Until recently, there was only one memoir, that isn’t even a memoir, I truly loved—an essay by Cheryl Strayed called The Love of My Life which originally appeared in The Sun. I read that essay often because it is unbearably intimate, the writing is impeccable, and the essay, the memoir, the writing speaks to something greater than the story being told.

I don’t read a lot of memoir which is kind of strange because I am nosy. I love reading personal blogs and I’m fairly obsessed with reality TV where I can witness unbearably intimate moments in people’s lives even if they (and I) are fully aware the subjects are choosing which intimate moments to expose. Memoir is much the same way. Like reality TV, a memoir doesn’t provide the reader with unfettered access to a writer’s life. That access is measured; it is controlled. We may learn private, intimate things about someone’s life but only because they want us to know those things. There’s a deceptive quality to the honesty of memoir.

Even though I find similarities between memoirs and one of my favorite indulgences, I have long stayed away from reading memoirs because I haven’t quite understood what compels people to divulge their secrets.  It’s one thing to dress the truth up as fiction, but to share the truth as truth is another matter entirely, one that confounds me.

I have no idea how to review a memoir because you’re not only reviewing the writing or how someone conveys their recollections of some aspect of their life, you’re also, in some ways reviewing the life lived. That makes me uncomfortable. Who am I to judge? Who am I to traipse through a writer’s memories. They’ve chosen to expose themselves, yes, but have they chosen to have that exposure dissected?

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During the great de-acceptance debacle of 2010 wherein Lorin Stein, the new editor of The Paris Review declined to publish a selection of previously accepted poetry, one of the tangents to the discussion, for me, was the nagging sense that we were all engaged in a fascinating, vigorous discussion about a magazine only a fraction of us actually read. If we, broadly speaking, were going to dissect the editorial decisions being made at a given magazine, I felt we should probably have a greater stake in the discussion than to simply say, “We are all writers; this affects us.” I can only speak for myself but The Paris Review was not on my regular reading rotation. I own that.

The Paris Review is big and as a side note, the spine margin is wide enough to keep the magazine readable (they heard you, Blake).  The Paris Review is expensive. I was pretty angry about the price, not for the magazine, but for shipping. $5.95? Really? The  shipping is a touch less than half the price of the magazine. I’m cheap. They’re rich. It’s one thing for a tiny magazine to charge $5.95 but can’t TPR break us off a little something? It was frustrating. Yes, I devote mental energy to these sorts of things. The cover design is fine—it doesn’t rock my world but I don’t need it to. There’s a certain elegance and familiarity to the design—a patrician quality evoking visions of speaking in hushed tones in libraries with leather chairs and men smoking pipes. The interior design is, well, pretty terrible, but nobody’s perfect and there’s something to be said for a magazine that lets the writing do the talking instead of throwing their ability to use InDesign and Photoshop in your face at every opportunity. I had a good laugh when I saw a full color Chanel and Richard Anderson. In the Chanel ad, a barely pubescent girl with extremely dark eye makeup stares at you sullenly like she’s channeling Kristen Stewart or Taylor Momsen. The ads let you know, “Look—this magazine is for the wealthy or those who aspire to wealth.”

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