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The Best Memoirs (Part One)

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Feb 13, 2018
Category: Memoir

A few hours after I published an appreciation of Eudora Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, two readers wrote with the same question: I’m thinking of writing a memoir. Are there any I can use as models? In fact, there aren’t — books that are modeled on others are doomed. But it’s very much to the point to read good memoirs, the better to light up your brain’s circuitry and get you thinking creatively.

I started pulling together a list. It turned out I have so many favorites that it’s going to take two days — the rest will appear next week — to profile them all. So, in alphabetical order…

Act One
The best Broadway memoir. Ever.
I’m not the only one who says it.
I read “Act One” on buses and subways and got smiles and big thumbs up.
I read “Act One” in restaurants, and people came over — in New York, at least, it’s a terrific conversation starter.
I read it at home and, as I laughed my way through one insanely funny passage, my wife delivered a sentence not said here often enough: “Hurry up and finish so I can have it.”
Here’s novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett: “’Act One’ is one of the best things about owning a bookstore. I can sell ‘Act One’ to people all day long.”
So let me now sell it to you.
Moss Hart was a phenomenally successful playwright — “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take it With You,” which won the Pulitzer Prize. As a theater director, he won a Tony award for “My Fair Lady.” He wrote the screenplay for “A Star Is Born.”
“Act One” deals with none of those triumphs.
As its title suggests, it’s about Hart’s childhood, his struggles and his ascent — for me, the most exciting and important times in anyone’s life.

And There Was Light: The Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance
At 7, he had an accident in school. The shaft of his glasses stabbed his right eye and tore away the tissue. The left eye had sympathetic damage. The happy-go-lucky Paris schoolboy woke up, his eyes bandaged.
He was totally blind.
And he was completely happy.
Despair, he realized, was simply a matter of “looking the wrong way.” In fact, he could see — “radiance [was] emanating from a place I saw nothing about.” He could see light, after all. It only faded when he was afraid.
The world was still beautiful — indeed, more beautiful. Waves were “arranged in steps.” Voices could be caresses. Metaphor was everywhere: “Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else.” So blindness was an obstacle, but it was also like a drug — it made other senses intoxicatingly intense.

All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness
Sheila Hamilton’s business is getting the story. She does it very well — as a television reporter, she’s won five Emmys. In Portland, Oregon, where she hosts the morning drive-time show on KINK FM, she uses her celebrity to promote good causes and creative people.
But there is a story she didn’t see right away, and it’s huge — the suicide of her husband. Here’s how the book starts:
I missed much of the unfolding of my husband’s mental illness. By the time I pieced together the puzzle of who David actually was, he was falling apart. My once brilliant, intense and passionate partner was dead within six weeks of a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder, leaving my nine-year-old daughter and me without so much as a note to understand his decision. He’d left us hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and with no plan for helping us recover from the profound grief of his suicide.

Angela’s Ashes
Frank McCourt’s memoir was a huge hit, the #1 nonfiction book of 1996 and then a film.
He certainly can’t be said to have had an enjoyable childhood. His parents were poor. His father drank. In five and a half years, his mother had six children — and three of them died. There was no indoor plumbing. Little food.
A downer? Not at all. Though horrifying, the book is incredibly funny

Bettyville
At the surface level, “Bettyville” is a simple story: a charming but difficult man comes home to care for his charming but difficult mother. Betty, in her 90s, is winding down, suffering from dementia “or maybe worse.” George was once a valued editor at Vanity Fair — where, in my day, the office politics were so Mandarin that putting out the magazine was almost an afterthought — and at a publisher. He got downsized; now he’s a freelance book editor in Manhattan. But his father’s dead, and he’s an only child. Off he goes to Paris, Missouri (population: 1,220).

Bob Dylan: Chronicles
Dylan’s memoir, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize and received a special award from te Pulitzer board for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
This book didn’t have to be a cry from the heart, a plea for understanding. It could easily have been an activity, something to do on the road while Dylan roams the world on an endless concert tour. But it’s more interesting than that.

Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
“What sort of person calls after midnight?”
New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast asks herself that question twice in her memoir.
The answer is obvious.
Your aged parent.
Or, worse, the hospital.
The reason “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?” raced to #1 on the New York Times list of graphic books is that it tells a universal story. Roz Chast deals, tenderly and brutally, with the thing that no one talks about — the skull on the banquet table and how, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, life forces us to deal with it.

