Coping Via Memoirs

            Press the ON button and you’ll see flesh and bones hanging from invisible string atop a gondola with Venetian merchants in the background. Or maybe you’ll come across twenty-something human beings screaming obscenities because living together, contrary to popular belief, is not easy. The again, you might even be grazed with Emeril Lagasse judging sixteen plates of abnormally sophisticated and gourmet food prepared just twenty minutes ago by frazzled contestants in Top Chef. No matter the topic, we are drawn to those documentations of the human condition. Because reality is fascinating and that vicarious part of us relishes shitty television that supposedly offers the satisfaction of those needs.

            This reality exposed through writing, art, or a video camera, can be seen in a certain Michael Kimball’s postcards. He writes people’s lives on the back of postcards. He doesn’t even have to beg or even dig to urge people’s disclosure and liberty with their feelings. “Over the past year, more and more people have contacted Kimball, telling him about themselves. Something about email communication, and the fact that he is a stranger, makes them very open,” says Kate Salter, who wrote about Michael in The Guardian. There’s something about disclosing certain personal secrets or actions to people we know, people close to us, that makes us cringe. Because, for some reason, knowing them makes them realer somehow, more able to judge us. In divulging our lives to a stranger, it’s almost innocuous, and painless. In a way, Kimball is enacting his own type of nonfiction, his documentation of varying memoirs. And people enjoy it.

            The thing about memoirs, though, is that they are wrapped too tightly in the constraining box of guidelines. A memoir, by definition, is an account of a personal experience. And so everyone is set on believing that every single detail has to be a fact because that is the genre that classifies the piece, ergo it should represent it correctly. But “ the memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over the questions regarding the memoir's relation to the "facts" and "truth."” Because the human mind, the human memory, is so that it can’t fully hold every single moment, detail by detail, thought by thought, color or temperature, texture or sound. It just can’t. And to expect a memoir to be full facts is just stupid, because it is humanely impossible. When people write lyric poems and express themselves, we don’t question if whatever they’re saying really happened and read on with a critical and cynical mind. “We accept the honest and probably inevitable mixture of mind and spirit.”  And we accept this because history has brought us to understand the sophistication of the lyric poem infused with the poetry of words and the human mind, not just events. Memoirs, on the other hand, are expected to be crisp facts tied together on ink because it doesn’t have that same history as the lyric poem. Reality already happened. Someone’s retelling of reality is already not real. So people should just chill. ---Unless, of course, the author crafts a completely new event that clearly didn’t happen---. In that case, judge away.

            In a way though, by writing people’s memoirs, Kimball is composing a whole essay whose argument is the human need to communicate, to redeem oneself via words, to express. A lot of the people who participate in the postcard project “are claiming - or reclaiming - themselves.” They’re not just doing it to pass the moment or do something strange. Kimball said that he’s “heard about people being in jail, about suicide attempts, about communicating with aliens, about terrible things they have done.” This in itself demonstrates the people participating in the project, people with baggage, with hard lives and events that have probably affected them greatly. And maybe, for them, the postcard project is a relief, a type of redemption. And Kimball is demonstrating this idea of people wanting to cleanse themselves via ink disclosure: “In essays, ideas are the protagonists.” In doing this project, Kimball is contemplating, whether consciously or not, the human need to communicate and redeem. “Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. Only inner space–interesting, active, significant–can conceive the contemplative essay. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self.” Kimball is exploring all of this.