Memoir is a formulaic genre, designed to satisfy our hunger for meaning. A well told memoir reassembles the odd-shaped pieces of human experience and fits them into a neat mosaic, in which every event contributes to the picture. As if to say: See, all of this was part of a larger whole. It meant something. And yet, life is messy and inherently unpredictable. It doesn't conform to narrative archetypes.
Jesse Ball's "Autoportrait" reckons with this problem by discarding meaning-making. In one long, unbroken paragraph, he recounts events from his life as they occur to him. Weighty events butt up against quotidiana. In one passage he lists how many drugs he did at once, only to slide into a childhood account of imitating his brother a few sentences later. The effect of this is to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.
The style here is direct, frank: We learn about unflattering aspects of Ball's personality, such as his "horrendous temper," as well as the great extent to which he includes his mother in his life. We learn of his many surgeries, his aversion to sunlight, and the time he bellyflopped off a cliff in Mallorca. Reading the book is similar to spending all night talking with a friend, as a conversation of such intimacy may mean you learn more than you want.
Ball takes his form from Edouard Levé's book of the same name. In homage, he wrote this book, as Levé did, when he was 39, on the cusp of the traditional marker of middle age. Most people, at that juncture, have the kind of midlife crisis that is the stuff of memoir: affairs, addictions, health problems. Then they write a conventional book about it. Some may criticize Ball's response to Levé, as it isn't wholly original and lacks some of Levé's transgressive power, but perhaps it's best to think of this as one side of a conversation, rather than a monologue. And I, for one, wish more memoir were so honest about its influences.
"Autoportrait" is an antidote to a genre that has become overly codified. To be sure, there are many writers disrupting the memoir form — Billy Ray Belcourt and Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint among them — but often the shortest route to the bestseller list is by following a familiar arc.
Released from the contract of high-stakes tragedy, Ball provides an authentic look at what life is really like and offers the reader a way to encounter life outside the parameters that society, and narrative convention, would impose on it. If everything is equally important, then we must live life moment to moment, as if each portion of our day has the same opportunity for value as any other. Or, as Ball puts it, "the world is horrible; it is also cause for ecstasy."
Steve Woodward is a freelance editor and designer at Woodward Creative and a former senior editor at Graywolf Press.
Autoportrait
By: Jesse Ball
Publisher: Catapult, 144 pages, $20.
