I recently finished All in Good Time by Jonathan Schwartz. I have been listening to Schwartz on the radio all my life (quite literally, as my parents listened before I was old enough to remember) so the memoir interested me, and it didn't disappoint.
This post, though, isn't primarily a book recommendation. Reading All in Good Time brought me up short on the whole concept of the memoir. The book is raw and open. Not in the conventional, might-as-well-be-true manner of James Frey, but in a much more personal, much more revealing manner.
In a memoir, anyone can be honest about their alcoholism (and Schwartz definitely is). To reveal your first drink at age ten, to chronical checking into the Betty Ford Center in a moment of desperation, these are facile revelations that function as the memoirist's stock in trade.
No, I'm talking about shame. Humiliation. Being a braggart and getting called on it. Hurting a friend with a casual lie and getting caught. Meeting your hero and sticking your foot all the way down your throat until you can kick yourself in the esophagus.
I was stunned by the honesty of these revelations, and moreover, by the absolute impossibility of me ever pulling off such a feat. I'm a very blunt person, the undisputed Queen of TMI. My role in life is to go there when people say "don't go there." But reading All in Good Time, I knew I could never be that honest in print, in public, with (as they say) God and everyone watching. Geez Pete, I've written five books, and even with the impersonal stuff of spells and elements, readers are happy, nay, gleeful, to rip you a new one. Tell them my mistakes? Oh the pain.
The. Real. Goddamn. Pain. I'll tell you the truth right now: I could never write like that without cleaning up my act. Without tidying the messes, without making me look just a little bit better than I really was. I wouldn't know how to bear the suffering of it otherwise, and I don't know how anyone else does.
(Cross-posted at Property of a Lady.)[That's all, folks]
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