On time, as anticipated, they have returned, tunnelling into view, leaving their sooty signature. Pale in the sudden light, they fan and flutter their wings. It’s time to sing. Me, they sing. Me, again.
Cicada season has come and gone; it is another class of organism I refer to, in the throes of a parallel drama of ceremonial unwrapping and full-throated song of the self. As if compelled by biological imperatives of their own, these writers—serial memoirists, they’re sometimes called—burst forth with regularly timed tales of tribulation, of molting, of transformation. And each time they tell us they have it figured out. This time, they’ve got the real story for us, the real handle on themselves, on what it’s all about. It’s about living with the ambiguity. Accepting the light and the dark. It’s about (the serial memoirist will say, without a whisper of irony) other people.
To be fair, memoirs have exhibited a tendency to multiply ever since Augustine recalled pocketing those pears. His “Confessions,” which began appearing around 397 C.E., were spread out over thirteen books, each conceived as a distinct unit. In his wake, heavy hitters have included Diana Athill, Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, and Augusten Burroughs, each of whom has produced a proper shelf of memoirs. At work, and advancing: Leslie Jamison, Mary Karr, Lauren Slater.
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From time to time, what necessitates a new installment is a dramatic development in the author’s life. After writing a memoir about her parents, Dani Shapiro learned that the man who raised her was not her biological father. Back to the desk and out with another draft, “Inheritance” (2019). (It’s about living with the ambiguity.) More often, however, these accounts are dispatches from ordinary life, and frequently about middle age: reports of the birth of a child, worry for the child, divorce and love again, this secret, those ghosts, my parent is sick, my friend is sick, I am sick, I have an armful of regret, I have these memories of my father’s voice, what to do with the too much and too little of it all. A stack of such memoirs might be distilled down to the title of Athill’s 2015 volume: “Alive, Alive Oh!”
They can give off a particular scent, these serial memoirs—embarrassment mingling with self-regard. The self is merely source material, the memoirist protests, pink-cheeked; the life merely what is at hand for the staging of larger questions of memory, ethics—Cézanne painting his apples and rewriting the laws of perspective, etc. There will be little of the playfulness and blunt candor of, say, HBO’s “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” in which Carmichael, a comedian, arranges for a camera crew to follow him, documenting his infidelities, therapy sessions, breakdowns. When a friend protests that Carmichael seems less interested in the truth than in being “masturbatorially public,” he does not deny it. More often, to sell copies or to justify the necessity of another installment, the writer doubles down on the importance of the new story—she’s finally surfaced the defining trauma, finally seized the defining insight.
But a small, seditious group of serial memoirists complicate the endeavor. Here, one book follows another not as its sequel but as its unmaking. These writers unravel their own stories, enumerate the costs and consequences of the act of narration, with an avid, unsparing eye for distortion and error. In 2000, Emily Fox Gordon published a memoir of her decades of psychiatric care, beginning when she was a teen-ager, called “Mockingbird Years.” Part of a wave of therapy memoirs, including “Prozac Nation” and “Girl, Interrupted,” the book was well received. Ten years later, Gordon renounced it, in “Book of Days.” The first book, she said, was a lie—of a particular kind, a lie forced by the form itself. “Everything that I say happened in my memoir happened, and happened more or less when I said it did: no fact checker could catch me out,” she said. “I wrote from an impossibly posthumous point of view, as if I knew the final truth of my life—as if I were confident that nothing that happened in the future might yet revise it.”
Gordon felt that she could not separate her sense of self from what she had written; she felt ensnared in her own words, stunned into silence: “For two years after Mockingbird Years was published, I struggled to disentangle the triumphant narrative self of my memoir from my necessarily nontriumphant real self. I lost touch with my real past, and consequently lost access to the future; I was unable to live and consequently unable to write.”
They are restless creatures, these books, so often stained with shame. Two new ones join the pack: Jill Ciment’s “Consent” and Édouard Louis’s “Change.” (Louis’s accounts of his life have been published as autobiographical fiction, and he insists that everything he writes is true.) I suspect that the ranks of such books will only grow, with the current mood of rapid reconsideration, of reckonings of individuals and institutions, as we ask how present knowledge inflects the past, and vice versa: What do I call what happened to me? What did I know then, and what am I to do now? What story am I to carry forward?
Beneath the tablecloth, a faint silhouette of a horse’s legs, mid-stride. Behind a copse of trees, children at play. “Pentimento,” from the Italian pentirsi—to repent, change one’s mind—is the term for the ghostly emergence of something painted over, obscured, an error perhaps. With time, the paint fades. Behind the steady calm on a portrait sitter’s face, another expression reveals itself.
