Enough Already

I am currently reading Wild, a memoir in which author Cheryl Strayed recounts her solo trek north along the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother dies. Though I am not yet halfway through it, I have some thoughts that I would like to share with anyone in the mood for some good old-fashioned whining.

I am, mildly put, unimpressed with this whole sub-genre of memoir--what I call the "enlightenment memoir"--that has gotten its footing in recent years. You know the one I mean: authors find that their lives have spiraled out of control and they decide to have one detoxifying, earth-shattering experience that will magically transform them into new people.

But here's the thing: no matter the author or the circumstances leading up to the Great Big Important Transformative Experience or the nature of the Great Big Important Transformative Experience itself, the story is exactly the same. "I was unhappy," they all start. "I _____ [1) lost my mother to lung cancer, 2) lost touch with my friends and family, 3) cheated on my husband with my friend's boyfriend, 4) got divorced, 5) 3, then consequently 4]. I was _____ [1) drinking myself into a blackout every night, 2) in the throes of a heroin addiction, 3) going through a divorce I/my spouse didn't want, 4) sexually promiscuous, 5) all of the above.] I needed to change."

In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert takes off on a journey across the globe to "find" herself. In Running Ransom Road, Caleb Daniloff runs a marathon in every city in which he'd battled alcoholism, and "finds" himself. And in Wild, Cheryl Strayed decides that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail will be her answer to the death of her mother and the subsequent rupturing of her sibling ties and her marriage. And oh yeah, she "finds" herself.

My poor best friend Casey had to listen to me shout for a solid ten minutes on the phone this afternoon about how irritating this concept is to me. We as readers are introduced to authors who have managed to fuck up their lives in an assortment of (sometimes) inventive ways, and we are invited to sit back and relax as these authors describe extramarital affairs (drunken or otherwise) or stealing from siblings to pay for their drug addictions. And then, after we couldn't possibly care any less about them, we get a holier-than-though lesson in achieving spiritual transcendence from a woman who, two chapters ago, was shooting heroin into her ankle because her boyfriend-of-the-week couldn't find a vein in her arm.

You're miserable, you climb a couple mountains/run a couple marathons/eat some pasta/do some yoga, and you're not miserable anymore. We get it.

As worn-down as I am by these formulaic enlightenment memoirs, I keep reading them. I believe that to be a successful writer you need to be an informed reader, and as I hope to be a writer myself one day I find it necessary to know what's being published. Unfortunately, this is it: some young, attractive, educated person dealing with, oftentimes, first-world problems that make me roll my eyes and groan, "Get over yourself." I promise I'm not trying to sound unsympathetic to these issues. I am inspired by people who recognize their mistakes--or even just things about themselves and their lives that they want to change--and set about changing them. I couldn't be happier for those people. What I have a hard time getting behind is the fact that memoirs of this type are inevitably whiny and, simultaneously, elitist. The authors assume that chronicling their hardships--"I had barely run a mile and already my feet were killing me!"--will ingratiate themselves with readers to such a degree that the readers are willing to overlook the I-found-enlightenment-and-you-didn't moment at the novel's climax. I've noticed an influx in recent years of books by ordinary people who have transformed their lives and  essentially thought, "Hey, good for me. I should write a book about how I'm not a schmuck anymore." To which I say, enough already. I get that you were self-destructive and emotionally unstable and now you've learned to hold yourself accountable for your actions. That's really great, and I honestly mean that. But lay off the let-me-regale-you-with-my-tale-of-spiritual-transcendence memoirs, will you? You're not inspiring anyone--you're just making us all hate you.