Our last class raised provocative questions about life writing and its readers. Is the very act of reading relational? The conversation pointed to the ambiguous tensions that life narratives generate: what factors facilitate familiarity or distance between reader and text? What are the politics of making a story “easily” translatable to a general audience? How do various social locations shape or limit this? With this in mind I want to recommend Nancy K. Miller’s But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives, a classic text which addresses some of these issues as central to the genre of life writing itself.[1]

In the preface, Miller offers a blueprint for her book: part autobiographical account, part “collective memoir” of second-wave feminism, and part critical reflection on life narrative as writing and reading practice. She writes of the theoretical premise: “I explore two propositions: the first, that the subjects of life writing (memoir, diary, essay, confession) are as much others as ourselves; the second that reading the lives of other people with whom we do not identify has as much to tell us (if not more) about our lives as the lives which we do.”[2] Miller contends that life writing is not an isolated or self-centered practice, but instead hinges on a connection between reader and text. She states, “…the genre of memoir is not a terminal ‘moi-ism’ (as it’s been called), but, rather, a rendez-vous with others. Put another way, it takes two to perform an autobiographical act—in reading as in writing.”[3] Miller is challenging the popular criticism that the “memoir boom” simply grew out of our modern cultural preoccupation with narcissism and confessional spectacle. In contrast, she offers a more sustaining description of the genre: “Memoir is the most generous of modern genres. Indeed, the point of memoir—when it succeeds—is to keep alive the notion that experience is a form of art and that remembering is a guide to living.”[4]

Miller combines personal and critical writing to explore the unique way that contemporary memoir functions as “the record of an experience in search of community.”[5] At the outset she promises to recount sketches from her own life, yet the book is simultaneously “organized by a plot not about me.”[6] Her structure reveals the titular paradox: we seek out “other people’s lives” for what they reveal about our own. Memoirs do important cultural work because personal narratives are always implicated in a larger story or history. In this sense, autobiography or memoir can serve as a contact point between “individual and collective” stories, or the shared remembrances that constitute “the bigger picture of cultural memory.”[7] They can act as “a prosthesis or aid to memory” that prompts a reader to revisit her own past.[8]

Each chapter is an exercise in the collaborative potential of memoir. In the spirit of invitation, Miller asks: “What do my memories call up for you?”[9]The answer is, of course, dependent on the reader, clearly ambiguous, and often unexpected. Miller explores themes of female rebellion, generations, authority, nostalgia, aging, and more. Her model of “collective memoir” works to unhinge the idea that identity is fixed. She writes: “Are there models of relation that escape those of hierarchy or aggression between ego and others? Yes. But they require a constant reminder of reciprocal dependency, the porousness and vulnerability of personal boundaries.”[10] Miller poses integral questions about the process of reading another’s story against our own. What are the points when a cultural moment becomes “my story too”?[11] Why is “reconstructing” the past always a limited project? How does the “autobiographical act” reveal the instability of self/other boundaries?[12] For Miller, the unpredictable exchanges that life narratives explicitly invite is the most salient feature of the genre. Her book makes this connective quality tangible.