A Goldilocksian Solution

I stay away from memoirs because they are fiction pretending to be non-fiction. I prefer fantasy. It says: here are lies, beware. But then you find out it tells the truth and tells it in such a way you can't look away. Memoirs? Not my thing. But I've also resolved to read outside my comfort zone so I took this up as a worthy challenge.

In Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage we meet Dani Shapiro at her most contemplative. She muses on factors of transformation and mutability. The imperceptibility of it all. The transience of it all. The self-imploding destructiveness of it all. She confronts her past self and we hold up that exchange for our (and her own) examination. It's a case of dealing with a narrator who cannot trust her own memory but makes this her honest confession. As we read on, we are unsettled by the suspicion that we, too, are changing. Like two beings in time that move towards one another, we are altered and reconfigured by the force and momentum of the collision of mind vs. mind, subjectivity vs subjectivity. 

So I stay away from memoirs because there's nothing more alarming than thinking another person's thoughts that eventually get worked into who you are. And there's nothing more cynical than rejecting it due to the realisation that the memoir is fundamentally a myopic and selfish account of another individual whose life didn't matter until I opened the book. 

I'm wondering what it means to enjoy a memoir. For me anyway. And I think the answer is a rather Goldilocksian one: you can't care too much and you can't care too little; you have to care just right.