Once Upon a Memoir

It used to be joked during his contest of the primaries against Hillary Clinton more than four years ago that he was making a bid for the most powerful office on earth just on the strength of two memoirs Dreams From My Father,The Audacity of Hope,and not on an accumulation of experience to qualify for the job. So he may have,but by placing his life story at the heart of his policy prescriptions in such a way that every retelling of his story made the narrative yet more capacious to accommodate the arc of history,geography,race relations,generational shift and the welfare state. It was not,as Tea Party types would have it,a confidence trick Obamas has been an attempt to transform by articulation,and his story has been central in that endeavour even after he made it to the White House. Recently,he gave Michael Lewis unusually open access to his work and domestic spaces to allow a view from the inside,and a few lines from the resultant article for Vanity Fair spring out: He Obama was especially alive to the power of a story to influence the American public. He believed he had been elected chiefly because he had told a story; he thought he had had problems in office because he,without quite realising it,had ceased to tell it.

You could argue that Obama will need the power of his story to claw his way back from the setback after his first debate with Romney; and you can be certain that should he fail to do so,a fine memoir will be hot off presses some time not too far away and that should he,in fact,win,that book will be just another four years and a bit away. Either way,it will take a while for a sober assessment of the Obama way as a template for political engagement. But its not too early to use this opportunity to shine a questioning light on the art of the memoir.

The Obama context and a reading of Dreams From My Father extraordinarily textured and,in hindsight,written amazingly well to withstand the scrutiny of fact-checkers and political opponents at a time he may have had little inkling of the public profile he would one day acquire may in fact provide the appropriate moment. In an essay in a collection of previously published writings just out Waiting for the Barbarians,literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn cautions against ignoring the great autobiographies while participating in a routine ritual of trashing tell-alls born of vanity,narcissism,spite,greed,self-regard and delusion. Those provocations are easy to spot and judge. More interesting is a question that Mendelsohn lingers on: the utility of autobiographical narratives that turn out to be works of fiction.

An example he cites is Rigoberta Menchu,Guatemalan winner of the 1992 Nobel peace prize for her work in promoting the rights of indigenous people. She hit the headlines for the wrong reasons when it subsequently came to light that she had made up some of the incidents and even persons mentioned in her 1983 memoir. Upon being so charged,she retorted that the book highlighted a larger truth. Taking a few more examples of more extravagantly invented memoirs that nonetheless claim to utter essential truths,Mendelsohn passes judgment: Such claims add up to quite a valid defence of a certain literary genre,but the genre in question isnt the memoir its the novel.

Yet,if recollections are not intentionally fiction,do they become incontestable facts? How reliable a guide is memory,after all? Mendelsohn recalls returning from Australia after interviewing Holocaust survivors in an effort to find out what had happened to his mothers Polish relatives. On the flight back,his brother and he had an argument about whether the former had in fact been on the school choir. Mendelsohn wondered that he could not settle a fact of a past much more recent than that his interviewees were talking about. I thought about this and burst out laughing. Then I went home and wrote the book, he concludes.

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