I loved the book Three Cups of Tea. You likely did also if you read it. This morning The New York Times carried an investigative story that questions the veracity of the central narrative about stumbling upon Korphe, a village in Afghanistan, after failing to reach the peak of the mountain K2.

Here’s the story:

‘Three Cups of Tea’ Author Defends Book

By JULIE BOSMAN and STEPHANIE STROM

“While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts of his book and the management of his charitable organization.

The report could puncture a hole in the uplifting narrative of “Three Cups of Tea,” which has fed a charity run by Mr. Mortenson, the Central Asia Institute. The institute has built schools, mostly for girls, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The report has also revived a chronic concern in the publishing industry over the accuracy of nonfiction memoirs, which are typically only lightly fact-checked by publishers, if at all.

Viking, the imprint of Penguin Group USA that published “Three Cups of Tea,” declined to comment on the book or answer questions about how it was vetted.

The CBS News report questioned, in particular, a central anecdote of the book that was as dramatic as it was inspirational: in 1993, Mr. Mortenson was retreating after failing to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second highest mountain, when, lost and dehydrated, he stumbled across the small village of Korphe in northeast Pakistan. After the villagers there nursed him back to health, he vowed to return and build a school.”

Read the whole story here.

I agree with author William Zinsser, as I have stated elsewhere on this blog, that factual truthtelling is important in memoir. But I still admire Mortenson’s book and his mission. This kind of compression of events seems less offensive than James Frey’s over-dramatization of his addictions, perhaps because it serves nobler ends. However, the 60 Minutes charges of misusing funds for personal gain hurt the most. Do you buy Mortenson’s explanation?

The video below of a TED talk given by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is a must-watch for all memoir writers. In this talk Kahneman, psychologist and inventor of the field of behavioral economics, describes how hard it is to study happiness.

A moment in time lasts about three seconds. The average person has over 600 million of these and remembers only a tiny fraction of them. This person can be called the “experiencing self.” What memoirists attempt, it seems to me, is to use the “remembering self,” which makes memories out of beginnings, peak moments, and endings, to recapture enough of the experiencing self so that some of those millions of erased moments can come back–and we get to live twice. Both selves are made stronger by a good memoir. Do you buy this thesis? What is your response to the fascinating video below?

[ted id=779]

If you follow memoir in the news (one of the categories in this blog which could easily be ten times larger if I followed all the relevant stories here), you probably have read Neil Genzlinger’s savage review of three recently published memoirs (along with praise for a fourth one) in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Genzlinger sounds a little like gunslinger, and his attitude resembles Gary Cooper’s in High Noon. He stands alone on a dusty street, single-handedly ready to save the world from the effluvia of badly written, unnecessary memoirs.

Genzlinger is staff editor at The New York Times. Like a number of other critics of the genre, he prefers that those of us with uninteresting lives keep our stories to ourselves.

The questions begged by this review include:

• What makes a life interesting or uninteresting? And who gets to judge?
• Is the quality of a memoir determined by the drama of its story or the elite status of the writer in some other realm? Or can a person of no extraordinary life write a memoir masterpiece?

I encourage you to read the article and then share your opinion here. Have you ever read a memoir that could more productively been turned into bedding for the horses?

Ryan Grim’s searing essay in The Huffington Post about George W. Bush’s new memoir deserves our attention. Grim claims that many of the passages of Bush’s Decision Points are taken word-for-word from accounts of other writers. Read his review here.

In it Grim describes high crimes and misdemeanors in the Bush memoir. He found lots of passages that were taken straight from other people’s accounts.  In a few, the “high crimes” cases, the former president tells stories about events he did not attend!

What kind of standard should publishers demand from political figures who tell their stories? How do any of us know how to separate our own thoughts and memories from the thousands of words and images we see every day?

Or is memoir a particularly perilous form for a man who, in the famous phrase of Ann Richards’, was born “with a silver spoon foot in his mouth”?

What are your thoughts? Do you read political memoir? Does it matter to you if the writing comes from the author’s own voice or not? What constitutes a high crime against the form in your book?

Every so often I “Google” key words related to this blog–like “best memoirs,” “ memoir blogs,” and “top ten memoirs.”

If you do the same–Google “best memoirs”–right now, you will come across this article in the Wall Street Journal by new memoirist Norris Church Mailer. I have not read her memoir about life with her husband Norman Mailer, but I am intrigued by the reviews, especially by this one in the New York Times.

Here’s my favorite quip from Alex Witchel’s review above: “That she managed to stay with Mailer — self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, perennially womanizing to the point of even his own humiliation — for almost 33 years until his death in 2007 was a feat most women would not have attempted. When people asked, ‘Which wife are you?’ her answer was, ‘The last one.’”

Increasingly, memoirists are being asked about their own favorite memoirs. I try to take note when this happens and share the suggestions here.  Right now one of the most frequently checked posts at 100memoirs is Mary Karr’s Top Ten List.

If you know of other lists, please share them. And continue to offer your own!

 

Thanks to Richard Gilbert, whose wonderful blog Narrative I highly recommend, I can include a link  guaranteed to induce a chuckle.

One of the goals of this blog focuses on the quest to understand memoir as a genre. What differentiates it from other forms? Why is it both popular and maligned in the contemporary literary world? I named this category “books about memoir,” and you can find the posts stored in this category by using the handy category list in the right-hand column. Or you can follow this link to find previous posts which reviewed those books, sometimes commenting on how they define the genre. 

I have cited a few other writers on this subject, but none of the definitions in these posts were as fun as these from Chris Offutt as taken from Harper’s. Open the link and enjoy a laugh.

