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.

Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

 Apologise for the lack of blog posts recently. I have read many things but none of them really inspired me to bitch or fawn. Anyway, THIS NOW CHANGES. On to the review.

"The old believe everything. The middle-aged suspect everything. The young know everything." - Oscar Wilde.

You may have done this at some point in your life. You pick up a book thinking "yeah! That's a premise I can get behind!" only to find out that the whole thing is so badly argued that it brings out your FUCK YOU mentality and the next thing you know, you've decided the authors are wrong about everything including what day it is. Then you sit back and try to untangle the gem of truth from the bits that sound like comments on the Daily Mail website.

So let's start from the beginning shall we? The premise of this book is that there's a problem with narcissism today, particularly in the US, and particularly among young people. Said narcissism is the cause of many problems. Said narcissism may, in fact, be the cause of every freaking problem the authors can think of. But take them seriously, people, because they're scientists. It is of course true that they're talking very much about American culture, and they make this clear, so protesting that the UK isn't like that doesn't get you very far - although I don't think the two cultures are all that different. The fact is that when I started reading this book I was quite prepared to accept that there's a real problem with a narcissistic culture. And there may even be. The book doesn't make the case at all well however.

There are two main problems with their argument, and since they're big on their scientific credentials let's look at them from that perspective. The first is in the nature of the evidence that they're presenting. Scientific studies are thrown in without any real detail or analysis as long as they completely back up the authors' tirade. This should set off alarm bells. Science is rarely that cut and dried, and Psychology (a science which is soft to the point of downright mushy) is often full of ambiguous results, tiny sample sizes and experiments so poorly designed that they tell us virtually nothing. Then there are the anecdotes. There's a reason why you don't tend to see journal articles that do a meta-analysis of the available data and follow it up with "and what's more, when I was in the supermarket the other day -" Although the authors are very keen to argue that they are IN NO WAY middle-aged grumps who don't understand youth culture, the kinds of side-swiping at anyone aged under 25 in the manner of a Daily Mail reader does nothing to help their cause. This book hasn't decided whether it wants to be a coolheaded look at the available data or a grumpy OTT opinion piece such as Charlie Brooker might write. Writing something which is mainly the latter and then throwing in "but we're professors!" doesn't work.

Then there's the interpretation of such data. I'm not for one moment disputing that there are some nasty, overly-entitled little shits out there who think the sun shines from their behinds. Nor am I disputing that these people are a reality-TV maker's dream. Of course they are. It's dishonest, however, to make your point by constantly comparing the worst of this decade with the best of previous decades. Does it mean anything to compare the spoilt 16-year-old daughter of a millionaire, who has got on TV by dent of being entertainingly self-obsessed, with your poor grandmother who grew up in the Depression and had nothing? Does that tell you anything meaningful? No, not really. Perhaps if we'd compared a rich, spoilt 16-year old from now with a rich, spoilt 16-year-old from the 1930s it might tell us something, although probably not too much - the world has changed in many other ways, and comparisons of individuals are always fraught with problems. Likewise you can compare the lowrise jeans of today with the frumpy frocks of the 1980s and be scandalised. Or you can consider that the 1980s had their own skimpy outfits, as did other decades, and it is quite possible to dress modestly today if you want to. Today people have spray tans! THE HORROR! They didn't do that in the 1950s. They did, however, wear innard mushing girdles, spend hours curling their hair and plaster on at least as much makeup as we do now. Tastes change. Does it help you to feel smug and superior to younger people? Why yes, I think it might do so. But narcissism is a disease of the young, right?

The fact is I don't really want to accuse the authors of narcissism, despite the fact that they accuse everyone else of it. This brings us on to the second problem with their argument, which basically involves narcissism being the root cause of all evil in the world. Whatever problem you might see, narcissism is the root cause. War? Famine? Environmental destruction? Economic chaos? Caused by narcissism, people. Welcome to the fun merry-go-round of circular reasoning. Narcissism causes all the problems in the world. How do we know? Because we've defined narcissism in such a way that anything bad can be attributed to it. They have basically looked at all the world's problems, and gone and retrofitted their definition of narcissism so that all the bases are covered. Here's a slightly odd case in point on this one. Isn't it a shame that people these days are so fixated on their appearance? Skinny people are all narcissists who fixate on how hot they are in order to demonstrate their superiority over others. If only they could be less fixated on themselves. But not to the point of becoming fat people, because as we all know, fat people are narcissists who have erroneously come to believe that their bodies are acceptable because our culture stresses self-admiration and self-acceptance to such an extreme degree. Apparently. I'm not sure exactly what your BMI has to be in order to avoid being a narcissist, but I'm pretty sure that if you set out to get that BMI that will somehow implicate you.

Moreover, there's something about marking everything with the same brush that leads to a lack of perspective that's almost hilarious. The authors cite the case of a man who murdered his pregnant wife in order to get her out of the way so that he could be with his mistress instead. This, they suggest, is what narcissism can ultimately lead to. My guess is that this case was caused by something more like clinical psychopathy: a pathological lack of conscience. It is true that exaggerated self-worth and entitlement is a feature of psychopathy. This doesn't mean, however, that self-absorption is psychopathy-lite, despite the determination of the authors to link high self-worth with aggression. We've all met people who were so self-obsessed that they were crying out to be stabbed with a spork. Very often they're not really bad people: they just need to grow the hell up a bit. Some of us have been these people when we were younger, and thank God on a daily basis that blogs, Facebook and Youtube didn't exist when we were 15. I wouldn't know about that, being as how I'm a small felt car, but I've been told this is the case. Yes, teenagers are self-absorbed. They always have been. Arguing that they're much more so now because they drivel on about their woes on Facebook rather than drivelling on about their woes on the phone as they did when *you* were a teenager is a little bit disengenous, methinks.

Sometimes the authors will make such a mighty jump in logic or in perception of the world that it'll take your breath away. Apparently, teenagers don't date anymore: they only have casual sex. I'm pretty sure that's not true, but there it is, getting thrown into the book as a fact with nothing to back it up. And then we move on. Sometimes it seems as though the authors are imagining a strange world in which beautiful youths are constantly posing for suggestive pictures for Myspace (always Myspace. And published in 2010 - was anyone still using Myspace then?), having no-strings sex and generally having far more fun than they are. It leaves me on the side of the kids.