How to write a memoir

 I should clarify something before I get started: I’m not a fan of misery memoirs. Anything that involves a cover with a sepia photo of a miserable-looking child with big eyes is not for me. That said I’m interested in lives that are a bit different, particularly if they take place alongside the familiar culture of the modern world. I’m also interested in narcissists and psychopaths so I tend to gravitate towards books about them.

I thought I’d turn this into an entry about memoirs because I’ve read two recently and one was very good and one was very bad. The good one was “Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots” by Deborah Feldman. The bad one was “Web of Lies: My Life With a Narcissist” by Sarah Tate. Here’s an overview of each.

“Unorthodox” is the story of Feldman’s life up to her early twenties. Feldman was raised by her grandparents in the Williamsburg area of New York, in a community of Satmar Hasidic Jews. The community – still suffering a great deal from shock and loss – has come to believe that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for Jews assimilating too much into gentile society. The community in Williamsburg was set up after World War II to be as Orthodox as humanly possible. So Feldman grows up with a family who regard English as a Satanic language, bans all secular books and forbids any mixing of men and women outside of family. Not only do women cover their hair after marriage: they shave it off entirely. Their lives are dominated by purity laws and the requirement that they have as many children as possible in order to build the Jewish population back up again. She enters into an arranged marriage at seventeen, has a son and finally decides she has to leave the community in order to protect him from living his own life in such a rigid environment.

“Web of Lies” is the story of a young woman who falls for a middle aged man who appears to be charming and wonderful. They get married. They have children. Then cracks start to appear and, painfully slowly, she realises that his lavish lifestyle is all paid for with loans and screwing people over (including his two ex wives). Eventually she leaves, after the marriage has fallen apart anyway, and goes off with three children, an arseload of debt and no self esteem. If this doesn’t sound very interesting, then I’m trying my best but it just isn’t very interesting.

The trouble with the kind of “triumph over adversity” memoir which I think Tate thinks she has written is that that if there is no real triumph it just falls apart. Instead it reads as a two hundred page self justification of someone’s really rather stupid life choices. I’m not blaming Tate for getting mixed up with an arsehole. That’s an easy mistake to make. I’m not even blaming her for failing to see the massive red flags that were clearly apparent from early on in the relationship. Those are a learning experience. I’m just saying it doesn’t make a good book to have chapter after chapter of clueless wife having conversations like this -

Her: We received a court summons today for the massive amount of income tax you didn’t pay.

Him: Oh don’t worry about that. I’m going to sort it out. You look after the kids.

Her: Oh okay then.

- followed by a long stream-of-consciousness passage about how she thought she could make it all better by being a better wife and how did she know and oh God the pain. At best it might make a decent article in a women’s magazine but really, it’s the kind of story you should tell your best friend over a massive tub of ice cream. Unfortunately, I think she did this and her friend said “that would make a great book!” and unfortunately she followed this advice. It doesn’t make a good book. However much she wants to snatch some kind of justice out of this fucked up situation, it just doesn’t make a good book. It’s easy to pick up on the typical problems with these self-published kindle books. (I should know better by now – just because a book only costs £1 doesn’t mean that it’s worth spending £1 on it.) It’s easy to note the typos, the errors in punctuation and the hellish lack of understanding of standard book formatting. The real problem is that there just isn’t a book here. The whole thing is a desperate bid for self justification and/or revenge: the kind of impulse that makes people want to write long, stupid letters to their exes in a bid to make them feel bad about what they’ve done. Yes, he’s a bastard. Yes, you are justified in being angry. Now hold your head high and get the fuck away from that keyboard.

How is “Unorthodox” different then? Well, for one thing the author clearly has a great deal more self-awareness. She makes a difficult decision to leave, as opposed to writing a bitter tirade against the man who has basically already dumped her. The scenario is genuinely interesting. The writing is actually good. None of the people in the book are bad people; it’s just that Feldman has such a massive personality clash with the culture she’s grown up in that something has to give. In fact, something that’s almost more interesting than the book itself is the backlash that has hit since it was published. Being a small, insular community, the Williamsburg Satmars are of course very aware of Feldman and very hurt by the book. There has been something of a campaign from them to try and discredit her. Her detractors have made her real name and the real names of her family public knowledge: Feldman herself changed them all in the book.

I’m fascinated by some of the responses because in many respects they say more about the community than the book itself. They tend to say things like: “She was unhappy because she had a dysfunctional family – not because of our way of life! It’s not our fault that her mother decided to go off and be a lesbian instead of a good Jew!” A good many comments go along the line that “Jewish women don’t feel the way she suggests about ritual purity / arranged marriage / large families / limited education! We love it!” as though there was only one possible reaction to each of these things. The thing is that Feldman never suggests that every Jewish woman should feel the same way that she does about each of these things. She only explains how she, personally, feels about them, and this stands in stark contrast to the insistence from her detractors that everyone should feel the same way.

Then again maybe I just like the fact that these days when she sees Hasidic men who’ve snuck off to a bar on a Friday night she likes to scare the crap out of them by wandering over and wishing them a blessed Sabbath in Yiddish. I’d totally do that too.