Awash in the Lives of Others

Drowning in memoir

A few years ago, as we were in the planning stages of our new General Education curriculum, somebody made the suggestion that we should, as part of the writing component, require every student to complete a “reflective essay on their learning” at the end of each term. This idea was received with rapturous enthusiasm by a fair fraction of the folks who voluntarily attend meetings about curricular design outside their specific major, and with horror by, well, me.

Happily for me, this did not make it into the final version of the program (which you can read about at length here), most likely because of one of the things I found horrifying about the suggestion: the logistics of who would grade several thousand of these things every year. As someone who has been a department chair (a position accurately described by my predecessor as having “responsibility but no authority”) and who has the kind of overdeveloped sense of responsibility that leads one to attend meetings about curricular design outside their, I could see the exponential growth in my workload this would entail, and wanted no part.

The impracticality wasn’t the only reason I recoiled from this particular suggestion, though. Even more fundamental than the logistical problem is what might be called a problem of taste: I absolutely and unequivocally do not want to read a stack of essays in which students reflect on their experience of learning in the previous academic term. This is not meant as a knock on our students, either— I have very little interest in reading reflective essays written by professional writers who have been paid for their work. It’s not a genre of writing I’m all that drawn to even when it comes pre-screened by editors and has been produced by people who are very good at what they do.

A striking bit of nonsense from the prompt “memoir versus science”

I’m not implacably opposed to the idea of personal reflective writing— it would be darkly ironic if I were, given what I’m doing right now— but it’s a very hit-or-miss genre for me, one with way more misses than hits. There are a few narrow windows in terms of topics and especially the narrative voice that grab me, separated by wide swathes that read as either self-indulgent horseshit or the kind of oversharing that makes my skin crawl. I recognize that these things serve a purpose for the author— again, it’d be super weird if I tried to deny that— but I don’t have much appetite for reading them.

This is not, I am well aware, a universally shared opinion. My social-media feeds are regularly swept by waves of enthusiasm for one piece or another in this vein. I generally click these links with the trepidation of a bomb disposal tech donning one of those armored suits, and a finger hovering over the “close tab” button. (I also get a similar volume of links dunking on other essays in this general mode; I definitely don’t click on those…)

It’s not just a magazine phenomenon, either. The proximate cause of this particular bit of bloggy reflection was the annual New York Times list of “Notable Books.” One of my regular exercises in tilting at windmills is to go through the non-fiction half of the list looking for science writing (spoiler: there’s basically none), but this year I was struck by the degree to which the list is dominated by, well, personal reflection. Here’s a list of adjectives the Times put in front of “Memoir” when categorizing the non-fiction half of the list:

• Feel-Bad

• Culinary

• Philosophical Family

• WWII

• Media

• Glitzy Downtown

• Grief

• Sex, Drugs, and Techno

• Transition

• Survival

• Supreme Court

• Family History

• Uncoupling

• Basketball

• Adventure

That’s 15 out of the 50 non-fiction books honored with the “Notable” tag; two of them are among the “10 Best of 2024!” as well. And that doesn’t count a couple of essay collections that are highly likely to contain yet more personal reflection. This is yet another area in which I’m not at all clear what the “right” fraction should be, but 30% feels like a veritable flood of the inner lives of other people. Especially when there are no books directly about science in the list, and only a couple on subjects that intersect with scientific issues.

I can’t claim to have any kind of comprehensive sense of the explanatory science books published in 2024, but I find it hard to believe that there were none worth being deemed “Notable.” And it’s highly disappointing that one of the chief taste-making outlets for the educated professional class chooses to so cavalierly overlook a large and central category of human activity. Particularly when this exact same thing happens year after year after year: a big pile of memoir, a second big lump of “current events,” and maybe a crumb of explanatory science writing.

Looking down that list of adjectives also makes me think, to paraphrase an op-ed headline from some years back, that I could stand to know less about these people. A few of these categorizations are the kind of thing that could only get me to hate-read the book in question, with the intention of writing a vicious pan. Given the personal nature of the subjects, though, that would just feel gross, so I will assiduously avoid them instead. And the vast majority of the others, to be honest— there’s maybe three adjectives on that list that would get me to read the cover copy in the store, let alone consider buying the book.

But, as I said, this is clearly a mode that has an audience. And a moderately enthusiastic constituency (among the sort of faculty who go to curricular design meetings, anyway) for teaching students to create more of it. To say nothing of the crucial role that a particular subgenre of memoiristic writing plays in getting students admitted to college in the first place. (There’s a reason you’ll never find me volunteering to read application folders for the nice folks in Admissions…)

For myself, though, I’d be happy with less writing about the inner lives of other people, and a bit more about the external reality that we all inhabit. Particularly when it comes to producing year-end lists that will so strongly influence the aspirations of a large and important segment of the reading public.

---

That’s a bit of yelling at clouds, I know, but I needed to get it off my chest. If you want to read more of this, I can’t say I fully understand why, but here’s a button:

And if you want to call me a cretin for thinking that I wouldn’t read a Glitzy Downtown Memoir for less than a dollar a word, the comments will be open: