I have been stymied in my efforts to craft a memoir. Here is my problem: there is absolutely nothing interesting about me. So the news this week about authors James Frey and J.T. Leroy has me dancing on air. Frey, it turns out, just makes things up and says they're true; "true" things that got him selected by Oprah's book club. But J.T. Leroy tops him. Not only were the sordid details of his life faked, J.T. Leroy himself doesn't exist but is the pen name of a married San Francisco woman who, unlike her fictional alter-ego, was not a truck stop male prostitute. It turns out Frey and "Leroy" are as boring as I am!
I recently read an article in the New York Times that made me very jealous. It was by a Caucasian woman who adopted an African-American baby. She detailed her struggles in raising a child of a different race and the myriad rewards that resulted from her willingness to grapple with something so potentially fraught. I wish I could write a piece like that but, like me, my children are white. And worse, they are not adopted. If one of them were a criminal, or a prodigy, perhaps there would be something around which to construct a memoir. But I'll be honest, as far as memoir material goes, my kids have been a great disappointment.
As a family, we are not on the edge. We are in the middle. As a middle class white guy, I am in the very middle of the middle. If I didn't make my living as a screenwriter, a job many people mistakenly consider interesting, there would be nothing remotely compelling about me (and since I live in Los Angeles, where if you throw an orange you will hit ten of us, there actually is nothing remotely compelling about me).
I am a man who has sex with women (okay, woman - singular, if you must know - specifically my wife, who is, incidentally, the only wife I've ever had, leaving me entirely devoid of ex-spouses about whom I could rail against in a memoir). That eliminates the gay card. If I were a gay man adopting a child, I could write a memoir. The child wouldn't even have to be of a different race. My heterosexuality has hamstrung me although it has not held others back. If I was, say, a performer of protean sexual feats, a la Ron Jeremy, I could write a memoir about my sexual escapades (where is the Ron Jeremy memoir, by the way? Memo to Judith Regan: call him). But I am a garden variety, married male who is not a former porn star. I wish I was a former porn star so I could write a memoir about it.
My childhood in suburban New York was so ordinary that I nearly became a lawyer. My father did not beat me, molest me, or take me to a commune and leave me in the care of hippies. Neither did my mother, although she showed an interest in paddle tennis that bordered on the obsessive, just not to the point that it was memoir material. I wish I had terrible parents since they make for such excellent memoirs.
I attended a four year college in New England where I did the things one usually does in college. I thought about taking time off and traveling around the world, learning new languages, and having dangerous adventures in exotic places. But I didn't. Instead, I graduated and went to work at the New York Daily News. There I met Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Liz Smith. They were columnists at the time and all were pleasant to deal with, although Ms. Smith did not make eye contact with me the time I came to her apartment to pick up her copy. I wish I could write a raffish book about my exploits with famous New York journalists but, to be honest, I encountered each of them only one time. Breslin laughed when I called him "Mr. Breslin". He preferred to be called "Jimmy". It's a cute detail, but hardly worthy of a memoir. I wish I got drunk with these people night after night because then I could put those stories in a book. I wish I used to have a drinking problem.
I did some drinking when I was younger, but it was always moderate. If I had only known I was going to want to write a memoir, I would have partied like William Burroughs! Recently, I appeared on a panel with an author known to be a former heroin addict. He informed the audience, who were hanging on his every word because of his ex-junkie gravitas, that he is contractually obligated to mention his former heroin addiction at least once in the course of every public appearance. It was a joke, but, really, it wasn't. He has gotten a lot of mileage out of smack and, not coincidentally, a memoir. I wish I had been an addict.
Because I have written for both television and movies, I have had the opportunity to meet a number of celebrities. I also met Johnny Haymer, the man who played the bad comic in "Annie Hall" who wants Woody Allen to write gags for him. Johnny Haymer was less dull than all the celebrities, most of whom were soporific. But does anyone want to read my book-length reflections on Johnny Haymer? Paul Theroux wrote a highly unusual memoir about his tortured relationship with V.S. Naipaul. I had a meeting with Robert De Niro once. I wish he was as interesting as V.S. Naipaul, and that we had more than one meeting. Perhaps then our relationship would be tortured, too, and I could write about it.
Because of my vast lack of experience, I had concluded the memoir genre is not for me. It is for this reason I wrote a novel. At least there you're allowed to make things up. But now that I know you can write a memoir the same way, I'm reconsidering.