From Rousseau’s unprecedented confessions to Hong Kingston’sWarrior Women and China Men, Alex Zwerdling traces the history of the memoir in hisThe Rise of the Memoir, reviewed by Frances Wilson for the TLS. The difficulty with memoirs is that they are written to be memorable; enough so to be a steady source of profit after ones death, so we should suspect that Rousseau’s extravagant confessions were really cryonics dressed up as histrionics.
Self-portrait (1960) by Dorothy Mead Ruth Borchard Collection, courtesy of Piano Nobile, Robert Travers (Works of Art) Ltd
Readers search in vain for the insights and humility we now require of autobiographers. I am made unlike anyone I have ever met, proclaims Rousseau, removing himself from any sense of communal identity. He plunged into his life and he plunged into the telling of his life: the further I go into my story, the less order and sequence I can put into it. Onto this formless and never-to-be-finished mass he imposed no shaping structure or narrative arc because he had no interest in, or knowledge of, a narrative self. Rousseau was our first episodic autobiographer. Looking ahead, he explained, always ruins my enjoyment.
So why did this book, described by Zwerdling as incoherent, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, embarrassing [and] often irrational, exert such power over Wordsworth and De Quincey? Why was Rousseaus Confessions so beloved by George Eliot and Emerson, why did Virginia Woolf lament that there was no womans autobiography to compare with this, and why did John Ruskin, according to Charles Eliot Norton, feel that Rousseau, who was unlike anyone, was so like Ruskin himself that he must have transmigrated into his body?
The review manages topile on one anecdote after another while clapping hard for Professor Zwerdling rollickingmonograph. To find out some of the answers to these question and inspiration for your own memoir:
Read the full review at the TLS
