THE "ME-AUTHORS": A REVIEW
By Alex Good

Since I began writing book reviews three years ago, I've been asked on a couple of occasions to try to add something to my by-line that will give readers a better idea of who I am. Having a Ph. D. and an "interest in popular culture" is, I've been told, a little vague. It is also, I might add, misleading, since I've never considered myself a "culture critic" - a now ubiquitous title that can only mean everything and nothing.

Nevertheless, there aren't a whole lot of alternatives. The work I do outside of reviewing isn't very interesting, and the fact that I have the world's largest collection of bookmarks probably won't excite anyone very much.

More recently, my disinclination to come up with a pocket bio was strengthened by a piece that ran in Maclean's magazine. The column, written by Anthony Wilson-Smith, attacked the rise of what he called the "me-journalists": a tribe of self-absorbed hacks interested mainly in reporting on themselves.

Smith shouldn't be so hard on his profession. Journalists aren't the only ones to blame. The idea that the "Me Decade" ended with the '80s is a patent delusion. Today we have personality radio, celebrity politicians, and confessional TV all contending with the "me-journalists" for media air.

As someone who tends to read too much, I've noticed the spread of the same disease in the world of books. It first hit me about two years ago when I looked through an entire box of hardcover new releases filled with nothing but memoirs and autobiographies of people I had scarcely, if ever, heard of. There's nothing wrong with that, you can learn a lot from people you don't know, but I couldn't help feeling that some of the authors were asking me to play audience to what could only be described as carnivals of self-indulgence.

A case in point was The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White. Now Edmund White, I don't think it would be rude to say, hasn't exactly led the most interesting life. He is a writer, critic, and . . . well that's about it. Nevertheless, The Farewell Symphony was the third volume of an autobiographical trilogy - and over 400 pages at that! Is it any wonder the new Penguin biography series got this guy to write the life of Marcel Proust?

And this is only one pebble in the landslide. The rise of the "me-authors" is a general phenomenon. In some cases it is simply the result of "me-journalists" hoping to gain caste by writing books and, frankly, not knowing much about anything else. But it is hard to fit all of the "me-authors" into a single pigeonhole. Their efforts run from the merely distracting to the offensive and the bizarre.

The most widely publicized, and controversial, recent example has been Edward Morris's Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. A memoir of Edward Morris, his critics counter. For some reason I still can't figure out Morris inflates what would have been a dramatic and insightful 300-page life of Ronald Reagan into a 600-plus page pseudo-novel by injecting a fictitious but obviously autobiographical narrator. The narrator isn't really Edward Morris (Morris wasn't around to be rescued from the Rock River by the handsome lifeguard Dutch), but in the later chapters the two identities merge. And there is an awful lot of him on display.

Of course the personality of the biographer is a live issue in any biography, influencing almost every aspect of interpretation and presentation. All the same, there is something unpleasant about Morris's constantly pushing himself in our face. One gets a sense of the attitude involved most clearly from the pique he displays at those times when the fading Gipper did not seem to know who he was. "How dare you, Mr. President, not recognize me?"

A less egregious Canadian example of the same trend is Modris Ekstein's Walking Since Daybreak. Ekstein's earlier work, the critically acclaimed Rites of Spring, was an excellent introduction to some of the cultural origins of the First World War. In his latest, however, he seems at ease with the "death" of that kind of history writing, and more interested in pursuing "the intimacy not of truth but of experience." The narrative progresses on a parallel track, moving back and forth between his own life story and the story of his ancestors in the Baltic states. It's not without its moments, but it's no Rites of Spring. Eksteins's reflections on history are still fascinating, but now they are only rare gleams shining out of what is, I think by any estimation, a pretty tedious exercise in autobiography. That may sound like a harsh personal judgment, but given the nature of the book I don't see how it can be avoided.

Eksteins, however, is at least a serious writer, and still worth reading. The shallow end of the swimming pool of the self is currently being vacuumed by Mark Kingwell, Canada's most frantic celebrity wannabe. His most recent book is a collection of essays that he introduces by alerting critical readers to several of his "ongoing preoccupations." But this is a sham. There is only one ongoing preoccupation in Kingwell's writing and that is Kingwell. In his magazine pieces and in his books, even in his introduction to what is supposedly "Canada's Century" ("my century," he wistfully concludes, finally unable to separate the public from the personal), this is one young man who simply can't stop talking about himself.

"An intellectual with attitude," the Calgary Herald vapidly proclaims on the cover, unconsciously hitting on the truth. Attitude: the very philosopher's stone of me-writing, capable of transforming the most tired banalities into gold. Is it now too much to ask that our intellectuals actually have some original ideas, or something interesting to say? Kingwell's mission to become everything Marshall McLuhan was, and less, 40 years after the fact is starting to wear very, very thin.

In one of his better moments, T. S. Eliot described the progress of the artist as "a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." The same advice could be applied to most species of writing. The self-disclosure of the "me-authors" is rarely informative, and on the whole tends to be rather dull when it's not just embarrassing (I mean, of course, for the reader).

It is not, however, without its own rationale. Since every biography tells us more about its author than it does about its subject, why not get rid of the tailor's dummy? Since the only real history is subjective, who cares about hopelessly inadequate things like public facts? Since the best novelists base their fictions on life experience, what could be more interesting than the story of my life, told in the first person? The "me-authors" know what you're really interested in.

The psychology behind this cult of exposure, when it isn't just crass self-promotion, comes from the need to assert some kind of identity or self-worth in the crush of anonymity that is the modern media environment. As the importance of family and community declines, we seek to invest our lives with meaning by showing baby pictures and family snapshots to strangers. We think that somebody - it is really a pathetic wish - should care.

It's the spirit of the age, no question about that, but it doesn't make me feel any better about baring my soul, either in a by-line or on-line. Anonymity also has its charms and attractions, ones that are still worth exploring.

Notes:
Essay first published online January 24, 2000.