Jill Ciment’s new book, “Consent,” is an account of her marriage to the painter Arnold Mesches, told largely through a rereading of her 1996 memoir, “Half a Life.” She traces evidence of pentimento in those pages, looking for what her narration occluded and what the years have made visible, what she is finally able to confront. “What do I call him?” Ciment begins. “My husband? Arnold? I would if the story were about how we met and married, shared meals for forty-five years, raised a puppy, endured illnesses. But if the story is about an older man preying on a teenager, should I call him ‘the artist’ or, better still, ‘the art teacher,’ with all that the word teacher implies?”
Ciment was sixteen years old when they met. She was driving home from school when she noticed a painting hanging in a gallery window. She stopped the car and got out for a better look. “Under a sheen of varnish, a pile of toys—rag dolls, fire trucks, tin soldiers—appeared to be made out of motion and life,” she writes in “Half a Life.” “When I cupped my eye to the window glass to find the source of the painting’s intensity, the toys imploded into sheer pigment.” Whatever that power was, Ciment wanted it. The woman in the gallery mentioned that the painter was her husband. And he gave lessons.
In “Half a Life,” Ciment portrayed herself as a scrappy, sensitive girl trying to escape her hurricane of a home, dominated by a father prone to cruelty and inexplicable compulsive behaviors. Arnold, the art teacher, appears late in the story, an older man, forty-seven years old, whom Ciment, as she tells it, is determined to seduce, never mind his wife and two children.
Ciment and Mesches were married for almost half a century. Ciment turned from art to fiction, writing novels that were often about women married to much older men; Arnold continued to paint. He died in 2016. Ciment has no one to protect now, she writes in “Consent.” She has been stirred by the energy of #MeToo. She dissects her previous memoir, holding it up, part by part, to the light. She pursued lessons with Arnold, and she pursued him. But, at sixteen, was she capable of consent? Was his praise of her talent a form of grooming?
Ciment had considered herself the “sexual aggressor”—was it a false narrative of empowerment? And what of their ensuing years together? “Was my marriage—the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?” she asks in “Consent.”
Ciment scatters questions like confetti, letting them lie where they land. What can language do for her? Words want to fix things in place, and what she seeks to understand feels as if it’s in motion—in the culture, in her own mind. She does not think she was wounded; her marriage was long, happy—but what could she be concealing from herself? She pans for clues in the silences, the omissions in “Half a Life.” In that book, recalling how Mesches left his family and moved in with her, she wrote that they found a rental, a “hillside bungalow,” situated between her college and his studio. “Late at night,” she recalled dreamily, “the ceaseless whoosh of tires sounded like a wave that never reaches shore.”
In reality, as she clarifies in “Consent,” they were house-sitting and were relegated to a five-year-old’s “princess pink” room, complete with a canopied bed draped in purple sequinned gauze. Arnold couldn’t get an erection on the Barbie sheets. “We bought neutral sheets. It didn’t help,” Ciment writes. “The irony of our landing in a pedophile’s daydream was not lost on me. I found it funny, but it troubled him.” She left out those details in her first memoir, just as she did the stories of the pair’s early assignations, the sneaking into and out of squalid motels. Too many shades of Humbert Humbert and Lolita.
She is disturbed, too, by the absence of descriptions of Arnold’s body. She notes that she did not include her early impression of his “middle-aged neck”—“I found it repulsive.” Later, she wonders if she really felt overpowering desire for Arnold, as she professed; if so, “where are the loving descriptions of his body, the object of my mad desire?”
Where are those descriptions? Well, on page 120 of my copy of “Half a Life,” for example. “He wasn’t wearing his usual undershirt and I could see a faint dusting of gray hair around the base of his throat,” she wrote. “He looked ‘lived’ and I wanted him all the more because of it.” Or in a passage about watching him sleep, his eyes “rolling to zones where I yearned to follow. When I caressed him—I couldn’t stop caressing him—my touch became as proprietary as it was tender.” Or in a scene in which she hungrily smells his skin. One doesn’t present these examples to contest Ciment’s point, to call her redescription of these events into question, but to demonstrate the difficulty of her task; as she moves from memoir to memoir, and from one trope (scrappy heroine escapes hardscrabble childhood with wits alone) to another (possible #MeToo story of exploitation), much is revealed and obscured. A different genre, a different set of questions, renders different details inconvenient, irreconcilable.
And so the omissions in “Consent” become revealing—what did she leave out as she revised, and why? To read “Half a Life” is to encounter a simpler, more saintly version of Arnold—not purely because he was being protected but because of the larger story the book includes (one that “Consent” largely avoids), of a family life that was frightening and full of neglect. Her father’s cruelty and unpredictability were so total, so destabilizing, that, as a teen-ager, Ciment once tried to kill him. She strangled him with a leather cord until she was pulled off by her brother. Ciment’s mother would sneak into her daughter’s bed at night to unfurl long confessions about her husband’s poor hygiene, her loneliness, her longing for touch. Her daughter was bent on escape. Fleeing to New York for a time and living in a squat were preferable; posing for nude photographs for revolting men was preferable.
