Cake or Death (4 page)

I say this as a person who watches a neighbour take a specially saved plastic bread bag and a hand spade and monthly collect hundreds of tiny beige balls extruded by her yappy little dog. She saves it for the next garbage collection. I yearn to move to another city or petition City Hall for a new fence-height limit of 16 metres. I, dear Reader, am normal that way.

Also, I don’t think anyone—and some of the people Augusten was growing up with who did this had enough remnants of sanity that they had jobs outside the home—would eat Kibbles as a snack. It’s lumps of dried dog food that look like … well, there’s a theme here and I’m not running with it.

Burroughs has rescued himself from a childhood so bad that you wish he had Asperger’s Syndrome, as his brother does, because people with Asperger’s have difficulty making emotional connections with others and are less likely to be hurt by living in a household of mental patients driven mad by a psychiatrist who is a dead ringer for Santa Claus. But there are things that don’t seem possible.

This creeping doubt about misery memoirs has damaged the work of the great American humorist David Sedaris, who writes truthfully about his eccentric childhood, decades of dealing with nutcases while working in an apple-cannery, as a mover, a housecleaner, a performance
artist and devoted drug user and alcoholic. People say Burroughs resembles Sedaris. But Sedaris is a kind, highly intelligent human being who, while strange, observes the strangeness of others with a keen awareness of his own peculiarities.

Burroughs is a book in himself, minus his upbringing, and it isn’t amusing. It is tragic. “Not laughing,” as my tiny stepdaughter used to say to me severely when I would tell a joke I thought would appeal to children, usually things that rhymed. (I was trying too hard and that never works with kids. They will not be courted.) All memoirs start to look dodgy to me in this light. When Gerald Durrell wrote
My Family and Other Animals
, the classic autobiography on “that rarest of things, a sunlit childhood” about his youth in Corfu, he made his brother, the late novelist Lawrence Durrell, a figure of idiocy. Indeed, he made everyone a figure of fun. What a collection of fumbling, foolish, well-meaning people.

And then we read about the suicide of Lawrence’s daughter—he is said to have raped her—and the hopelessly sad, borderline criminal life of his other brother, and his sister’s haphazard scary boardinghouse existence in post-war England, and Durrell’s own pathetic end in a care home, soiling himself and left untended for days by family and friends who admired him but did not really love him. Durrell died like the animals he had put into zoos, surrounded by well-intentioned individuals.

The great British novelist and playwright John Mortimer was once accused by a reviewer of “covering pain with jokes.” I asked him about this and he was taken
aback. Covering pain with jokes is the only possible attitude, he said, and he is of course right. Not everyone manages it, but it is the stance to aim for.

Durrell never mentioned pain, but he was always making jokes. Burroughs cannot be amusing, although he can describe madness well, choosing just the right detail to send the reader away heaving. But Sedaris is a comic genius. He is Thurber, if not Wodehouse, and he is certainly Perelman. He has no “side,” as the British say. He thinks little of himself and I suspect accepts compliments with mystification.

The baddies have much to fear now. Before memoirs became popular, child molesters had things very much their own way, for instance. No more. Mary Tyler Moore was a little girl when she was sexually assaulted by a neighbour and her mother either didn’t believe her or didn’t care. The British writer Jill Craigie was raped by the historian Arthur Koestler, a revelation that caused consternation at the university that was about to erect a memorial to the man, plans hastily changing there. Alan Bennett now writes of being cornered as a little boy by a pedophile in a cinema. It is a terrifying story, but he typically insists on making little of it.

It does appear that a great many people—judging by the stories we read of the prominent—were raped as children, and we have the Pain Memoir to credit for this knowledge. Two—and as of last Friday, let’s make that three—of my closest friends now tell me of having been sexually attacked by male family members when they were children; another friend was raped by a psychopathic
dinner date, a professor, who put a pillow over her face. He was perfectly friendly afterwards, which was the terrifying thing, she said, aside from asphyxiation. They tell me this only because the Pain Memoir appeared in my lifetime and began to unwrap the real world for us, making it acceptable for us to tell our own stories.

