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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch by Roxane Gay

03 Apr 2013|

The RumpusWhat do you look for in a memoir? What stands out to you as “good?”

Lidia YuknavitchI look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don’t ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. See what I mean? I also thought of The Lover by Marguerite Duras as a memoir. Most of Carole Maso’s books and Kathy Acker’s novels read as memoirs to me. Paris Spleen by Baudelaire. On the Road by Kerouac. You can see how my memoir turned out different. But of the variety everybody else likes too, Mary Karr seems to be understood as the Gold Standard (I learned that way back from Andrei Codrescu, who told me to cut one-third of COW out…ha), but I like Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, Cool For You by Eileen Myles, Yarn by Kioko Mori, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo better… Hell, I even liked Just Kids by Patti Smith, though the writing wasn’t artful. And of course there’s my comrade-of-the-heart Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which pretty much killed.

Elizabeth ScarboroI agree with Lidia that good memoirs, and I love the way she puts this, “abandon the glory of the self in favor of the possible relation with another.” The memoirs I love best find a way to be deep and wide, even as they are very particular. I need the feeling that the writer isn’t just relaying a story, but is searching to understand it. I’m moved by stories where I can feel the undertow of the writer’s struggle to make sense of what’s happened, to find honest words. A few memoirs I’ve loved are Three Dog Night by Abigail Thomas, Falling Through The Earth by Danielle Trussoni, Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, and The Mercy Papers by my own comrade-of-heart Robin Romm.


To read Roxane Gay’s entire interview, go to The Rumpus.