ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
It's time now for the latest entry in our series Three Books in which authors recommend three books on one theme. Today, three efforts from one much maligned genre: the confessional memoir. Here's author Marion Winik.
MARION WINIK: These days, memoirs are often the target of contempt. A scathing slam in The New York Times Book Review inveighed against over-sharing; and in The New Yorker, the memoirist was likened to a drunken guest at a wedding. But in the right hands, these stories can have unmatched immediacy and redemptive power. To read an author who speaks about the darker parts of experience honestly, beautifully or humorously, this is more than just titillating. It makes the world a less lonely place.
In "The Adderall Diaries," Stephen Elliott mingles the coverage of a San Francisco murder trial to which he was marginally connected with an unpacking of his own troubled past: an abusive dad who may have killed a man himself, a mother he cared for as she died of multiple sclerosis, a series of group homes. With friends overdosing and committing suicide all around him, he found refuge in drugs and violent sex, working as a stripper, a professor and a writer. The matter-of-fact, present-tense narration moves from Elliott's daily life to the unfolding courtroom drama to ruminations on the writing process.
In "A Chronology of Water," Lidia Yuknavitch carries on the transgressions of 80's feminism, gleefully breaking rules about storytelling as she looks for a way to write a book that is not an incest narrative or a recovery memoir or even the autobiography of an Olympic swimming hopeful, but is faithful to a life that has contained all of these elements. From her druggy college days in Lubbock, Texas, through a doomed early marriage and a stillbirth, through promiscuity of many flavors, an apprenticeship with Ken Kesey and a very bad DUI, the author hangs on and is rewarded with an amazingly normal happy ending.
"501 Minutes to Christ" by Poe Ballantine proves that there's still a member of the Beat Generation wandering among us. A ridiculously gifted writer who could tell a good story about nothing, Ballantine has made sure he doesn't have to by spending most of his adult life as an itinerant writer, cook, day laborer, gambler and moral philosopher. In this collection, he hangs out with the homeless in New Orleans and the speed freaks in San Diego, devises a plan to punch John Irving, loses a book contract with a New York publisher, and settles down to raise a family in Nebraska. Ballantine is unflappable, hilarious, and so observant of his fellow men and women that his half-cocked hobo lifestyle cannot be mistaken for anything but a spiritual path.
If you don't want to read about drugs, sex or unconventional lifestyles, you should avoid these memoirs. But if you do, then pick them up. They offer a Wild West of personal revelation, still open to pioneers, adventurers and those looking for gold.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: Marion Winik is the author of "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.