Kim Explain Things To Me: Memoirs

🗣️ Open the schools!

Wow, what a terrible time to be on the internet. What a disappointment to learn that some of the women you read, respect and follow online can’t differentiate between what bad thing a man did to them and what a woman they don’t know wrote about in her book. It’s still projection if it goes viral. It’s still projection if you squeeze multiple newsletters out of it.

Here’s a fun rhetorical question: when did you stop believing women?

I don’t know anyone personally who participated in the Lindy West discourse, and none of the heavy hitters are going to read this. I’m writing this for us. I’m writing this for normal people who read memoirs and who feel like we just witnessed a multi-week, mass hysteria.

I read memoirs. I have a job where I have to read, review and hand sell books. I write personal essays. I’ve had three of them published. I’ve taken 10+ years of memoir and personal essay writing classes. Perhaps most importantly, I move through the world in a fat body, which allows me to see the myriad ways people are treated based on how far they exist outside the norm.

📚 📚 📚

I have forged a path different from what anyone in my family was able to model for me. When I graduated from college, I left Nashville and moved to NYC. I devoured books about women moving to the big city. It was the closest thing I had to a roadmap. Years later, when my late thirties hit, I needed a different roadmap, one that helped me figure out who I was and how to stay true to that. My therapist pointed me towards Cheryl Strayed, Brene Brown and Liz Gilbert.

I had done a few years of trauma work when Hunger came out, Roxane Gay’s memoir about the trauma she suffered as a child and how she survived it. I was able to take an online class with Roxane about writing trauma in memoir. I don’t remember all the books we read, but I know that’s when I read Heavy by Kiese Laymon, which blew me away. I didn’t know anyone could write like that. I didn’t know you could be that honest.

Sidenote: I was later able to take a writing class with Kiese and meet him at an event in Nashville where I was able to tell him how much his work means to me.

I’m telling you all of this because I need you to know that I’ve read the ancient texts. And I didn’t just read Eat, Pray, Love, or Wild, or I Thought It Was Just Me. I read them in real-time. I read them while they were in the zeitgeist.

Honestly, even though she’s kind of fallen out of favor, a lot of folks could stand to go back and read Brene Brown’s philosophy on criticism:

“If you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.”

I’m going to drill down on this point because it’s important. It’s not brave to post a hot take online. I don’t see the vulnerability in that. To use Brene’s example, you are not offering critique from the arena. You are shouting from the cheap seats.

Criticism is important, but the flip side of criticism is enthusiasm. If you just hate things all the time, you’re a hater, not a critic. There’s also a difference between how you critique fiction and non-fiction. Reviewers who dislike a novel, rarely attack the author. Guys, you can do the same thing for non-fiction! You can critique a memoir without telling the author that she doesn’t know her own life.

📚 📚 📚

I’m a sensitive person, and I’m an empathetic person, which means I am rarely having a good time online. When the Lindy West discourse went into overdrive on Threads, I was like, Wait, didn’t we just do this? Reader, we did. We did it when Liz Gilbert’s memoir All the Way To the River came out in September.

All the Way to the River is Gilbert’s memoir about her relationship with Rayya Elias, who died in 2016, and Gilbert’s subsequent journey through love and sex addiction and 12-step recovery. Prior to its publication date, both The Cut and The New Yorker ran excerpts and reviews that were … not positive. In The New Yorker piece, Jia Tolentino wrote:

“But Gilbert’s most pervasive influence can be found online, in the breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted. On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. ... Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.”

Listen, I’m not a Liz Gilbert apologist. She doesn’t need me to defend her, but the line at the hot take factory was wrapped around the building when these pieces came out. I would love to know how many of those people read her book. I read it and I liked it. I think she did a great public service by pulling the curtain back on codependency and 12-step recovery.

I also read Adult Braces, and I fucking loved it. It’s exactly what I’m looking for when I read a memoir. It’s relatable, it’s honest, it’s vulnerable, it’s funny as hell and it doesn’t pretend that the ending is finished and wrapped in a bow. It’s a real book written by a real person.

