Comments on: Ana Marie Cox on Emily Gould (and me on the future of writing?) http://scrawledinwax.com/2010/04/16/ana-marie-cox-on-emily-gould-and-me-on-the-future-of-writing/ WHERE MODERN THINGS MELT INTO OTHER MODERN THINGS Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:38:29 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: The TFJ http://scrawledinwax.com/2010/04/16/ana-marie-cox-on-emily-gould-and-me-on-the-future-of-writing/#comment-2218 Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:13:31 +0000 http://scrawledinwax.com/?p=1963#comment-2218 Ben Greeman had a conversation with Emily Gould recently about (among other things) memoir, fiction and memory. In it, Greeman called his own fiction, “Memoir that is overpainted until you can’t see, but maybe you can sense, the original image.” I would assume the same thing can be inversely true for memoir.

I have been reading and commenting on Emily Gould’s blog for going on two years, and while I think she is a talented and insightful writer, it is obvious that she is still an incomplete human being. She’s only in her 20s, afterall.

If there is anything overdetermined about her writing, it is in how she introspectively arrives at subjective truth given her limited supply of life-experiences. Many could argue that it is pompous and naive to write a memoir based on your average and ordinary life when you are only a 20-something microcelebrity. Memoirs should be reserved for older people, men and women who have led extraordinary lives, or younger people who have stories that are so dripping with crazy unbelievable details that they simply beg to be told.

Here is the link to the Greeman/Gould chat http://www.smithmag.net/memoirville/2010/06/01/dear-ben-greeman-talks-to-emily-gould-about-writing/

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