Agonists of the Contemporary Memoir

Abstract

Agonists of the Contemporary Memoir Michael Cohen (bio) "Perhaps I want them to wince." —Nancy Mairs, "On Being a Cripple" There is a group of contemporary writers whose subject is their own suffering. The ones that come to mind most readily are Nancy Mairs, Carolyn Knapp, Marjorie Williams and Andre Dubus. Many writers have a single essay or two that would qualify—Joyce Carol Oates describing her attacks of tachycardia in "Against Nature," for example. Until she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking I would not have included Joan Didion here, though her 1979 essay on migraine headaches, "In Bed," was a classic description and very reassuring to those of us who had been treated to the kinds of responses she describes: the suggestion that a couple of aspirin might be a magical remedy we hadn't thought of, or the supremely condescending, "I'd have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn." But writers such as Mairs and Knapp and Dubus make a subject of their afflictions and return to that subject. I have called them "agonists" because they seem to embody all of the original meanings of the Greek word that came down to us as agony: the struggle, the public contest, the anguish. These writers are performing their struggle with suffering; by writing they make public the pain that is ordinarily invisible and always located within the single self. Three of the group I have mentioned have already lost the struggle and are dead. Nancy Mairs, who survives, is perhaps the best exemplar of the group in her concentration on her own and her family's suffering in her nonfiction writing. [End Page 174] Reading these writers leads me to ask why one reads material that is painful—though the reader's pain is hugely attenuated from that which is described. And the next question is why these writers would want to revisit their pain again by writing about it. As I read I deferred the first question and concentrated on the second, discovering in the process that there are almost as many reasons for writing about suffering as there are writers who do it. Some Proto-agonists It would be a mistake to suppose that the writer's focus on her or his own discomfort is somehow a modern trend. The self as subject necessarily includes the suffering self, as we can find in the work of the first essayist, Michel de Montaigne. He suffered from migraine headaches and from depression, which he fought by writing the Essays: "It was a melancholy humor, and consequently a humor very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which I had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this day-dream of meddling with writing." The remedy seems to have worked. But less tractable than his migraines (which apparently lessened over the years) and his melancholy were the kidney stones that tortured him. He does not often mention his health, but in two essays he gives more space to the topic. Click for larger view View full resolution Michel de Montaigne Montaigne feared kidney stones because they killed his father, he tells us in "Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers." They began around 1578, when Montaigne was forty-five, but after more than a year of the symptoms he was "already growing reconciled to this colicky life" and mused that "I had more fear of them than I have found pain in them." But it is, he conceded, "the worst of all maladies, the most sudden, the most painful," and he found its onset both sudden and severe. In "Of Experience" he talks about what one can expect from the disease: "you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood . . . discharge thick, black, and frightful urine, or have it stopped up by some sharp rough stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your penis." He thinks that his illness may help reconcile him to death: "consider how artfully and gently the stone weans you from life and detaches you from the world. . . . If you...