A Time to Keep Silence

For everything there is a season,

and a time for every matter under heaven:

...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak...

(Eccleasiastes 3)

This week I discovered timely blogging advice in an unexpected place: "The Problem with Memoirs" ~ an article by Neil Genzlinger in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. His critique offers cautionary wisdom not only for memoirists, but also for bloggers, poets, preachers, and anyone who posts on Facebook! His testy elegy begins:

A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.

Mr. Genzlinger continues...

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose...

... Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job...

Mr. Genzlinger then reviews four recently-published memoirs. Three, he claims, should never have been written. But the fourth – An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan (translated by Anthea Bell) – passes muster, succeeding in large part because the author makes sure that she herself is the least important character in the book. Without the self-indulgent I dominating center stage, the other subjects are respected and their stories illuminated. This in turn opens up space for the reader to make creative connections and experience her own epiphanies. (It seems to me that Jesus modeled this technique beautifully as a teacher, and as a teller of stories and parables.)

Mr. Genzlinger concludes:

... That’s what makes a good memoir – it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery.

Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.

Cranky, but sage advice!