whether fo
writer or significant others the writers has known.
This is followed by "Memoir and Genre," in which Couser e
forms like confession, apology, testimony, conversion, and c
narrative reflect the relation between the narrator and his or he
whether critical or defensive. He is unafraid to admit that memo
in its techniques compared to fiction, leading to his assertion in
ter, "Memoir's Forms," that it works best when it acknowledges
rather than appropriating the freedoms of novelizing. Couser
poses that today's autobiographers often allow themselves too
(showing, mimesis), in the form of unrealistically remembered c
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820 Biography 34.4 (Fall 2011)
stylized detail, and present-tense drama, horribly much like "hi-def" televi
sion. He prefers memoirs that develop the art of narration (telling, diegesis),
and not simply because these respect the autobiographical pact to truth-tell.
Couser argues that the more distance there is between narrator and protago
nist, the more room for self-knowledge, offering the surprising examples of
narratorial presence in Tim Page's Parallel Play and Alison Bechdel's graphic
memoir Fun Home.
To those who object that this is an old-fashioned sort of attitude, Couser
provides one of the best chapters in the book, on the ethical dangers of memoir,
which distils his longer treatment in Vulnerable Subjects. Here he argues that
life writing's ethics result from its distinct obligations to the historical record
and to the people it depicts. While utter fidelity to factual truth is neither pos
sible nor necessarily desirable, false testimony violates genre and devalues true
testimony. This is obvious in the case of hoaxes in which people of privilege
pretend to be members of oppressed populations, such as Holocaust survivors
or indigenous people. But also potentially harmful is the more common situa
tion whereby memoirists play with intimate but often unequal relationships—
such as between parents and children, siblings, or partners. An example of
Couser's subtle touch is his observation that over the life course, the tables can
turn: Julie Myerson was, in his view, correctly criticized for exposing her son's
drug addiction in The Lost Child: A Mother's Story, but J. D. Salinger could
not prevent his daughter publishing a memoir of her famously reclusive father
in his late life. Couser also rightly observes that many a memoirist's crimes are
motivated not by financial or even emotional gain, but by the sheer desire to
get published. He recommends methodological transparency and citing your
sources as one form of ethical protection. But he implies a more important but
less choate requirement that memoirists know themselves deeply, in arguing
that the real felony for the life writer is to distort or lie about one's identity.
Couser says that he is writing not for other scholars but for general read
ers and undergraduates, and they will certainly enjoy the next two chapters,
which offer a concise history of North American memoir, from classics such
as Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, James, and Stein to its extraordinary diver
sity today. His treatment of the earlier period intriguingly traces intersecting
lines of settlement and slave narratives. Of contemporary America, he picks
out what he calls the "lyrical memoir" (partly the product of the institution
alization of creative nonfiction in universities), the "nobody memoir" (which
makes the writer's name) versus the "somebody memoir" (a product of exist
ing celebrity), and the "some body" memoir, in which the particularity of an
odd body or bodily experience is explored. Couser draws particular attention
to the role of the Disability Rights movement here, and pleasingly challenges
facile condemnations of contemporary misery stories. Like Smith and Wat
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Reviews 821
son, he observes the large number of family quest tales, thoug
these more as the product of relatively comfortable baby-boom
the position to examine their parents' mortality. Couser descri
phy as the key form for contemporary filial writers, propelled not
to defend patriarchy so much as to explore, and even reclaim, its
absent and sometimes abusive fathers. (This contrasts interestingly
en Buss's view of memoir as a form in which women have expl
ships with each other.) He also discusses graphic memoirs, "stun
animal-centered memoirs, and the postmodernist memoir (Slat
of which, he claims, there are probably few because the open
ment of the artifice of the text is inconsistent with the nature of
This genealogy is justified as a complement to Ben Yagoda's
pean-referenced history of memoir, but to me, Couser's sugg
memoir itself has "American roots" may be a step too far, particu
context of the global picture Smith and Watson draw. But Cou
that this is a personal guide. In the final chapter, "The Work
he again insists on the difference between fiction and memoir, sh
the latter's ability to conscript the reader often results in what h
"traction." This is truest of the utilitarian genres, like slave narra
are also the least literary, but even artful confession and apologia
self-rehabilitation and memorialization in what he assesses as acts
erosity. Conversely, in certain circumstances—like a history of ch
memoirs can accuse and condemn. The chapter concludes with t
at its best, life writing does not register pre-existing selfhood, but
how creates it. In this, he is superficially in line with Smith and W
formative lens. But as I've suggested, he searches for the possibilit
vention and self-knowledge within his strictly identified paramet
whereas they are interested in the swirling of texts, modes, and s
in uncertain and over-determining geo-political marketplaces.
ferent premise might also account for a difference in style. Wher
Watson are capacious and carefully observational, he is wittily def
his preferences, classical to their rococo. The fingerprint in the m
volume's minimalist white cover seems nicely to make the point.
With these two guides, we naturally find no clear answers to t
of whether life writing is ontologically different from fiction, wh
the self is located, and how much control we have over our fates.
us that these questions remain at the center of the field, even as
spreads into evermore media and modes, questions that all three w
been crucial to making so fascinatingly sophisticated as well as acc
Margaretta Jolly
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