This was not from my shelves, but it was a reread for bookclub last month.
I’m going to paint with a broad brush, but we’ve had memoirs since the Odyssey, so breaking down some categories helps.
Memoirs look at the three journeys - journey of the soul, the journey of the body, and the journey of time.
The first looks for spiritual catharsis or a sense of being at peace with the events discussed. The second tells you about experiencing the world outside yourself in a project or place. The third looks at the flow of time with your self as an observable anchor. There is some overlap. The journey/ time combo is big with house renovators in Bill Bryson’s At Home and Francis Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun. Bill Bryson also does straight journey memoir, Just a Little Walk in the Woods and the Road to Little Dibbling. Michael Pollan adopts projects and does some soul searching - A Place Of My Own, Cooked, Omnivore’s Dilemma. We like telling stories. We like telling them about where we’ve been, who we are, what we’ve done, and what’s happened around us.
Hillbilly Elegy has a journey trajectory— Out— with plenty of justification for it, but the journey is the hinge for the personal journey to accepting his mom. The stories are great in the sense that they are memorable - you would remember a massive adult tantrum that leveled a chunk of a toy store.
Some of it is laid out in statistical likelihoods. Those that go to church are more likely to hold down a job or go to college. A single parent is less likely to take kids to church.
Some of it in pure anecdote - the terror of a boy that thinks his mom is going to kill him; the terror of believing the state would take you away and send your mom to jail.
But a memoir of this variety suffers from the Tara Westerfield problem. The first to speak seems right until another comes. In Tara Westerfield’s case her memoir was not only countered, but held as slander.
But it comes down to knowing it is the story Mr Vance wants to tell, and it could be the whole truth or a ghost written lie. You can’t take a tale of the soul towards acceptance as clear evidence for a political candidate. It is interesting.
Further Up and Further In