Discussing a memoir called Loose Girl* by Kerry Cohen with a friend the other night, we ruminated on the lack of the recovery period in memoirs. Recovery. Not the sexy, busy, crazy, wild part where you go manic/have a sex addiction/are institutionalized, but the long, arduous, boring-as-hell-in-real-time but actually super-fascinating-and-inspiring-for-others time period.
We are both often disappointed by the lack of recovery. In fact, we could both use a whole other memoir post-Loose Girl and that ilk (as much as we love these books for their incredible honesty), focused just on recovery alone. How it is to tow the long road from figuring out for real now you have a problem (addiction, mental health challenges, etc) to the point where you can even begin to consider writing a book like this (now-ish).
The "credentials" that appear on a memoir of someone recovered - family, job, degrees - all are supposed to suffice for recovery. We need to imagine how someone got from realization to present moment, as it is often covered in a chapter, if that. I am thinking of often very commercial books like Wild, or Fast Girl, but these issues plague even more literary, mindful and small press memoirs like The Center Cannot Hold, or a favorite here on this blog, The Chronology of Water.
To stop the memoir after all that action and then leap forward to publication in an afterword, if at all, is painful for those of us who live in survivor or recovery mode. We come wanting beautiful painful words, yes, but we also want slow joy and hope, building up how to get by brick by brick, day by day.
Those who do focus on the nitty gritty tend to ONLY do that - Anne Lamott's books are all basically recovery books, in which she relentlessly shares her failings and insecurities. Mary Karr, once she gets past the core childhood memoirs of Cherry and Liar's Club, does that with Lit a bit more. And the work of Abigail Thomas** really does this, continuously exploring not just individual difficult events, but the rich weaving of life that goes on behind and underneath survival and recovery.
What I'd love to see is more books in-between - books based on single events, but with recovery woven into the story. It's the denouement, and it is too short-shifted right now. Somewhere between more on-going, contemplative, life-writing memoirs (one of Abigail Thomas' books is titled An Actual Life), and those about single incidents, dramatic effects, or recovering from addiction, there must be a middle ground with a fuller picture included.
*previous posts with Loose Girl here and here.
** previous post with Abigail Thomas here.
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