And yet people still yearn for the mythical days when children were sent out to play. Nobody worried about molesters then. The truth is, the molesters didn’t worry in those days either. They were home-free.

Children accept the lives they are given, which is one of the blessings of being a child. You’re like an animal in that you don’t question your own existence, you simply live it. But at some level, all children yearn for a “normal” family, knowing in their hearts that there is something very wrong: drunken parents, a central shared lie that is never articulated, a mystification about how Daddy brings in money, why Mummy sleeps all day, the relatives who are permanently shut out, the pills, the endless hasty moves.

Good memoirs are based on meticulous observation and no one is better at that than children. The interpretation of what the child saw comes later.

The odd thing is that there is nothing more fascinating than unperceptive people. In fact I know several people who are utterly incurious. They don’t read. They watch a smattering of bad TV, though I’m guessing here, because they never talk about high and low culture or anything in between. They cannot catch a current reference beyond the year they turned twenty-one. If they’re
women, they have never worked and they despise women who do. They have never had any achievement or any ambition to achieve. Is it some sick element in me that is drawn to people like this? It mystifies my husband how I chat with them at parties or in stores. It’s like talking to a parrot, whose best effort is to mouth your words back at you perfectly. But they don’t know it. Tell me about your life, I urge them. They do say the most astonishing things, if only they knew it.

Sometimes I think the greatest loss of all is not the unexamined life (for Socrates was referring to examination of the self) but the unobserved life. Unobserved people are fascinating.

A woman named Sylvia Smith wrote a very strange little autobiography in 2001. She lived in London, had done various odd jobs throughout her life, had very little money, no education or sense of aesthetics, read nothing, took everything at face value, was plain. She sent in a manuscript and Canongate published it. It was called
Misadventures
and took the form of a series of vignettes. She would agree to meet a date at the station to have dinner at his house. Asked to bring sausages, she would. And he wouldn’t show up. There she’d stand with her packet of tubular processed meats until she left alone to go home and fry them. That would be a chapter.

Or she would negotiate bath times with her fellow boarders and they would inevitably fall out. People cannot live together, I think. Smith had a habit of giving her age and the age of those she described at the start of every incident, as if she had been taught in grade school that
this was a means of authentication. Instead, it sends out the hum of madness.

I swear,
Misadventures
was gripping stuff. What was distressing, though, was the newspaper feature writers who were sent out to interview Smith and failed to form any kind of connection with her or to translate her for their readers. She was not rich. She was not beautiful. She had never met the great and rarely the good. It was as if her kind were beyond the writers’ ken. They dismissed her while nervously praising her publisher for having taken on such a nonentity, as though she were a member of another species.

But the fact is, she was normal. One thing I always remind myself when I walk about the streets of my own city is that I am the freak. I am endlessly thinking, rethinking, analyzing, watching, missing out on things that should claim my attention, my brain a buzzing mess.
I’m
the oddity.

A man named Joe Fiorito interviews normal people for my local paper. And I am sure his editor considers the column to be some kind of social service with a human face. The most startling interview he ever did was with a poverty-stricken Asian man who had been arrested for shoplifting at a drugstore. He had stolen skin-lightening cream. For he had noticed that brown-skinned people didn’t make anything of themselves in this country. I hadn’t even known such creams existed. I wanted to scream, Don’t press charges. Give him a barrel of the stuff.

Ten years later, I was prescribed a birth control pill that my doctor explained had given me the “mask of
pregnancy.” There were slightly darker patches on my cheeks, something that pregnant women sometimes develop. She prescribed the same skin-lightening cream for my vanity that the man had stolen to survive. I wonder what happened to him.

Joe understands that the people he interviews are normal. He is the strange one, with his writing talent and his interest in cookery and his astonishing kindness. I am the weird one brooding over my tube of Lustral and what this means in the grand scheme of things, a tide of sorrow sloshing inside me.

