Poised to tell all

I'm interesting! I'm really, really interesting!

Out There by Ellen Barry

Time's winged chariot nearly mowed me down recently when I realized I had reached the age of 26 without a working title for my tell-all memoir. Now, I've done a lot of living -- there was infancy, toddlerhood, late toddlerhood, and elementary school, to name a few particularly memorable episodes -- but I stopped short when I read a recent review in Vanity Fair that raved: "Attention all memoirists under 60 -- put down your pens! Maria Flook has taken home the brass ring with her searing family bio."

I began to feel a teensy bit threatened. For one thing, since Mary Karr launched the literary memoir craze with The Liars' Club, in 1995, the stakes have gone way up; these days, if you want a call-back from a publisher, you have to have the prose skills of a college-level writing instructor and the kind of dysfunction last seen in Flowers in the Attic. Three years ago, Karr could wow the critics with her description of a volatile, colorful family -- something that is, in point of fact, common to many Americans. Now you've got Flook, a teacher of graduate writing seminars at Bennington College, whose memoir uses the same crystalline first-person prose to recount such spectacular events as lap-dancing on a raffle winner at Shriner Night.

I may never have lap-danced for money, and I'm not a college writing instructor, but I can't believe there isn't room in the literary marketplace for certain chapters from my own upbringing, which was, I assure you, very troubled. I have made a complete audit of my personal history and can offer a number of searing episodes suitable for several of today's popular memoir subgenres.

The family secret memoir. Sometimes families keep terrible secrets because admitting them would cause too much pain, and sometimes -- just sometimes -- a brave survivor can come forward and tell the story. In the spirit of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, I present the lyrical Girl, Forgot to Put on the Emergency Brake, in which the author (me) reveals the painful secret that came between her (me) and her father (my father) when, one morning, the family station wagon was found protruding from another person's car at the bottom of the driveway, which had been at a steep, unsafe gradient ever since the family (mine) moved in. What transpired was wildly dysfunctional. Not the author, not her father, and no, not even her father's auto insurance company has ever faced the whole truth about what happened that night. Here's a glimpse into the harrowing depths of this story: that wasn't the only time I forgot to put on the emergency brake. Searing!

The hypothermia memoir. As we learned from Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, America is spellbound by the true ordeals of ordinary people caught in elemental death grips. Although I have never actually had hypothermia, I have experienced remarkable extremes of temperature -- sometimes over long periods of time. For instance, I once lived in an apartment with central heating that got so hot during the winter that my roommate and I were forced to strip down to our brassieres and prepare blender drinks such as frozen mudslides as soon as we walked in the door. Other times it got very cold. Into Brookline Village tells the story of that year, as well as many other occasions when I got very hot or very cold.

The wayward sibling memoir. What happens when one sibling is inexorably swept into a risky social demimonde, and the other sibling is left behind to write a memoir? If you liked Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, or Katie Roiphe's Last Night in Paradise, or Flook's My Sister Life, you'll love My Brother Sold a Pair of Pants to The Edge, in which I tell the (true) story of the day my brother sold a pair of pants to U2's The Edge, although he did not recognize him until someone pointed him out after he had already left the store. He did not pay with a credit card, so my brother could not ascertain whether his card was embossed with "The Edge" or his real name, which is David Evans. They were army pants.

The catastrophic illness memoir. A French gentleman named Jean-Dominique Bauby recently got extremely good reviews for writing a memoir called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which he dictated -- after his brain stem was rendered inactive -- by blinking his left eyelid. Although the book was very short, one enthusiastic reviewer called it "a tender testament to the power of language and love." I'd like to follow in his footsteps with The Bad Salad, in which I recount in fierce and riveting detail a four-day bout of salmonella during which I questioned some of my most basic assumptions about life. I recovered my health several years ago, so there is no way of predicting whether I, like Bauby, will die within weeks of publication, adding a special poignancy to the book's release. But you can't rule it out!

The "lots of free time" memoir. Sometimes, when a writer is accomplished enough, he or she doesn't even need interesting experiences to write a lengthy memoir. Examples of this genre are David Denby's Great Books and Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder. Taking a page from Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust, I'd like to present The Year of Reading Mason and Dixon, which opens on Christmas morning as the author unwraps the extremely long book she has received as a gift from a close relative who has mistaken her for the kind of person who would read such a book, and follows her through the ups and downs of the year she spends attempting to read it out of a sense of familial obligation. Mason and Dixon is less the subject of this charming memoir than its connective tissue, as the author (me) is distracted from her project by charming episodes including several appointments for dental work and one harrowing appearance in traffic court. The charges, by the way, were trumped up.

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.