illustration by Roz Chast
I think mine is right in the middle. Nothing extraordinary, just a Midwestern perspective on life and death. Big publishers seem to like those memoirs on the right and left of the illustration. I’ve had numerous big-city editors and agents tell me my work was “too quiet” for them, even “too Midwestern”! Hey, I take that as a compliment.
If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 
Hollywood has made millions on “midwestern” style writing made into movies!
I like to think there’s an audience for that type of voice!
Quiet is fine. So many big writers’ memoirs are quiet, like Self-Consciousness by Updike and Speak, Memory by Nabokov and Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past. The book fastest out of the gate may fade to black, while the quiet one speaking its truths may last.
Going back to Rachael’s previous question, the answer is, Speak Memory is definitely one of my all-time favorite memoirs.
I bought that book a year or two ago at the used bookstore. Unfortunately, I have yet to read it. I think it’s one of those that I know I will cherish and I want to wait until I have time to savor the writing.
It’s the kind of thing to read while floating on the cambridge in a punt… it definitely wants leisure.
I thought that someone on here mentioned Patricia Hampl…maybe it was on another post. I think she’s the definition of “quiet” memoir, but completely contemplative and thought-provoking. I definitely lean that way than toward the big, splashy, tell-all, drug-and-alcohol fueled memoir.
Weird–I thought Patricia Hampl but didn’t mention it. Are you a mind reader? Or is it this rural south-central Minnesota enviro again, just making us think alike?
I swear I read about Patricia Hampl in the comments somewhere! I cannot find it. Maybe it was on another post, or maybe it is just a freaky moment! That’s been happening a bit lately 🙂
Small presses are so important. They offer an alternative to the big-city notion that a memoir isn’t worth publishing (because there won’t be enough profit in it), which in some ways implies that it isn’t worth reading, unless it’s about fame/fortune, scandal or rage-inducing injustice.
On the other hand, if a writer wants to make money writing, eventually it doesn’t hurt to take a look at what sells to the big city and why. But if I had done that early on in my development as a writer, I would have written pulp or mass-market stuff, because there’s a bigger market for it (and there’s nothing wrong with writing it, if that’s what a person wants to do).
I really wanted to find my unique subject, voice, perspective, style. The comic is great, by the way.
Been thinking about this all yesterday, and it’s still on my mind. It was one of those so simple and obvious truths, that nobody really pays attention to it. I’m really looking forward to reading your memoir–I definitely prefer quiet, “pretty much like your life” writing. The way better and way worse varieties are rarely thought-provoking. It’s only in “quiet” that I can find a place and the leisure to be soulful and contemplative. I don’t usually read to get “adventure” or “thrill” or “pity” any other wild ride of emotion. I read for the companionship. I like it best when it feels like going for a long walk in the woods with a good friend, talking about what matters to us. (And what matters most, is often the ordinary stuff).
In a writing group I was in, we had this conversation a lot. Write what you love, or write something that you know has a good chance at being marketed toward a larger audience? I always advocated for the former. I’m not sure I can wrap my head around writing something only for commercial appeal. It seems that without your heart in it, without passion for the topic, that it would simply fall flat. Though I think the market proves again and again, unfortunately, that flat writing doesn’t always matter.