In the new memoir, we wait for Ciment to consider what “consent” might mean, to this teen-ager on the run, who would identify a middle-aged man as a safe harbor, who did not stop to acknowledge what felt distressing in this relationship because she had known little else. But Ciment demurs. “Consent” is trained squarely on her and Arnold, on a story of changing sexual mores. To widen the aperture, to consider what she was running from as well as toward—in effect, to read the books together—would blur the outlines of the story she is telling, one about consent and harm. It would risk indicting others, too, who took advantage or who watched and did nothing. Her mother, for example. “Consent” does not complete or cancel out “Half a Life”; in tracing the evidence of pentimento, it leaves its own traces that tamper and reveal. No one story supplants another, no brushstroke blots out the past.
The serial memoirist haunts her own books. But not all ghosts are like Ciment; not all linger in the hope of clarity, of restitution. Some unravel the story to keep it going—ghosts unsure about their next destination.
Édouard Louis was born in 1992 in the village of Hallencourt, in northern France, into bitter poverty and family dysfunction. At twenty-one, he published an autobiographical novel, “The End of Eddy” (2014), in which he dramatized the violence of his village, the racism, the routine humiliations he endured growing up gay. The title referred to him changing his name, as if to bury the boy he once was.
“The End of Eddy” was an international sensation and a local scandal. Louis reported that his brother travelled to Paris and was looking for him with a baseball bat. His mother went on television to challenge his account. He could no longer return to his village. In a 2017 interview with the Financial Times, he sounded indifferent. He had a new family now, writer friends, famous ones at that. “Anyway,” he said, “I don’t write for maman and papa. I won’t let the conservative ideology of the family stand in the way. What is this, the 18th century?”
Four books followed in rapid succession: “History of Violence” (2016), “Who Killed My Father” (2018), “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations” (2021), and, most recently, “Change,” which was published in 2021 and appeared earlier this year in an English translation by John Lambert. Louis now devoted himself not only to writing for maman and papa but to avenging them. He went from attack to identification; from criticizing his family—their values, their ways—to enveloping them in a silky and surprising pronoun: “us.” “Should I not repeat myself until they listen to us?” he asks in “Who Killed My Father.” “To make them listen to us?”
His father is the monster in “Eddy,” introduced on its second page, his mouth ringed with blood—he had been drinking the still warm blood from a freshly butchered pig. In subsequent books, Louis notes, with admiration, his father’s evolution. He wants to give his mother solace: “I would like for this book—this story of her—to be, in some way, the home in which she might take refuge,” he writes in “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations.”
One begins to suspect that Louis returns so frequently to the scenes of his childhood, to the stories of his parents, not to soften his previous critiques but for the sheer sake of return and the relief it offers. New angles seem like pretext; his pen feels surest on the old terrain, requires it—no matter how extensively and expensively he has transformed himself. In “Change,” he asks, “Need I tell you again how it all started?” We barrel backward again, back to Hallencourt, always to Hallencourt, to the story of how Eddy Bellegueule became Édouard Louis. “At just over twenty I’d changed my first and last names in court, transformed my face, redesigned my hairline, undergone several operations, reinvented the way I moved, walked and talked, and got rid of the northern accent of my childhood.” He recounts finding fame, moving to Barcelona, trying to “give up everything and move to India”—the doleful itinerary of the years when he thought wealth and success would make him happy. He dwells on how wrong he was.
“In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places,” Alice Munro wrote. For Louis, there is such a place, the place where it happened. I’d argue that it is not Hallencourt but that first book, that first set of memories and impressions he captured in “The End of Eddy,” which he rehashes again and again, those scenes which he does not develop or complicate (like Ciment) but continues to haunt. “I’d like to go back,” he writes in “Change,” sounding bewildered. “To the time of smells. To the times when I came home after school to the strong odor of fuel oil in the living room . . . (I’m not nostalgic for poverty, but for smells and images).” His new life seems to give him little creatively; it dulls him. So he stalks his past—waiting, it seems, for the transformation, that intensity of sensation, to happen again. He wants the blank page back.
Who wouldn’t? A memoir is not merely the record of a transformation but the device for one, and the blank page symbolizes its great hope and wager. Is it the lure of renewal that drives the serial memoirist? The writer’s “I” can be a persona, but it can also be a chrysalis, a placeholder for the self in making, the self to come. Lift your hands from the keys, to reconsider, revise, be reborn. Watch the cursor blink back, patient and cautioning: I, I, I. ♦
