Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

The classic problem of the memoir is to tell the truth, yet make it readable. The difficulty is that truth and readability are not entirely compatible. No one, of course, really expects much truth or honesty in the memoirs of great and famous persons. We would all be very surprised if George Bush's memoirs were to be entirely candid in treating the Iran-Contra affair. If they were, we would call them "courageous" and "hardhitting"—but we really do not expect that.

But for the memoirs of relatively ordinary people, the standard is somewhat higher. Honesty and readability: this is a tall order. Two of this year's more promising Texas-based memoirs fall short of the mark, but the flaws of the books are instructive and each book captures, almost in spite of itself, a bit of Texas. Those bits may be of interest to those who know the principals or the milieux.

The existence of Carlton Stowers' The Sins of the Son is testimony to the ironies of life, and this particular irony is exceptionally cruel. Stowers is an Edgar-winning writer of true crime books: this true crime book is about Stowers' son, Anson Stowers, becoming a murderer.

This is at once an enthralling and appalling idea for a book. Stowers quickly confronts what he assumes will be an initial response: that this book is exploitative. Here he has got it quite backwards. Perhaps the books upon which he has made a career, the books about other people's tragedies, were exploitative. But this book, clearly, is his story to tell, if only he will tell it. No one could fault Carlton Stowers had he found this book too painful, too personal, or too difficult to write. But once he undertook to write it, he owed his readers something—and that something he has not produced.

A memorialist owes the reader one kind of truth, the journalist owes another kind. The journalist owes us the kind of truth that comes from interviewing people on all sides of a story, of verifying each statement with another informant, and of researching documents. The memorialist owes us honesty: an introspective kind of truth, a personal and sometimes painful veracity. This book is exceptionally short of either sort of truth.

Here I must admit to one of my illiberal attitudes, namely: I believe in bad kids. In some cases, yes, it is possible to identify environmental causes of kids who have taken a wrong turn in life. But certain kids will go bad no matter how well-nourished and nurtured they are, just as some will turn out well in even the most hostile environments. I wrote that to write this: I do not believe I have found reason to blame Stowers for what his son has become. I blame him only for writing an unbearably dull book.

Through the first fourth of this book we learn next to nothing about Anson, the son who will become a murderer. Finally, on page fifty-nine, Stowers discovers his son, as a result of sniffing paint thinner, carrying on a conversation with a nonexistent dog. It seems Anson has also been using speed and marijuana for some time. Yet in the book, this is the first sign of real trouble—Stowers has offered prior reports of only a couple of very minor, typical boyhood incidents.

If writing as a journalist, Stowers has failed to give us an account of how the son came to start using drugs: when did it happen? where did he get them? how long has it been going on? And if he is writing as a memorialist, Stowers has failed to tell us how it is possible to live in the same house with someone who is using speed and not know he is using speed.

We receive detailed accounts of Stowers' parents, of his first marriage—occasioned by an unplanned pregnancy which did indeed turn out to be the murderer—and of his career as a writer, but we have no idea who his son is until the moment of the conversation with the nonexistent dog. And that is all we learn. If this book is not journalism, we are not owed an account of who Anson is in reality; but if it is a memoir, we should know, at the very least, who Stowers thinks his son is.

Naturally, we conclude that the father-son relationship was quite distant, perhaps even alienated. But that is itself information we ought to get directly. Did Stowers and his son never talk about anything? Did they never do anything together? If Stowers does not remember anything, has he asked Anson what he remembers? I call attention to these omissions not as the failings of the author as a father—but as the failing of the father as an author.

Stowers initially describes himself himself as a "jock's jock," and hints at the opinion that his son might have avoided drugs and his other problems if only he had pursued athletics. But Stowers has been a sports reporter, and he must know that a career in sports is hardly a way to avoid exposure to drugs. Did he attempt to interest the son in sports? Was this the cause of some disagreement between them?

After the paint-sniffing Anson's father-troubling episodes go from bad to worse, although "episodes" is too elegant a word for Stowers' news-summary accounts of them. We have no evidence that Stowers had any foresight, and we get from him neither hindsight nor insight. Stowers interviewed Anson for the book, but the only visible result is an account of Anson's movements in the few hours before he sticks an ice pick into his ex-wife's ear. The murder itself might have been a climatic moment—if only we knew who these people were, or what they meant to Stowers. Either Stowers does not know who he thinks these people, including himself, are—or he will not tell us. In either event, Sins of the Son is an account of last week's drive-by shooting: surely a tragedy to those involved, but meaningless to everyone else.