I read memoirs because I want to know what almost killed you, but didn’t. I want to know how you survived, or got free. I want to know how that survival changed you - not because I like trauma porn, but because I am still, all these years later, looking for a roadmap.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in therapy is the difference between when someone is doing something to me, versus when someone is doing something that makes me uncomfortable.

The difference is when someone is just doing something that you feel uncomfortable about, you are not the victim of that person’s behavior. That person isn’t doing anything to you. They’re not the bad guy and you’re not the good guy. You’re just two idiots bumping into each other in this stupid world.

A lot of folks online are having a very oversized reaction to these books and these women. These women didn’t do anything to you. You chose to read these books. Obviously, you get to have an opinion about what you read. That’s ultimately good for books and good for the reading community at large. But we are so far past that.

Some of you don’t believe Lindy West is happy in her marriage, and I know this because you’ve posted 20 Threads and three Substacks about it. I also noticed that some of you went back to your “I believe women” roots this week when a Congressman got #MeToo-ed and resigned. So, which is it? Do you believe women or not?

It’s very disorienting and disappointing to watch some of you not see the contradiction.

---

Further reading:

Virginia Sole-Smith wrote a piece called Believe Fat Women Even If You Don’t Like Their Husbands, and in it, she wrote:

“When you shout down a fat woman claiming to be happy and tell her she’s obviously lying it’s because you, yourself, do not believe that fat women can be happy. It’s because you don’t believe anyone wants fat women.”

In a piece called Friends Don’t Let Friends Ignore Their Husband’s Red Flags, Kate Manne wrote:

“But the discourse has reached a pitch and volume that strikes me as, more than anything, an expression of frustration: the frustration of an army of sharp, committed feminists so used to biting our tongues about the red flags in our own neighborhood that the opportunity to go ham on Aham has simply been too tempting.”

You know we’re in trouble when the nice guy who teaches the Barnraisers classes has to weigh in. Garrett Bucks from I don’t have any useful opinions about Lindy West’s marriage, but oh buddy do I have thoughts on caring, however clumsily, for and about strangers:

“They tried, West and her fans. And perhaps the famous writer shouldn’t have been the vessel for so much diasporic trying, but in a nation of lonely islands, that was the one made accessible.”

“This should never be our end point, a cyclical argument about a stranger’s marriage. Telling the famous lady to get divorced will not bring a grand victory for feminism. Neither will critiquing others for doing so, shouting ‘how dare you deny the famous woman her agency.’ But I get it. We’re all trying to care, and to have our care add up to something. And this is the imperfect space we’ve been disproportionally given to do so– logging on, experiencing somebody’s story vicariously, expressing an opinion.”

On Landline, Mary Mahoney wrote about the new Liza Minnelli memoir, which led to this great aside about Lindy’s memoir. From One Nepo Baby, One Memoir, Lots of Mess:

“A trope in the way we talk about memoir is the perceived irony that in revealing themselves to us on the page, a writer actually demonstrates a lack of self-perception. Whether or not this is true, it comes up in recent writing on Lindy West’s memoir and the internet hot takes on her marriage. Whatever you make of her life and choices, her decision to write about them is hers, and the messiness of that may be the point. Maybe she is processing by putting it in writing, and that process is worth more than the product. Or, maybe it reveals a very complicated person who is not yet done navigating a difficult personal chapter. The vulnerability of sharing is part of the strength of memoir, whether or not we agree with the plot.”

---

🫶🏼 I had editing help on this. I won’t name names, but you know who you are. Thank you.

---

ICYMI: I interviewed Lindy West at her Parnassus book tour stop in Nashville.

I Met Lindy West!

---

If you support my work, consider subscribing to the paid Substack plan. It’s $5/mo or $50/year. You can also “buy me a coffee” or subscribe for $2/mo here. A heart or comment goes a long way, too.

---

Note: All of the books I reference can be found in my bookshop.org storefront. Many of my posts contain affiliate links to Bookshop.org and Libro.fm. If you make a purchase through these links, I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.