Julie Rak

Memoir, Truthiness, and the Power of Oprah

After his memoir A Million Little Pieces became a best-selling selection for Oprahs Book Club in 2005, James Freys meteoric rise as a major writer of the American memoir boom was cut short when it was discovered that he had fabricated some events in the book. The resulting controversy meant that Frey and the memoir as a genre were written off by most of the mainstream press. However, the memoir is closely related to the development of American ideas about individualism and citizenship. As A Million Little Pieces fell afoul of conflicting expectations of memoir as genre, it also became part of a public debate in the USA about the meaning of truth connected to the idea of weapons of mass destruction, the relationship between publishing and television, the image of the addict in American culture, and the value of personal experience in the public realm. This paper explores the debate.

Pop Life: An Introduction

This collection of essays deals with an important form of representation in American culture today: popular auto/biography. Popular auto/biographical discourse appears in a dizzying array of forms in North America, including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. It is worth considering that, during a time when it is becoming hard for the general public to trust political and spiritual leaders, auto/biographical representations by celebrities and by “ordinary” Americans are on the rise: there are thousands of memoirs and biographies in print, and memoirs like Tuesdays with Morrie stay at the top of bestseller lists for years at a time. The scholars in this special issue examine a mix of popular and everyday auto/biographical practices and texts—from Eminem to the commemorative monuments of violent acts against women—in order to consider what life narratives mean in a public sphere where, more than ever, the personal is political. Ce recueil d’essais traite d’une importante forme de représentation dans la culture américaine d’aujourd’hui : l’auto/ biographie populaire. Le discours auto/biographique populaire apparaît dans un ensemble époustouflant de formes en Amérique du Nord, y compris les documentaires personnels, les livres graphiques, les paroles des chansons, les fanzines et les récits de la vie des célébrités. Il vaut la peine de tenir compte que, à une époque où la confiance dans les chefs politiques et spirituels s’atténue dans le grand public, les images auto/ biographiques que véhiculent des célébrités et des Américains « ordinaires » sont de plus en plus nombreuses : des milliers de mémoires et de biographies ont fait l’objet de livres, et des mémoires comme Tuesdays with Morrie demeurent de grands succès de librairie durant des années. Dans ce numéro spécial, les universitaires jettent un coup oeil sur divers textes auto/biographiques et diverses pratiques populaires et courantes – de Eminem aux monuments commémoratifs des actes de violence contre les femmes – afin d’évaluer ce que les récits de vie signifient dans un espace public où, plus que jamais, le personnel est politique.

Introduction: Auto/Biography in Transit

The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document their lives. Essays in the second section explore critical approaches and texts that signify how both the study of life writing and its objects of inquiry are themselves in transit, and have the potential to change our ideas about the field itself.

Insecure Citizenship: Michael Ignatieff, Memoir, Canada

This article links Michael Ignatieffs need to write memoir to his desire to explore what family, public service, and citizenship can mean when they are thought together. Ignatieff does not yet use memoir as most politicians do, to recall what public life was like or to set records straight. He writes as part of a process of self-invention and reinvention. In the process, the concepts of citizenship and national belonging move too, from a position of insecurity and migration as a challenge to national belonging, to a position of citizenship as securely patriotic and the focus of national security.

Teaching Life Writing: Four Ways to Fail

If you have been teaching life writing in a literary-studies program for as long as I have (eighteen years), you might have had your share of failures, or at least of “teachable moments” when you s...

Radical Connections: Genealogy, Small Lives, Big Data

ABSTRACT Genealogy research is a type of excavation, as practitioners piece together stories of origin of millions of unknown, small lives. As the work of genealogy becomes monetized as big data, it is vital to consider genealogys radical potential as a kinship practice, and its relationship to ideas about DNA.

Derailment: Going Offline to Be Online

What is next in the study of autobiography or life writing? What should be next? I have chosen online as my keyword for this discussion, but it is not possible to think online without “offline,” a word that has come to mean that we aren’t connected, aren’t on the internet, aren’t seen, aren’t working, aren’t there. Like “nonfiction,” “offline” is a negative, a term that cannot exist without its opposite. What “line” of thinking are we talking about when we think these binaries together? Sara Ahmed’s quotation about disorientation concerns shifting the ground that we know or in which we are engaged. She wonders whether a queer politics can disorient something like sexual orientation and whether there is radical possibility in that. When a computer, or a body, goes offline, a trajectory is disrupted. We lose the line, the thread. We forget our lines in that moment. We may not know what to say or what the right thing to say might be. In that disruption, Ahmed suggests, there could be other temporalities and other futures. Something may happen which has not happened before. It may be conservative or progressive as a movement. But, and this is key for my discussion, it may be. The original word online, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, referred to trains, the most technologically advanced means of travel in the nineteenth century. Goods and people were delivered to “on line” locations, that is, locations that were literally on the train line. Trains were therefore embodiments of an online future, and they took people into a certain kind of futurity. This was not just because of their speed and efficiency: for the first time, goods and people were moved to precisely a single location on the line. Precision is what matters here. Unlike shipping lanes, which were inscribed in water and subject to all kinds of unpredictability, trains did not deviate from the tracks on which they ran. If they did, they were derailed. Derailment was and is a dangerous thing, an unthinkable thing if you are a passenger. Predictability is the hallmark of trains: passengers in trains always know what

