Chicago Tribune
William Faulkner’s typewriter at a museum in New Orleans.
Does Memoir Belong to Just One Gender?
I wasn’t sure what to think when a female friend said, “You write like a woman.”
by Ken Budd
November 12, 2015
But is Peggy right? Are female memoirists more emotionally honest than their male counterparts? That's certainly the stereotype — and a key reason why the genre is dominated by women. On Goodreads.com, a list of "Beautiful and Brutally Honest Memoirs" is a collection of memoirs by 39 women. At the HippoCamp conference on creative nonfiction in Pennsylvania — an event held in August that focused largely on memoir — 84 percent of the attendees were female. When I searched Amazon over the summer for "new memoirs," the first 11 were by women on topics such as forgiveness, survival, and family. The one male-authored memoir: "Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group."
"The surge in contemporary memoir writing is woman-driven, very feminist," says Sue William Silverman, author of "Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir" and the recent memoir "The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew." "Memoir seems like the perfect genre to explore the feminine journey. Women tend more intuitively than men to recognize, and be unafraid of, how they feel."
As Silverman conducts workshops across the country, she encounters far more women majoring in creative nonfiction than men. "Frequently there are no men at all," she says. Women earn nearly 70 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded in English, so they're not only more likely to be writers, but they're arguably better equipped emotionally to expose themselves on the page.
"Memoir requires vulnerability," says Kerry Cohen, a writer, psychotherapist, and author of "The Truth of Memoir: Writing About Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity." "I hate this notion that women are more the purveyors of honesty and emotionality, but we live in a culture that doesn't work to develop those qualities in males."
That's not to say that men can't write intense, emotional memoirs. Silverman cites works such as Greg Bottoms' "Angelhead," Bernard Cooper's "The Bill from My Father," and Mark Doty's "Heaven's Coast." Cohen praises memoirs such as "This Boy's Life" by Tobias Wolff, "The Tender Bar" by J.R. Moehringer and "Hurry Down Sunshine" by Michael Greenberg. But tough-guy strength and Trump-style bravado still trump sensitivity for males in American culture. It starts in boyhood (usually in gym class): As a guy, being told you do anything like a woman — throwing, running, burping — is a coded insult. The translation? You're a wuss. Cohen, author of the memoir "Loose Girls," saw this while raising two sons. "I watched as they grew how they felt they had to toughen up, or show a strength to the world, no matter my work to keep them soft and sensitive."
I, too, am a stereotypical male, despite Peggy's perception of me as a hairy-knuckled Elizabeth Gilbert. After my book was published, I was happiest when readers said it was funny, not that it was moving. The goofball gene is dominant in many males. Most guys would rather be Jimmy Fallon than Deepak Chopra. That's why the ultimate bare-your-soul female memoir, Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," led to a crude male parody, "Drink, Play, F@#k." And even though my memoir is emotionally honest, I envisioned it as a travel book: a comic fish-out-of-water tale centered on global volunteering. That changed when my eventual agent suggested the real story was the fatherhood dilemma; that this was deeper, richer, more powerful material. So it took, yes, a woman to steer me toward the story's emotional core.
Writing that story wasn't easy. When my editor — also a woman — gushed that my first draft was "so honest," I panicked. It's one thing to write about your life in private, in the isolation of the writer's cocoon. It's quite another to publish it; to share and reveal, well, everything — anguish, anger, embarrassment, fear. But I also found, to my surprise (though it shouldn't have been surprising), that writing about my grief was occupational therapy, another exercise more associated with women: 63 percent of Americans in therapy are female, while 37 percent are male, according to a Harris Interactive poll. The reason, Cohen believes, is that "emotions are more comfortable for women, and women process their feelings verbally more often than men do. So women believe therapy will work for them."
But the therapy disparity may exist for another reason: women often lead harder lives than males, creating a stronger need to share difficult experiences.
"Considering all the subjugation and associated depravity that women have endured, and still endure, maybe some uncomfortable emotional truths are fundamentally unequal," says Huan Hsu, author of "The Porcelain Thief," a memoir on his quest to recover his family's buried heirlooms and discover his Chinese heritage. He gives the example of "The Liar's Club," where "the specter of violence — sexual and otherwise — hangs over everything."
Hsu largely avoided emotional issues in his own book. Although I found private, personal benefits from writing, Hsu, a journalist, was wary of "personal writing lapsing into therapy, an idea my MFA professors hammered into us." Because of this, he created barriers. "It's like how the Chinese government gets citizens to censor themselves. It never lays out where the line is, so everyone stops well short of it. This, of course, could be my way of rationalizing some subconscious avoidance of uncomfortable emotional truths."
Which is a very male thing to do.
As for Peggy's point — that female memoirists write more nakedly than men — Silverman offers an intriguing alternative: that memoir is strongest when authors access their masculine and feminine sides. She points to the pioneering work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who found that creative girls are more dominant and tougher than other girls, while creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than other boys. Creative people, Silverman believes, tap into broader elements of our humanity.
"Some of the best writing," she says, "occurs when the author creates a kind of emotional androgyny."
Csikszentmihalyi called it "psychological androgyny," and I suspect many writers possess it. And it could mean, strangely enough, that gender is both vital and unimportant.
"Writing like a man or writing like a woman seems meaningless to me," says writer Abigail Thomas, whose latest memoir is "What Comes Next and How to Like It." "Writing like a writer is what matters. Write to discover things you didn't know, or didn't know you knew. Write for clarity. Write to find meaning in the meaningless. No sex has a corner on that market."
I agree with Abigail. The way I see it, I don't write like a woman, nor do I write like a man. I write like me. And that should be the goal of every writer.