Lary Bloom
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
A Few Good (And Candid) Men
On Monday night, a new memoir class gathered, this time at the Chester Library. Every memoir course I have taught in the last few years has been different in terms of quality of writing, but most have had one thing in common: scarcity of men. The new class is typical in this regard: nine women and one man. How to account for this?Is is that women are more willing to record honestly fateful moments in their lives, while men tread lightly on hurtful memory? Well, yes. This is, of course, not universally true. My reading list of classic memoir has the work of many men -- James Baldwin, Don Ascher, Geoffrey Wolff, David Sedaris, John Updike, Robert Graves. But in that list, women writers dominate.
In the last session of the memoir course before this one, students were asked, as they typically are, to read from their final ambitious works. Most of the women in the class chose life altering moments -- the kidnapping of a child, abuse suffered in early years, family dysfunction, the death of a son, and the like. One woman, however, wrote 1,800 words on taking a bath as a little girl. I watched the faces of class members as she read. All of the woman were completely caught up in the moment -- they had huge smiles on their faces. They understood the writer's vulnerability. The lone man in the class seemed befuddled. A very good writer himself, he had on his face a sense of confusion. How could this be? It's only a bath, after all. But that's the general difference between men and women in terms of memoir -- a willingness to come clean.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 3:13 AM
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