Nuptial Vowels

One of my Christmas presents this year was Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda. Dennis took the not-so-subtle hint I left in an earlier post that this would be a much appreciated gift.

I wasn’t disappointed. With plenty of time to read as I sat by the fire, snowed in, literally (thank you, Arlington County, for the crappy plowing job you did in our neighborhood), I was able to catch up on my reading. First I read Jon Loomis’s quirky, entertaining Mating Season, then Lorrie Moore’s amazing novel A Gate At the Stairs, and then, finally, I got to Yagoda’s book. My approach mimicked our daughter’s eating style: good stuff like pasta first, necessary and healthy stuff like vegetables second. I thought the memoir book would be the veggies of my reading list. It was certainly good for me, but it also turned out to be a wonderful read. I’m very interested in the whole genre of autobiography and memoir, I suppose because I’ve done more ghostwriting than I’d like (or am contractually able) to admit. Ghostwriting is to memoir what Asperger’s Syndrome is to autism. It’s on the spectrum but it’s a diluted form. 

Yagoda has a section on ghostwritten celebrity memoirs and it’s clear that he did his research. He tells many amusing ghost stories, my favorite one about baseball great Ty Cobb and his hapless ghostwriter Al Stump — talk about a Dickensian name– whom Yagoda notes was “living out a ghostwriter’s weird version of Stockholm syndrome.” He talks about what a horrible, cruel guy Cobb was to work for, and how he quit  the project twice and was fired once, but always came back. You see, Cobb was dying and Stump just felt compelled to help the guy and finish the book. Yagoda quotes Stump as having later said that he felt bad about the book, that it was a cover-up, I guess meaning it didn’t reflect what really happened. “I felt I wasn’t being a good newspaperman.” Understandable. There is an unhappy tango between fact and fantasy, as any journalist who has ghostwritten a book knows. The celebrity wants the story to be told in a sanitized way either because he believes that’s what really happened or he wishes that’s what really happened. It takes the skills of a “newspaperman” and the imagination of a fiction writer to pull off a successful ghostwritten book. Which leads me to the article I clipped from the Post Outlook section on Sunday (I know, how quaint that I’m one of the six readers who still has one delivered and thrown in the bushes every morning.). A terrific book review by Tom Miller uses the occasion of the publication of a novel called The Autobiography of Fidel Castro to explore the notion of autobiography and who is best suited to write the story of a life. It brought to mind an article on poynter.org that I refer my students to about the art of profile writing. It quotes Malcolm Gladwell as saying something along the lines of when you write profiles the least important person to interview is the subject himself. After my years as a ghost, I’d have to agree.