Memoirs are made of this

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, by Bill Clegg, Jonathan Cape RRP£12.99, 240 pages

A Preparation for Death, by Greg Baxter, Penguin RRP£14.99, 244 pages

Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr, Fourth Estate RRP£8.99, 400 pages

Cakewalk, by Kate Moses, The Dial Press RRP$26, 368 pages

Memoir has traditionally been more subjective and selective than autobiography and, hence, the more artful form. The founding text of the modern literary memoir was probably British poet Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), a book that spawned a genre of family writing and “narrative non-fiction” (Morrison’s useful term). He demonstrated that an “ordinary” background is just as worthy of record as any tale of baroque suffering.

At the other end of the literary scale, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It (1995), a wildly successful story of child abuse in California, kick-started the misery memoir genre with its surreal cruelties and drab prose. The following year brought Angela’s Ashes by the Irish writer Frank McCourt, a more literary take on childhood trauma. It’s interesting and significant that McCourt’s brother Malachy wrote his own memoir angrily rebutting the tales of picturesque poverty. Already the genre was buckling under its own contradictions.

Then came the James Frey affair: the author of the best-selling crash-and-burn memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) was first celebrated then publicly vilified. The most crazily vivid passages in his book turned out to have no basis in truth. If Frey had presented the book as semi-autobiographical fiction, there would have been no scandal. But memoirs were the hottest literary property of the day. It was hard to sell a sensitive debut novel; but even an unknown could shift a well-written memoir.

Gradually the idea of emotional truth being more compelling than factual accuracy began to take hold, and the notion that you have to have achieved something to write a memoir is now as quaint as the idea that you have to have talent to be a celebrity. Today there is still no shortage of writers eager to share their traumas and worst moments, whether it’s established stars opening up about booze or drug binges, or total unknowns trying to make us care about their broken families. Four recent examples, all American, take the ruin-to-redemption template and tackle it in very different ways. The addictions run from cakes to crack to bourbon, while the cures range from Alcoholics Anonymous to Catholicism to writing itself. So do any of them succeed in making their revelations a work of art – or at least a cautionary tale? Do we end up giving a damn?

Of the two debuts, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is an account of a successful literary agent who was also a crack addict; Greg Baxter, author of A Preparation for Death, abuses alcohol. Mary Karr, the American poet and author, is another one-time alcoholic; while the novelist Kate Moses offers up Cakewalk, which details a dysfunctional childhood sweetened by diabetes-threatening levels of sucrose.

Bill Clegg was a high-flying literary agent in New York when he suffered a breakdown in 2005. Those in the know had watched his decline into crack addiction with horror. Outside the industry, his sudden disappearance was mystifying. This stylised, artful memoir tells the story of his lost years, and it is an appropriately literary performance. Hilariously, some critics have castigated Clegg for not being hardcore enough (who knew book reviewers lived life on the edge? I was shocked and disturbed by his story).

Clegg does not flinch from showing himself at his worst, when the drug has leached away all his self-respect, empathy and even personality. After the breakdown, a friend sends a white orchid with a note, signing off, “So much love”, and he comments bleakly: “I ... wonder who it was she thought she knew, who she thought she loved.” Dimly visible through the thick self-involvement is his long-suffering, frequently weeping filmmaker boyfriend, continually lied to and deceived yet on hand, ever hopeful, for each new intervention.

The effect is often grimly comic as Clegg lurches from hotel bathroom to business meeting to cocktail party, always on the lookout for a willing accomplice, some security guard, waiter or taxi driver who will respond to junkie euphemisms, such as “Do you like to party?” or “Let’s hang out.” The farcical episode where Clegg continually tries and fails to catch a flight to Germany where his boyfriend is waiting for him at a film festival is a masterpiece of mistiming and outrageous behaviour. It’s a very privileged form of suffering, though; Clegg’s wealth and status protects him from the ravages of the street. It reminded me of Bad News, Edward St Aubyn’s heavily autobiographical 1992 novel of drug addiction in New York: the same posh hotels, bathroom stalls, paranoia and desperate attempts to cover up and appear normal – even the same eye ailment. No one can match St Aubyn’s marvellous sentence-making, however, and Clegg’s book is flat in comparison. And I’m sure he’d have advised a client to cut the corny and unconvincing flashback sequences to childhood that purport to explain the roots of his problem.

If Clegg seems unattractive, even without the fog of chemicals, the Texan journalist Greg Baxter is positively strange. His publishers recently issued a press release stating that his “startlingly honest memoir” had “cost [him] his job”. For “startlingly honest” one could substitute “remarkably stupid”. In the first few pages he admits that his job in journalism in Dublin is one “I was not qualified for and did not want, yet I remain there today ... I did not want to become a good reporter”. Later he describes his fascination with his boss’s high-heeled shoes and tells her he has sexual fantasies about her. It’s surprising he lasted more than a week.

The blurb on the back stresses the redemptive aspect of the book, presumably in an attempt to make it more saleable: “[Baxter] started teaching evening classes in creative writing – and his life changed utterly.” But although Baxter alludes to this development in his preface, precisely how or why creative writing changed his life for the better is left unclear.

