Time heals all wounds (and, hopefully, still allows for good stories.)

(an actual post, inspired by reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson)



Sometimes I wake up and decide, in my mercurial youthfulness, that I should write memoirs. I, like David Sedaris, Bill Bryson or Garrison Keillor, should look back and examine my life in short, witty essays that will make the reader chuckle warmheartedly. My books would eventually be closed with the bright-yellow, bittersweet satisfaction that comes from reading something hilarious to which you can relate.

My significant other also wants to do this with his life (more than I do, for me it's a whim), and he'll probably be very successful. Like Bill Bryson or Garrison Keillor (I cannot remember where David Sedaris grew up, but I'm sure it was FABULOUS), he comes from the midwest: corn, old houses, picket fences, covered bridge festivals, baseball games. He wears plaid, flannel shirts, and he doesn't do that to be ironic as people on the East Coast do. He votes Republican along with the rest of Indiana, and everything about him is earnest and all-American, and all of this will change, and he'll eventually be able to write about it with a combination of sharp-tongued insight and nostalgia for simpler times. I'm sure people will read his book and feel nostalgic and happy.

I don't see myself being successful in the memoir-writing endeavor--at least not in the tradition of the Sedaris/Bryson/Keillor triumvirate. I'm worried that, if I write my memoirs, they'll be a bit more Jack Kerouac/Jonathan Ames/Augusten Burroughs--not good. Entertaining, yes. A good read, yes. Certainly not good for me, though. Unfortunately, these writers are either A) prematurely dead by alcoholism, B) good-naturedly perverse, or C) emotionally damaged and being sued.

I'd like to look at my past with a sense of wholesome affability and happiness, but I can't--at least not yet.

Let's take high school, a time which all writers and artists seem to agree is a completely shitty one in everybody's life, what with the ineffective school system and shallowness and popularity struggles and erections and getting into college. I have stories to tell about high school which would be excellent in a memoir or even (this is another whim) a screenplay. But, again, were I to write them down, they would read more like something out of Running With Scissors than Tales from Lake Wobegone. Interestingly, this would also be true from a geographical standpoint (that memoir standoff is MA vs. MN, and my memoirs versus, say, the boyfriend's, would be NH vs. IN).

Possible Conclusions:
1. Only people from small towns in the midwest can write uplifting memoirs.
2. I am doomed to be one of those writers who writes a Hell of a memoir at great personal cost.
3. New England totally fucks you up (I actually do think this one is quite likely).
4. (And I think this is the likeliest) You cannot write an uplifting memoir (or film or autobiographical novel, whatever) until you are secure, successful, and, perhaps, wealthy. It's a lot easier to laugh at the suckers who picked on you in grade school when you have something positive to show for your suffering, and, if you're well off, the suckers who read your book are probably less likely to give you crap for calling them out. So, I suppose it takes present self-satisfaction to appreciatively poke fun at your past.

Problem: When you're finally self-satisfied after many years, does the gradual erosion of angst ruin the bankability of your hometown fallings-out?

I suppose we'll see.

Sincerely.