memoir

Ben Bradlee: Burying his own lede

memoir, Writing

bradleememoirSuppose you’re one of the best known newspaper editors of your generation, revered for your role bringing down a presidency. Wouldn’t you play that high in your memoir? 

Ben Bradlee did not. The long-time WaPo editor instead chose to craft “A Good Life” as a straight-forward chronological narrative, moving on from childhood illnesses to Harvard hijinks and so on. One third of the way through it, he’s still recounting his friendship with JFK, Watergate several chapters in the offing.

Somehow, I can’t imagine him letting a reporter get away with this approach in the paper. He’s burying the lede.

Bradlee, who wrote this a few years after his 1991 retirement from the Post, should have known better: You never want to lose your reader before you get to the really good stuff.

Memoir Mania: It’s Not Just Me

memoir, Writing

memoirstackWhy are memoirs so darn appealing? On my last trip to the library — I have time for such things, now that I’m a freelancer again — I picked up one book after another by or about familiar writers, finally limiting myself to four.

Sadly, “Looking for Anne of Green Gables,” the one that seemed most promising given my girlhood love for L.M. Montgomery’s stories about the fiery red-haired orphan, disappointed; Irene Gammel’s bio was a non-starter. But I quickly devoured the memoirs by Joe Queenan and Gustavo Arellano, plugging away at “Closing Time” even when the going got rough. Both had the benefit of covering familiar regions — Philadelphia for “Closing Time,” and Orange County for Arellano’s book of the same name — but that wasn’t the sole source of their appeal, any more than my familiarity with their work was.

I’m not the first to note the appeal of memoirs — part of the reason publishers keep getting in trouble with falsification is that they and/or writers retrofit fiction into the form — but haven’t quite figured out their mass appeal. I’m a journalist and have always loved literary essayists, so memoirs are a natural for me. But what about everyone else? Can we blame blogging for opening the floodgates to personal experience, or is blogging an extension of the same hunger that draws people to memoirs? Is this new — some consequence of our fractured communities — or an evolution? Did newspapers used to fill this niche? I’m sure others have expounded on this before.

But really, what is it about memoirs?