The places visited here are Abilene, Comfort, and Austin—all briefly—and various mostly suburban places around Dallas.

After a memoir so sparing of the truth, Mother and Son seems refreshingly rich in it. This is the story of a preppie mama's boy in a family which very nearly turns into the Brady Bunch—or at least what the Brady Bunch might have been if they lived rather near River Oaks, shopped at the Rice Food Market, and attended St. John's (for Dallasites and others who do not recognize these references, the setting is the wealthiest neighborhoods of Houston).

As the memoir opens, Michael and his brothers are returning from camp, and mama is trying to break the news that while they were away daddy has moved out. Daddy's abrupt departure clears the way for a second husband, with three children of his own, bringing the total to eight—and even the Brady Bunch will be surpassed because in addition to his three and her five, there will be one of ours.

As Sledge recalls it, he was especially precocious at matchmaking, interior design, and women's—well at least his mother's—fashions. He is also a fairly snotty, upscale twerp who seems think his book will not be complete until we know that sometime in the past his father drove a Jaguar into a ditch. Treated with some humor, Sledge's opinions of himself might be more palatable. I hope no one will consider me a spoiler if I point out that it takes Sledge a mere three hundred and sixteen pages before he comes out, to mama. For mother and son, a climatic moment this may have been—but the reader is approximately one hundred and fifty pages past caring.

Intellectually, I suppose I must agree that preppies are human beings. They must have emotions and needs and desires both sated and unfulfilled, and there must be some sources of human drama in a preppie life. Theoretically, I am sure that is true. Unfortunately it cannot be demonstrate by Sledge's book. Much as Stowers, in Sins of the Son, comes across as detached and unfeeling, Sledge in Mother and Son comes across as vapid. The difference is that somewhere in Sledge's one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-word manuscript is a good sixty-five-thousand-word book. Stowers conceals himself in his terseness; Sledge conceals himself in his logorrhea.

Nothing else is so hard to write as the truth, and this is so whether the truth seems pleasant or not. Literature is a linear form. Reality is irreducibly nonlinear. Moreover, reality is so rich that, even in several volumes, no writer can hope to capture the whole of the reality of even a single moment. Anything like absolute truth or even total honesty is impossible.

But this only means that at some point the writer must accept the responsibility for his work. The memorialist, in particular, cannot help but be selective. As no one can write the whole truth, the memorialist must attempt to convey the truth while telling less than the whole of it, and must accept the responsibility for doing so. Having gone thus far, the memorialist must go one step further, and make the result readable: he must apply the techniques of fiction to the nonfictional material.

It seems difficult for some authors to understand that who they know as people, readers will encounter as characters. Failure to appreciate this inevitable fact accounts for most of the flaws in both Stower's and Sledge's book. Sledge, for example, must introduce his father, his mother, his four siblings, several suitors of his mother, her second husband, three step-siblings, one half-sibling, and various neighborhood children of varying significance. This would be a daunting task for a novelist, who can draw any character the plot may require. For the memorialist, confined by the facts, it may seem well nigh impossible.

But it isn't. People cannot go onto paper and remain people unless they become characters. This does not mean, of course, taking liberties with the facts. But it does mean arranging the facts so that a character results. It means, for example, describing a character peg—a distinctive and memorable feature—and then hanging enough facts on the peg that the next time the character is mentioned the reader has some chance of knowing who the character is. Sledge gives us plenty of facts about his people—his characters—but the facts come out as they would in a not-too-interesting diary. Unlike Stowers, Sledge does not have a very remarkable story to tell, and if he cannot make us see that his people are interesting he hasn't much else with which to attract us; certainly he has not offered us humor or a refreshing way of expressing himself.

Any memoir must come down to being about "me." Sad to say, most "me"s are unspeakably dull most of the time. No one is ever going to find me as endlessly fascinating as I do—this ought to go without saying, but evidently not enough people have said it to enough memorialists. Yet it is just as true that no drama could succeed if there were not something dramatic, something to vibrate sympathetically, in the lives of the audience; not many stand-up comedy routines could draw a giggle, if there wasn't humor in the lives of the "me's" in the audience as much as in the life of "me" the performer. The art is in striking the appropriate sympathetic note, in such a way that it is not immediately damped by the minutiae and dull trivialities. It is the art, not the value of the experiences of the lives, that puts one person upon the stage, and the others seated before it.