Memoir Memento Mori and More

Who are Memoirs for? The writer or the reader?

This time around for the Why and How Book Project, I’m going to talk about a few books I’ve read recently and the experience, more the why of them and then we will get to the how because of course, this is the why and how book project. 

I’ve been on a memoir kick to wrap up the summer. In a way  I’ve been on one all summer. Lament from Epirus was a memoir of sorts. It focused on Christopher C King’s journey chasing sounds in Greece. That’s from our last episode.

That book inspired my music habits this summer. Sure, I’ve played Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, and 100Gecs on road trips when I needed to stay awake but for the most part I’ve listened to pre war era world music. There’s something about listening to men and women almost completely lost to the dustbin of history save for a name and a piece of shellac and maybe a photograph and now a digitally existing file on an app. I guess those are memoirs of a sort too along the lines of the notion that every piece of art is a kind of memoir.

 The word memoir reminds me of memento mori, the phrase in Latin that means, “remember you must die.” I always thought making art was an attempt at cheating death as in I will make them remember me. This thought is probably as old as cave paintings. 

In Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, she pulls a book on poetry that belonged to her recently deceased husband  off the shelf and comes across a hand written study guide. The first question is  1)What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? The experience? For this book, this memoir, the experience is the sudden death of her husband. I realize where I referred to this as recently deceased that seemed relatively innocuous. I should have said, recently suddenly deceased. He was there talking to her in the living room, she in the kitchen. Then he was gone. That directive, the experience is something I keep thinking about with books. The writing of them, and I think specifically memoirs, is trying to answer a question but the reading of them is trying to answer a question too. 

Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller: Tales of  Life and Music and it filled me with memories of my own life and music experiences. I related to Dave in some ways but mostly I saw where I made entirely different decisions than Dave did. 

Like Dave, I grew up scouring records, listening to everything, and playing along in my room as a teen. I figured out ways to record with two tape decks, playing them to each other. I made my own tapes and shared them with friends. But when I was young I was given the chance to tour in a van and the idea terrified me. Dave jumped in a van at 17 with an established punk rock band, SCREAM. For most of my life, I’ve kicked myself over this but the more I read, the more I spent time in Dave’s story, I realized I never had that story in the cards.

My journey ended up being about books, really. As much as I love music and love listening to it and sometimes even playing it, books really were the thing that changed my life and gave me direction. Funnily enough, I listened to a book on audio by a musician to write this. 

As his stories unfolded I realized I’d never listened to the story of a musician from my age group. This is besides ones that I know.  I grew up dreaming about being in a band because I read about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. Staying in nice hotels? Yes, please. Eating great meals? Sign me up. Wear posh suits and track guitars? Say no more! I didn’t read books about touring in a van, sleeping on floors, and eating Taco Bell one time a day and curbing your appetite with cigarettes for the rest. 

I could relate so much, but then listening to his audacious love of the unknown and adventure I could only shudder and be thankful I was in bed reading at 8:30PM. I wanted to be in bed and reading when I was 23. 

Dave’s book is a charmer. Even if you don’t love the Foo Fighters or Nirvana, the band that he joined that for better or worse was the last band to change the world. My highschool football coach's son was a jock before Nirvana. He was in a band after Nirvana. That’s that. 

Dave’s story about breaking his foot in a stadium and having it held together by a Doctor to finish his gig. His story about a marathon airplane airport jaunt to make his Daddy Daughter Dance. His scooter DUI in Australia are all mementos. Scars, screws, lines on his very permanent record. He remains in love with adventure. I admire the hell out of people like that. 

Next I picked up Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. Wow. I’m not going to try to review any of these books per se. I’m not a good reviewer. I tend to exuberantly like things and I don’t enjoy being critical, except when I do, and then I’m insufferable. “Ask my wife”, as Colombo says. But here we go; Zauner’s book is tart and lovely, somber and at times, wry. Reading Crying in H Mart I thought about the question she was answering and the ones I tried to answer while reading the book. I think her question was why did her mother die in her early 50’s. The other matter is how does she regain what she’s lost in her mother dying? Her mother’s family's heritage and Korean dishes, and ingredients needed to make them offer the closest thing to an answer in the book. How did she approach a memoir? I think she had to, because at some point songs couldn’t contain it all? 

I love food writing. Does all this come from me or from Anthony Bourdain and his memoir? Another memoir. I smack my forehead. Yes,  Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential is why everyone in my age group cares about food as the cynics or the simplifiers would have you believe. I was already interested in other foods before him but he made it seem so damn cool. Not just weird. 

There was a Greek Diner in West Knoxville in front of Pier 1 I worked at that I ate at all the time in 1995. I loved the sounds of the men speaking another language. I loved feeling like I didn’t belong. According to Google Maps Pier 1 is permanently closed and the Diner looks like it’s an Autozone. There was a Mexican Place in Oak Ridge that was my favorite place to eat out in 1987. I loved enchiladas. I loved sopapilla at 10. Perhaps, it's that I enjoy music, books, and food. I enjoy the things that mean life and experience. I enjoy the language of experience of knowing what things are in a Korean BBQ in LA or a Cuban Cafe in Miami.