Memoir: an introduction

character?” (175). This query succinctly offers her interpretation of what Ruskin attempted to achieve as an educationalist. Arguably, the weakest aspect of this book is its length; the actual text runs to just 156 pages. It has been criticized for this in other reviews. In light of the sheer volume of Ruskin’s oeuvre and the central importance of education to it, the short length does not allow Atwood sufficient scope to explore Ruskin’s complex ideas and explain them to a modern readership while also charting new ground in Ruskin studies. The problem of length is compounded by the number of quotations used. These limit the amount of new analysis which Atwood can offer, particularly on the topics of how Ruskin differed from the educational norms of his contemporaries and of how he influenced the educational theories of others. But to be fair, Atwood has carefully woven together the words of Ruskin and of other Ruskin scholars so that her argument can be followed easily and is clearly substantiated by evidence. The care she has taken in doing so results in a fluid, enjoyable read. Despite the fact that the book is quite short, Atwood does effectively distill Ruskin’s vision and offers an easily digestible overview of Ruskin and education, particularly as revealed in his more epistolary and autobiographical texts. This book is a useful resource for academics interested in the history of education, of ideas, and of life writing; as Francis O’Gorman notes on the cover, “it makes a valuable contribution to Ruskin, and indeed Victorian, scholarship.” For those of us who teach texts like Fors Clavigera and Praeterita, attempting to communicate Ruskin’s socioeconomic theories to twenty-first century students, it is a most welcome addition to reading lists.

Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography

I became interested in autobiography more than twenty years ago because I was fascinated by the imposter, Frederic Philip Grove. Once regarded as the best EnglishCanadian novelist of the 1920s, a Swedish immigrant whose colourful life and adventures were chronicled in his 1946 award-winning autobiography In Search of Myself, Grove was actually Felix Paul Greve, a German writer who migrated to the United States, abandoned his first wife and reinvented himself so completely that even his Canadian wife and son did not know who he really was until more than twenty years after his death. Grove’s story fascinated me because he worked so hard to be someone else. His autobiography was key to his self-presentation because that genre appeared to connect self, life and writing better than any other. And yet, a reading of In Search of Myself shows that the connections between text and identity are often tenuous, even as they remain necessary to the genre and its readers. The requirements of truth-telling which are expected of autobiography may in fact work to create the conditions of imposture, because the reading public needs, wants and expects a certain kind of life writer. In her examination of the history and context of imposture called Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt and Identity in Autobiography, Susanna Egan takes up the same questions which originally fascinated me and which I still find compelling. What kinds of expectations do readers have about the connection between writing and experience which creates the possibility of imposters? Why do so many readers of their works believe them, and what does the existence of fraudulent life stories say about the culture which consumes them? The existence of imposture acts to ‘call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information’ (Egan back cover). This in itself provides a compelling reason to investigate what autobiographical imposture is, and what imposters Life Writing VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2012)

The Doukhobor Problem: Media Representations of Sons of Freedom Women, 1952-1960

This paper analyses the process of the media in British Columbia and in Canada in the stigmatizing of members of the radical Doukhobor Russian religious community known as the “svobodniki” or the Sons of Freedom. This process lasted from the late 1920s through to the end of the 1960s. A key issue of their protest was the disruption to their way of life in the Kootenay region in British Columbia by an unsympathetic cultural environment—secularized and pro-militarist—which they regarded as the antipathy of their values. Despite the clarity of their demands and the open statements of the reasons for their protests, their methods of protest were presented by the media as acts of insanity. When women led the protests, the media portrayed them as monstrous and unfeminine. My analysis of the media shows how female Sons of Freedom protestors presented a direct challenge to the conservative gender roles which middle-class women of the 1950s were being asked to adopt. The response of the state was to declare these protestors “bad mothers” and to imprison their children for up to six years.