1 Introduction

Notes 1 Introduction 1 McCain is the author of two memoirs, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir (2000) and Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him (2003), and so is Obama, who authored Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). 2 In relation to history, explains Klein, “memory increasingly functions as antonym rather than synonym; contrary rather than complement and replacement rather than supplement” (128-9). 3 Julie Rak agrees, writing that in North America, “‘memoir’ is in the process of becoming a byword for autobiography” (305). 4 The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, comprises 700 book reviewers. Before 1983, biography and autobiography were considered “general nonfiction,” and from 1983–2004, autobiography and biography were one award category, separate from nonfiction. In 2005, autobiography was given its own category, separate from both biography and general nonfiction, and in 2006, memoir was added to the category’s title. 5 Timothy Dow Adams’ exhaustive Truth and Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1994) is an excellent source that examines the role of truth and lying in life writing, in which he clearly shows the critical conversation around McCarthy and Hellman, among others. 6 In the first chapter of Living Autobiographically (2008), entitled “Talking about Ourselves: The Rules of the Game,” Paul John Eakin gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the controversy surrounding Frey’s memoir. 7 Leigh Gilmore’s brief examination—a single chapter entitled “There Will Always Be a Mother,” in The Limits of Autobiography—is one of very few examinations of seriality and its implications for life writing. 8 In addition to Smith and Watson, see Winifred Morgan’s essay “Gender- Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass,” or Stephen M. Weissman’s psychoanalytic examination, “Frederick Douglass, Portrait of a Black Militant—A Study in the Family Romance.” 9 My focus and readings stem from the cultural significance of seriality in con- temporary life, rather than on the production of memoirs from the vantage of booksellers and publishing houses. For a savvy analysis of memoir’s place as part of a production cycle, see Julie Rak’s excellent Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013), which centers on the book industry and its power within the marketplace. 10 In her discussion of Persepolis and its publication history, Rak points out some of the implications of marketing and publishing strategies between France and the United States, suggesting that “Satrapi’s transition to a main- stream American market meant that some changes were made to the para- text of the series on order to make the story appeal to this new audience”; 159 160 Notes in particular, she notes that “readers of the 2004 English-language version of Persepolis were not made aware that the book was part of a longer series” (Boom! 165). In her analysis, she examines how the ignorance of the series underscored a particular kind of desire for a Western narrative—the pos- sibility for a “happy ending”—and how Pantheon’s American publication provided such for its readers. That said, she does not explore the seriality of the original publication and the myriad ways in which seriality is deployed in that text beyond the fact that it was initially published in a series. 11 Michel Foucault, in Language, Counter-memory, and Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays (1977), presents counter-memory as one way to challenge dominant discourses, thereby empowering the individual against the larger nation or system of imposed history. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, in their Introduction to a special issue of Representations on memory and counter-memory, write that “whenever memory is invoked, we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context, against what?” (2). Extending the concept of counter-memory to supplementarity, Julie Rak posits that memoir’s existence “works to highlight autobiography’s lack” (“Are Memoirs Autobiography?” 321), presenting a counter-narrative to the positions established in autobiography. 12 For an extensive discussion of memory, see Barbara A. Misztal’s Theories of Social Remembering (2003). 13 See Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979). Recent examinations in media studies also bear out Lyotard’s assertion. Mark Currie suggests that one example of this shift can be seen in the move away from the broadcasting techniques of early television, in which all viewers tuned in to the same programs, to the more recent trend of narrowcasting, which allows viewers to tailor their view- ing habits. Lizabeth Cohen, in her comprehensive study of consumption in the United States following World War II, agrees, explaining that narrowcasting and other kinds of market segmentation allowed interested parties to reinforce social groups but also thereby fragmented the national audience (331). 14 In its oldest forms, documented in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1494, “memoir” means a “note, a memorandum; a record; a brief testimonial or warrant.” 15 Pierre Nora agrees, as he writes that the phrase, “the acceleration of history,” is important because of an “increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear” (7). He continues: The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility. Self-consciousness emerges under the sign of that which has already hap- pened, as the fulfillment of something always already begun. We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. (7) 16 Currie continues, writing that the “quickening cycle of narration and renar- ration reflects the time compression of commercial life in general where the pressure to renew the style of a commodity is part of the process of renewing markets” (101). Notes 161 17 Trauma theorists Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub, as well as life-writing theorists such as Leigh Gilmore and Nancy K. Miller, are also invested in examining the twentieth century as the century of witness. 18 Fictional postmodern narratives also engage some of the features of serial self- representational texts, like the character of Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s novels. While many read Zuckerman as a stand-in for Roth himself, the books are fiction, and Zuckerman is not Roth; however, Zuckerman works as a con- tinuing character, across many texts, and is a figure to whom readers cling. As readers, we are engaged by particular characters and their stories, and we want to follow them in further narratives. This phenomenon is also remarkable in the serialization and sequelization of popular film franchises. 19 For a more in-depth examination of the etymology of “autobiography,” see James Olney’s essay “Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography.” 20 One well-known example involves Guatemalan author Rigoberta Menchú Tum. In 1992, Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her narrative I, Rigoberta Menchú. This text chronicles the Quiché Indian struggle opposing injustices against native people, and was classified in reviews as either an autobiography or a work of testimonio. These generic clas- sifications had serious implications for how readers read, understood, and appreciated Menchú’s story. As Paul John Eakin notes: “Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Rigoberta Menchú, makes front-page news in The New York Times when anthropologist David Stoll accuses her of having stretched the truth in her autobiography, prompting journalists to wonder whether the Nobel selection committee will reconsider its prize award to her” (113). The inter- national scale on which Menchú’s narrative was discussed—and that there was any speculation about reconsidering her Nobel Prize—underscore the significance for delineating multiple approaches to life writing genres and self-representational techniques, many of which are generated from cultur- ally specific understandings of self. 21 Timothy Dow Adams begins Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990), writing: The modern era in autobiographical theory began in 1960 with the publication of Roy Pascal’s now classic Design and Truth in Autobiography. Since then, virtually all autobiographical theorists have arranged their arguments within a complex, interconnected spectrum based on the terms in Pascal’s title. Gilmore calls Pascal’s text a “critical precursor to the renewed interest in autobiography studies” (Mark” 16). 22 In Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson delineate three waves of life writing scholarship: the first wave, the second wave, and the “avant-garde, postcolonial, and postmodern” wave (which they propose begins around the publication of James Olney’s Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, published in 1972). 23 Rak suggests that one of the reasons autobiography studies have elided the genre of memoir is because they have been a form of life writing associated with what [she] term[s] non-professional or non-literary textual production, [have] often stood in for problems 162 Notes that a wide variety of autobiography critics have had with popular writing, and with writing when it is considered as

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