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After a long day of family gatherings, forced religious experiences and altogether awkward conversations, I always leave my parents’ house thinking, “Well, that story goes in the memoir.”
That conversation with Dad where he screamed about “bastard grandbabies?” Yeah, memoir. Or the one where my grandmother talked all night about how hard she likes her matzo balls? Memoir.
We all do this. We all sift through the uselessness of our days and find knee-slapping, heart-breaking, cliche stories to put in the filing cabinets of our brains to call upon later when we’re writing our memoirs. In recent weeks, news of memoirs from Ernest Hemingway to Dick Cheney has made the genre relevant again.
Publisher Simon and Schuster is republishing Hemingway’s memoir “A Moveable Feast,” due July 14. Published in 1964, three years after the author’s death, the first edition provided a firsthand account of Hemingway’s failures in love and marriage. Originally edited by his fourth and final wife, Mary, the new restored edition was edited by Hemingway’s grandson from his second marriage, Sean Hemingway.
In the restored edition, Sean has altered his grandfather’s words to depict his grandmother in a more positive way. Of course, this choice could completely change Ernest Hemingway’s original intent. On the other hand, it could perhaps restore “truth” in the first place. Whose perspective is the right one? Who knows if Hemingway meant to portray the truth at all?
Another relevant memoir that has surfaced is that of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who signed a deal with Simon and Schuster to publish his memoir in 2011. Many questions arise about Cheney’s own truthfulness as a politician, but even more will surely follow with this new undertaking.
One can’t help but wonder how much detail he will go into about former President George W. Bush, 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Perhaps Cheney will be honest, exposing and explaining certain aspects of the Bush Administration. Or, he could glorify and defend those same aspects. We expect the truth from memoirs, but they rarely contain all of it.
Truly, if a memoir is anything, it’s subjective — there to tell a perspective — even if it’s not an entirely honest one.
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