Come to the Edge
Christina Haag and John F. Kennedy, Jr. met as teenagers, in that special Upper East Side hothouse of private schools and privilege. They were not exactly equals — her father was the son of a railroad foreman, and his father was… well, you know. But he was skinny and exuberant, fond of flipping water balloons out the windows of Fifth Avenue apartments, and she was dark and poetic, a budding actress. They hung out, walking through the park at night, Secret Service agents following.
They both go to Brown, where they share a house. (Another roommate is Christiane Amanpour, then known as “Kissy.”) Like dogs, they travel in packs; they see a lot of one another, but romance never ignites. After graduation, Christina takes up with a fellow actor — Bradley Whitford, later a mainstay on “The West Wing” — and John bounces from woman to woman.

David Carr: The Night of the Gun
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a guy threw himself under a crosstown bus and lived to tell the tale,” David Carr writes. “Is that a book you’d like to read?”
Good question. Indeed, it’s the question that prospective readers of “The Night of the Gun” will have to consider — because this is that book.
Consider:
A talented kid without much direction graduates from high school pot smoking to cocaine at college.
He starts a career in journalism that has him reporting on police and government officials by day — and freebasing cocaine at night. David Carr emerges from the darkness into a kind of radiance: a new wife, intact family, great job. At the center of his redemption is a reason a lot of guys can relate to: “Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine.”

Death Be Not Proud
John Gunther, Jr. loses his only son to a brain tumor in 1947, when the boy is just 17. And Johnny was no ordinary boy — he was brilliant, caring, funny. The kind of kid about whom, after his death, people say, “He was loved by everyone he ever met.”
And that’s just the summary. In fact, this kid was off the charts. He did original thinking in mathematics and wrote to Einstein — and Einstein wrote back to encourage him. Unable to attend his boarding school because of his tumor, he got all his work done, aced his college admissions tests and would have gone to Harvard had he lived. And, through his 15-month ordeal of operations and treatments and diets and doctors and hope and despair, he never showed his parents how much he was afraid.
Here’s how amazing: When his surgeon told Johnny he had a brain tumor, his immediate response was “Do my parents know this? How shall we break it to them?”
Imagine having a kid like that. Your only kid. And then sitting down and typing 150 pages about him.

Diana Vreeland: D.V.
You know all about “pink is the navy blue of India” and “wash your blond child’s hair with dead champagne” and “the bikini is the most important invention since the H-bomb,” but you may have been busy elsewhere when Diana Vreeland’s memoir appeared.
Well, the former fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and the onetime editor-in-chief of Vogue was just as outlandish in her book as she was in the slick pages of fashion magazines.

Drinking: A Love Story
She was running across the street with her best friend’s kids on her back when she lost her balance. Her fall was brilliant — she shielded the kids from smashing their skulls. Her reward: “a gash on the knee so deep the nurses could see my kneecap.”
Actually, Caroline Knapp got a much more significant souvenir of that fall — an ascent. Three months later, she broke up with alcohol, her lover for two decades, and stopped drinking.

Exiles
Michael Arlen — author of a novel called “The Green Hat” — may be more successful than his friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But Michael Arlen isn’t who he looks like; he was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian. In London, he won’t fit in. Ditto in New York and the South of France. And his wife isn’t exactly who she looks like either.
Exiles. That’s how their son, Michael J. Arlen, thinks of them. Exiles? How can that be — they had it all. Michael Arlen’s photograph was on the cover of Time Magazine. In the South of France, he owned the very best speedboat and hired a driver for it. Willie Maugham and Winston Churchill came for lunch. “The day he arrived in Chicago, the Daily News ran a front-page story — saying that he had arrived in Chicago.” But when the fame went away, he was beached.
Michael J. Arlen gets the glitter. And, even more, the courage that kept his father going.

Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service
If Ray Mungo had grown up like the other kids in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he would have become “a laborer in a paper or textile mill, married and the father of two children, a veteran of action in Vietnam, and a reasonably brainwashed communicant in a Roman Catholic, predominantly Irish parish.
Instead, he became “a lazy good-for-nothing dropout, probably a Communist dupe, and lived on a communal farm way, way into the backwoods of Vermont.
And so he asks: “What went wrong?”
Nothing went wrong.