Addicted to memoirs

Thus far, 2010 has been the year of the memoir. Since reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the genre has captivated me. Having hardly done more than smoke a cigarette, I can't explain the pull the tumultuous lifestyle of an addict has over me, but once I begin these books I cannot seem to put them down. I think the reason that I am so attracted to the genre is because within its writing has a brutal, cringe-worthy reality that fiction just can't carry.

It's my belief that a fictional character simply cannot carry flaws in the same aching way that a character based on a human being can. As a writer, I think I can see why - we fall in love with our characters, put pieces of ourselves into them. Because of this, we can't seem to help giving them at least one redeeming quality. In order to create a character as truly dark, troubled, and seemingly hopeless as Frey in Pieces, a writer would have to be far more accomplished at separating the heart from the craft than I can ever imagine myself to be. We tend to give our characters tiny glimmers of hope, to fill their mouths and heads with witty and thoughtful words. In my (limited) experience with memoirs, the conversation doesn't have to sparkle. The characters don't always turn out to be inherently kind or hiding an unexpected heart of gold. Sometimes, they're just fucked up. And for me, that's part of the draw.

I also think that a book based on a real life experience reaches a level of horror that a work of fiction simply cannot. Even if I were to put months into researching drug and alcohol addiction, I don't think I could ever create a scene quite like the opening of Pieces. Frey awakens from a blackout covered in "a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood," somehow on an airplane en-route to Chicago. "My front four teeth are gone," he says. "I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. [...] I look around for anything I might have with me, but there's nothing. No ticket, no bags, no clothes, no wallet. I sit and I wait and I try to figure out what has happened. Nothing comes." Unable to walk, he lands in Chicago and is handed off to his parents. Halfway through their drive to drop him off at a rehab center, they stop at a hotel for the night.Alone in his room, Frey smokes and drinks until he blacks out, completely aware that his mother is crying herself to sleep no more than a few doors down.

I'm not convinced that this could have come from any other mind.

Regardless of how they relate to fiction, drug and alcohol rehabilitation memoirs are my addiction (no pun intended) of the moment. Since finishing Pieces, I have also read Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood and Beautiful Boy, a girl's struggle with alcoholism from elementary school through college and a father's take on his son's meth addiction, respectively (although both are captivating, neither had the hold on me that Pieces did). Currently, I am making my way through Tweak, a natural segue after finishing Beautiful Boy - it is Nick Scheff, the son about which Boy is written, telling the other side of the story. As terrifying as it was to be the father, expecting everyday to receive a call announcing his son's untimely death, I am even more on the edge of my seat as Nick, wandering around the streets with nothing but track marks and hole-filled sneakers.

After this stint with memoirs, it's going to be difficult to throw myself into the next book on my reading list, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Maybe I'll skip ahead a few to make my memoir detox a little more manageable.