Do these definitions work as well as the serious ones for you? What do they reveal that the others lack? Or vice versa?

What could be a better, and more honest, title for a memoir than Song of Myself? I had not thought of Whitman as the originator of American memoir (usually slave narratives and captivity narratives are given credit for this honor), but I think I could make a case for Leaves of Grass, and especially “Song of Myself.” What do you think?

Be sure to listen to this interview between one of our best living poets, Robert Hass, and radio personality Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”  Hass and Gross loaf together and invite their souls and celebrate a new book of Whitman poetry called Song of Myself, with an introduction by Hass. You can also listen to Ed Begley read passages from “Song of Myself” here.

When I began this blog a little less than two years ago, I started a category called “memoir in the news” after several of the books on the “Top Ten Fake Memoirs List” located here made news for the wrong reasons.

I invite you to read the descriptions of these ten books. What do they have in common? What can we learn about the nature of truth from this list? Of the genre of memoir? Of the marketing dimensions of book publishing?

One wag said that the recent memoirs purporting to be survival tales of different ethnic groups get past the editors because they confirm mistaken impressions that the elite hold about “the other.” I’d love to have your thoughts on this subject.

Scroll slowly over this picture. Do you recognize the famous film critic Roger Ebert?

I knew that Ebert had battled cancer, lost weight, and kept on going. What I did not know, until I saw that picture and read the article in Esquire about him, was that he has also lost his physical voice and most of his jaw, not to mention that he struggles with his hip and shoulder, unable, now, to sit for any extended period.

This photo was a shock, partly because his website continues to show him with an intact jaw and partly because I have read more of and about Roger Ebert this year than at any other time, without knowing he had lost his physical voice. Essays, reviews, and blog posts, written with clarity, urgency, and love, have been pouring out of him. I highly recommend the February 16, 2010, article in Esquire  by Chris Jones, an intimate portrait of Ebert which may make you ponder, once again, the paradox of finding your life by losing your life.

Look at Ebert’s eyes in this photo and you will recognize the windows to his soul, the part of his face that cancer has not touched, except, perhaps to deepen the pools of wisdom, humor, and warmth contained therein. Cancer has also not touched his mind nor his creative energy. He uses his laptop like a lifeline. No longer able to be televised or recorded, he now “speaks” through his fingers.

“The greatest films are meditations on why we are here,” says Ebert. As his own experience on earth contracts and draws nearer to the end (consciously now), his voice takes on the kind of compassionate strength we recognize from our best teachers, their love of life, and their desire to share the best of who they are and what they know.

Two thoughts about Ebert relevant especially to our own pursuit of the best of memoir in this blog.

1. His top 100 list of movies assumes that 100 outstanding examples of a genre, explored in depth, create a curriculum that anyone else can learn from. Johnny Cash used the same method to teach his daughter the classics of country music. Bennington College offers one of the best low residency MFA programs in the country and uses this motto: “Read one hundred books. Write one.” Isn’t that a great curriculum in six words?

I feel confirmed in the use of 100 memoirs as a teaching/learning device. However, it’s easy to feel daunted by the depth of knowledge required to take on such a task. To get to the list of 100, both Ebert and Cash, spent their entire lives listening and watching much that never made it to their lists. By contrast, I’ve gotten a late start, but everytime I come across another “top 100 list,” I feel empowered to continue the quest. With the help of guest bloggers and great commenters, however, it seems like an attainable goal. If you click on the next link, you will see Ebert’s own great website with a feature I would like to add to this blog some day–all 100 movies (for me it will be memoirs)  in a clickable list that takes you to a review post about that movie. What a great resource. You can also find a printable version of just the movies themselves to add to your Netflix queue or take with you to the store. It took him 13 years to construct this list, adding a new one every two weeks. It might take me as long, but what fun!

2. Ebert’s has taken his calling to find meditations on “why we are here” in darkened movie theaters to new depths as he has fought for his life in the last four years. He says, at the end of the Esquire interview essay, that he has no desire to write his memoir, although he has been encouraged by many to do so. His approach to memoir is appealing to me, and becoming more so all the time. He has shared many personal experiences in individual essays and blog posts. He doesn’t want to revisit these essays or to impose a larger narrative arc on them in order to create a book memoir. If you want a great example of online memoir essay, read his  confession of being an alcoholic here.

If you add up the online personal essays, the Esquire interview, and the top 100 best movie reviews, you have lots of ways to understand Roger Ebert’s own raison d’etre. It’s own very similar to my own. I’ve stolen it from Wordsworth’s long memoir poem, The Prelude:

“What we have loved, others will love

and we will teach them how.”

How would you answer the question, “Why are you here?” Have other people’s memoirs shed any light on this question for you?

Remember when we looked at one of the casualties of the Bernie Madoff scandal–artist and blogger Alexandra Penney who got a book deal to tell her story? Here’s the blog post from February 12, 2009 catalogued under the catagory “memoir in the news.”

Just one year later, the book is not only written but published, and today NPR did a feature on the author, including an excerpt from the book.

The comments are highly critical of NPR for “shilling” for a writer who seems to evoke little sympathy for her small misfortunes compared to the truly indigent women she compares herself to. She may fear being turned into a “bag lady,” but in reality, she came nowhere close to that fate. I read the excerpt on the NPR page and decided not to buy the book.

What do you think? Who is the audience for a book like this? Do you expect it to succeed or fail? Commenters on the NPR website were disgusted that NPR ran the story. Are you?