Reading Zauner’s book,  I wish I had something like that.

Maybe I do? Appalachia? I left East Tennessee 25 years ago. I went to New York for a bit but ended up in Nashville. I never forget being Appalachian. I’m always thinking I’m in trouble. I’m always thinking the alarm will go off when I enter a nice place and that everyone knows I don’t belong. But what about the food? The music? I've been to Sean Brocks’ restaurant Audrey. The fact that I could afford going there makes my Appalachian fears ill founded and mental. However, I can “afford” to eat there in the one time a year sense, not the, “Lovey, what are you craving sense.” Additionally, the roast there tasted just like the one my Dad makes for free. At least free to me. I always wanted to learn to play the banjo but I can never get the hang of it. I wish I could play Dock Boggs songs on Instagram and do #banjotuneoftheweek but I have no patience for it. I always played like an Outsider Artist. The world is like a circus of competence now. I liked to learn enough to get by and then run with the ball. 

Perhaps I could embrace my Appalachianess late in life, live in the middle of nowhere. My wife can preserve stuff. We can be seed savers. Get real twee with being American Gothic looking like we are ready for Halloween. But you know, I’d rather listen to LCD Soundsystem most of the time. I get bored in the woods and I am a beach guy. Somewhere, I lost the mountains.  Maybe a part of me fears the mountains. Like they could grow over me and pull me in a hole. Zauner has H Mart and recipes and an Aunt who helps her reconnect to her place and time. Nashville needs an H Mart. I need a plate of greens and blackened Catfish. Is that Appalachian? 

Now, I’m into Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. I bought this at Books and Books across from Chugs’ Diner in Coconut Grove on one of the best mornings I’ve had this year. Chugs lived up to all the hype. If you know my family we can’t say no to a bookstore, so we finished breakfast and walked to Books and Books. After I picked up the Didio title, I sat at Panther Coffee, next door,, while the wife and kids browsed and I drank a Topo Chico and sweated through a few pages in the heat. The Miami Heat might be the most aptly named team in sports. I mentioned this book at the start of this and the note about experience. Her memoir so far is blisteringly badass. Part fever dream, part pieces of research she did, part her free association. Her free association, how her brain threw things at the wall is my favorite part of her writing. 

One of my favorite books of all time is My Dark Places by James Ellroy. Ellroy’s mother was killed when he was  10 years old. He finds this out when he came home from a weekend with his dad. The cops are in his yard. His dad is a suspect, quickly cleared. If a memoir is to answer a question then  Ellroy’s question he’s trying to answer  is, “Who killed my mother?” I mean, damn, he wins right? 

A biography is deceptively simple? Start at A and go to Z. But that’s not much fun. Rarely are they compelling now. They have to start at G and then go back to A. But then you sort of groan when they go back to A. “Oh no, I have to go through grade school with this person?” Maybe memoirs are just the “good parts” of a biography. This is all we really wanted. It doesn’t take you A-Z. It’s maybe H to M. 

I was in a coffee shop the other day and it’s near The Opryland Hotel. It’s in that strip mall world lost between the late 90’s and now. Forgotten but kept alive by tourists that never make it to lower broad or east nashville. They have a map on the wall and ask you to pin where you are from on it. At this point this game is so cloying and over done but I’m always game when someone earnestly suggests something. The lady said, “Just put the pin wherever you consider home.”
Well, shit. I don’t know. 

That’s memoirs come from. I start telling the lady, “Well, I was born in Georgia but I don’t claim that at all. I grew up around Knoxville, but it’s not home. Nashville, I sort of despise Nashville but I’ve been here forever. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get all existential on you.” She got the look on her face that introverts get when they are going to shut down. 

Why did Michelle Zauner’s mom die in her 50’s?
Why didn't Dave Grohl go home when his band SCREAM imploded in LA? He just hung out for a month! You have to read it. 

How did I get here? 

I was in Fort Pierce standing outside the Kilmer library on a burn hot evening. Fishermen and women. Throwing lines. Homeless men laughing. Someone yelling in Spanish. And someone yelling in French. And way off I could hear a fiddler busking in front of the shrimp bar. They cast and reel. Nothing. Then a small fish. And damn it’s hot and cigarettes and Fanta are on the rock wall. I go back into the library where the wife and kids are looking around and the AC is like another planet. Like I passed through an air lock from space to the space station in a movie. I picked up Bret Easton Ellis' The Shards off the new and notable shelf and sat in a library chair. Padded fabric and wood. Not lovely, not anything. A few pages in and I dig the way it reads but it’s too long and I’ve got to leave soon.