Uncategorisable, shapeless, odd, the book takes the form of a series of barely connected scenes and observations, always interesting page by page but not adding up to very much. Women come and go, beadily anatomised – there’s a lot of sex, including one stomach-churning scene in a taxi where you can only pity the poor driver. Baxter reminded me of Geoff Dyer, only with more porn and less charm. I did wonder whether some of these suspiciously compliant women were fantasies. However peculiar it might seem to write a memoir for your debut, there is no doubt that Baxter is a serious, thoughtful writer, bent on emotional truth and artistry. He has written an unusual, provocative book.

In contrast, creative writing did help save Mary Karr. In Lit, she describes teaching poetry in a “group home for fairly functionally retarded women”. “To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just,” she writes. Lit is a vast, rambling, slangy, self-indulgent but somehow likable book. Karr’s dysfunctional childhood was detailed in her celebrated memoir The Liar’s Club (1995). This follow-up details a doomed marriage with a scion of a wealthy family, a poignant codependent relationship with the unfailingly polite David Foster Wallace, the author who committed suicide in 2008, motherhood and descent into drinking hell, and her journey back into sobriety.

Initially, Karr recovers with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and some of the most affecting pages here deal with the fallen, those who having heard the AA message choose to sink back into a life of degradation. Karr seems to buy the AA line on alcohol unquestioningly, lapping up the “higher power” and the sloganeering. This acceptance paves the way for a twist in the last third of the book, in which Karr heads for the Catholic Church and embarks on a strenuous spiritual path. It’s a surprisingly touching and heartfelt conclusion after the blankness of Bill Clegg and the studied evasion of Greg Baxter.

Novelist Kate Moses’s Cakewalk is a tale of family unhappiness sweetened with sugary treats. Her fine debut novel, Wintering (2003), concerned Sylvia Plath and the writing of her famous poetry collection Ariel. Moses was keen to show the less neurotic side of Plath, particularly her hausfrau aspect in which cooking meals was a creative adjunct to writing. It turns out Moses has more in common with Plath than just a writing gene and a fondness for baking. Born in San Francisco in the early 1960s, but moving around constantly due to her father’s job, Moses found solace in a diet of cupcakes, biscuits, Twinkies, fudge and items more mysterious to non-Americans: Tastykake Krimpets, Coffee Nips, Sno Balls, Ho Hos, Marshmallow Fluff and It’s-its. Food, as Proust observed, triggers potent memories, and Moses intersperses her chapters of themed reminiscence with tooth-aching recipes. Moses’s thwarted, artistic mother expresses her love and creativity by baking. Birthday cakes are her speciality: “The white-capped blue buttercream surf was thick with sharks circling a deserted island. Sunk deep on the sandy beach of coarse raw sugar was a treasure chest my Mom had made of graham crackers stuck together with melted chocolate and filled with sparkling candies ... Lifesavers [candy] crushed with a hammer to look like chunks of semi-precious stone.”

Moses’s bitter, joyless father tells his teenage daughter: “If anyone really knew you, they would despise you.” Her mother, meanwhile, shuts herself up in narcissism and self-deception, becoming increasingly neglectful. As her parents’ marriage unravels, Moses’s sweet tooth intensifies. “No matter how much cake or candy I ate in secret, groaning and prostrate from a Twinkie overdose, I always felt empty.” Just as with Plath, the pressure of staying “sweet” and “nice” leads to a mental crash at college, where Moses spends a semester in the infirmary with severe depression. Tubby in childhood, as an adult she yo-yos up and down in weight, finally stabilising emotionally and physically. And unlike the other three, she gets to keep her drug of choice. It’s a life measured out in cups of all-purpose flour and Demerara sugar.

How emotionally true – or, for that matter factually true – a memoir is can never be assessed by the reader, and is perhaps irrelevant. The ring of truth is more important, and I was convinced and moved in different ways by all four books. It is striking that the two female authors seem less solipsistic, more concerned to put up a presentable front, than the males. It’s as though the women are saying, “I’m just like you” while the men are saying, “I’m cooler than you.” Yet both attitudes, one senses, are traps for the truthful. No matter how merciless the scrutiny, and how dismal the record of failure reads, there remains more than a sliver of ego – or why write a memoir at all?

These books did make me wonder whether there is any functional difference between an autobiographical novel and a memoir, both involving, as they do, clever selection of events and clearly invented passages. It’s hard to believe that any of these authors can remember the exact details of long-ago conversations, complete with facial expressions, verbatim dialogue, notes on the weather and noises off.

But then the distinction between memoir and fiction has never been clear-cut or obvious, and in this instability lies the memoir’s strength. Self and other must constantly be negotiated; it’s the basis of all literature after all. These four books testify to the fundamental human urge for acceptance and understanding, however oblique the route taken. Perhaps Kate Moses’s father was on to something after all, and memoirs are simply an attempt to refute the statement: “If anyone really knew you, they would despise you.”