Memoir, Race & Interiority

Why so few good memoirs explore whiteness

I’m lucky that I get to teach “Sociology and Memoir” to a group of undergrads at Hunter College this semester. The better title for this course would be, “Race and Racism of Interior Worlds,” because what we’re really exploring is this idea of interiority when it comes to race and racism. Here’s the stack of books we’re reading:

Sociology & Memoir Books, Fall 2024

There are a couple of things that makes a memoir readable, according to Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, carnality (or, how the narrator’s senses experience reality) and interiority, “the kingdom the camera never catches.” I love this phrase because it gestures at the way anyone who writes is always competing with Netflix and the vast universe of streaming services that what to capture our attention with visual media. Here’s a longer description from Karr about what interiority is:

Interiority moves us through the magic realms of time and truth, hope and fantasy, memory, feelings, ideas, worries. Emotions you can’t show carnally are told. Whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.

Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with [her]self over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all?

This is why memoir is my favorite genre. Show me that inner struggle, please! And, for someone like me who is always interested in race, show me how you managed the inner struggle of racism, not just how you handled the “gargantuan external enemies” of the Jim Crow era, as in Richard Wright’s memoir, but how you nearly burned down your house and why you killed that kitten (spoiler).

The astute observer (and, probably some far-right trolls) will notice that there are no books by white-raised authors in my stack for the semester. And, there’s a simple reason for that: we generally suck at writing about interiority that grapples with our place as racialized subjects. There is a short list of memoirs by white-raised authors that deal with race and they’re typically either “one-drop” memoirs, in which the narrator has discovered that they are actually a little bit Black (e.g., One Drop, Bliss Broyard; Gregory Williams, Life on the Color Line), or, they’re grievance memoirs (e.g., Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance; White Girl, Clara Silverstein), mean little books meant to settle political scores. There are a couple of exceptions to this, like Mishna Wolff’s I’m Down a lighthearted take on growing up the white daughter of a white father who thought he was Black, and, of course, Mab Segrest’s account in Memoir of a Race Traitor. This is a scant handful of titles in the vast universe of memoirs published over the last several decades.

It’s not that white-raised writers don’t address big, structural issues. They do. They just avoid whiteness. Here’s an example that may help illustrate this point. A couple of weekends ago, I read these two newly released memoirs, The Color of Everything, Cory Richards and Men Have Called Her Crazy, Anna Marie Tendler, both of which deal with mental health and gender. Richards, an extreme sports guy and National Geographic photographer, deals with bipolar disorder while scaling the world’s highest peaks (decidedly no fun). He eventually loses his National Geographic gig for a #MeToo episode in which he grabbed the ass of a co-worker (not cool, obvi). All this forces him to get thoughtful (just a little) about his gender and how masculinity and the awful way we raise boys in this culture may have contributed to his mental health issues and his ass-grabbing tendencies.

Anna Marie Tendler spent some time in a very posh psychiatric facility and shares her reflections about her gender and how femininity and the awful way we raise girls in this culture may have contributed to her stint in the nutter hatch. (This memoir may be most notable for what it doesn’t mention, which is the author’s marriage and divorce from comedian John Mulvaney.)

Both of these books are compelling in their own ways, readable for their carnality and interiority, but I found both of them utterly frustrating for the way they catapult over whiteness. Here’s one passage from Tendler:

“My mom’s rage lived outside her. It could be directed at anyone — a cashier not accepting her coupon at a grocery store, a customer service representative who couldn’t help her over the phone — but it was often directed at her family. She had strict and seemingly arbitrary rules that if broken, even accidentally, could be met with intense, explosive anger. I got in trouble for spilling food on my clothes and for not doing crafts at the correct table. I got in trouble if I broke something, if I cut my Barbie’s hair, if I didn’t want to do something that scare me. ‘I’m an Aries!’ she would claim as justification. ‘Fire energy!’”

To me, this is one of the best descriptions of the interiority of a “Karen” that I’ve ever read. This rage that “lived outside her,” seemingly looking for a target in someone of lower social status (a cashier, a customer service rep) is spot on for the kinds of out-of-nowhere explosions from white women that have circulated via social media. But, for all the talk of gender in the memoir, Tendler isn’t equipped to make this connection because she doesn’t see whiteness.

Thus, Tendler’s memoir, like Richard’s, ends up being a partial story. Both of these are gender-only stories, or gender-and-mental-health stories. But in both of them, there’s something else going on here, too. Race, and specifically whiteness, is part of the story of Tendler’s struggle to find a meaningful life and her mom’s rage and of Richard’s quest to climb the highest mountain peaks while churning through relationships with women he quickly discards.

In 1992, Toni Morrison wrote in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination:

“What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblack who held, resisted, explored or altered those notions.”

I feel like I share this quote all the time, and so be it. Perhaps I’ll get a tattoo of it since I always have to look it up before I put it here.

I just find it remarkable that the field of memoir hasn’t advanced any further than this in the more than thirty years since she wrote these words. Maybe I’ve missed some memoirs that do this work, if so leave a title in the comments.

And, if you’re a white-raised writer who would like to develop the skill of noticing and writing about whiteness, watch this space for an announcement about an online class I’ll be offering with the lovely Minal Hajratwala, on “Writing Whiteness” (to come in spring, 2025).