This year, I read that there’s an ingredient in the cream that may be carcinogenic. Is all of life like this, an accretion of odd facts that we hope will somehow form a pattern? Am I writing the book because my role is to figure out the pattern? I know I am worth less than I think. Writers are small people. They are on the fringe. They write their memoirs with great authority, not realizing that they’re the minion of the group, the person who tells the story instead of just living it.

Better to write a memoir with humility, as Sedaris does. One of the great frustrations of the book world—and I suppose the journalism world, although it is a much more callous surface-skimming place—is that the right books don’t sell. The bestseller lists contain books like
Minge: The Left Behind Code for Women Who Dish
that sustain publishers and yet you’d probably pay not to read them. Editors despair of trying to bring a great memoir to the attention of readers. Thanks to the book club, word of mouth, perhaps even Book Crossing, whose members
leave books in public places for strangers to pick up, there’s a wisp of hope. How else would good memoirs get a chance?

The best Second World War memoir (and like many people, I went through an intense Second World War phase) was
And No Birds Sang
, written by Farley Mowat, a Canadian writer of great reach. He could write comic novels, adventure novels for kids and scientific works, but at some point he sat down and wrote the tale of his joining the Hasty Pees, his father’s army regiment, and fighting through Italy, including at the horrific battle for the citadel village of Assoro. The terror of Assoro was that it was a fortress on a mountain, perched on the edge of a massive cliff. The task was to climb the cliff in the dark, undetected by German sentries, and take the town.

Mowat is good at detail. His description of a German sniper slowly firing bullet after bullet at a donkey as it wiggled in agony until a disgusted Canadian soldier finished the animal off has stayed with me to this day. We are told that the Americans admire Canadian snipers in the latest war in Afghanistan. I think snipers are cowards. I despise them. How clever you are to shoot someone in the back.

Mowat describes a soldier falling forward at the waist, his body perfectly sliced in two by a series of bullets. Journalism doesn’t tell you this; readers might disapprove of war if they knew such things happened.

Not until I read Robert Fisk’s dispatches about Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in
The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East
did I
read war described in this way again. Fisk says that telling readers what is done to human bodies, especially those of civilians, is the key to reporting. We have no idea what war is. He tells us of a squishy feeling under his boots and the realization that he was standing on a pile of murdered civilians in a refugee camp, the pile gathered by Israeli bulldozers. He describes a halo of wooden clothes pegs around the head of a woman shot to death as she was hanging up her laundry. He describes the vomiting of reporters as they came upon the slaughter that was abetted by Ariel Sharon, a war criminal later elected leader of Israel (and now he’s a vegetable, tra-la).

Thanks to those small details, I see the Sharonistas differently than many people do. Clothes pegs. Sharon’s bulging face, the face of an assistant killer.

Henry James said writing was all about seeing the pattern in the carpet. It occurs to me that many modern readers won’t get this. For one thing, everyone but me has fashionable planked wood flooring. Even if they have carpet, as I do, there’s no pattern. My carpet is a flat expanse of grey. James was a Victorian, which means he lived in an era of such fantastically complicated patterned carpeting that staring at it would make you go mad like that woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892
The Yellow Wallpaper
. I love you, Henry, but the complexity of your novels goes beyond even the maddest of Victorian flooring.

Nevertheless, a Pain Memoir has to have some kind of pattern or theme. The Rotten Parents theme is probably the most fruitful, given that most parents are spectacularly inept—family values, indeed—even when they mean
well. Subsets are Handed Over to Rotten Relatives
(City of One
by Francine Cournos, a great book by the way), Donated to Pedophile Cult (see Burroughs, above) and Evil Stepmother.

My favourite of this last subset is Helga Schneider’s
Let Me Go
, if only because the author is a lovely person who to this day doesn’t grasp that no court would convict her for having split her mother’s head open with axe. Hers was a careerist mother. Helga’s mother abandoned the family to join the SS and become a concentration camp guard who really loved her work and found the post-war years a letdown. Helga subsequently endured a sadistic stepmother (what are the odds?) and an orphanage.