Word: memoire
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Carroll is best known for Basketball Diaries, his bestselling 1978 memoir recounting his adolescence in the rough-and-tumble Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, which formed the basis of a 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Carroll also ventured into the world of punk music with his 1980 hit single “People Who Died,” immortalized in the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial...
...Despite the recent swarm of pretenders, however, the heavyweight champion of memoir writing is still Indian-born Ved Mehta. Back in 1972, long before memoirs became hip, the 38-year-old Mehta, who had already authored an autobiography in his 20s, got down to composing his memoirs in earnest. Thirty-two years and 11 books later, he has just ended his tale...
...Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period, the last book in Mehta's memoir cycle?collectively called Continents of Exile?concludes the most comprehensive autobiography of the past quarter-century. His topics range from going blind at the age of four to his childhood in Lahore, an education at Oxford, working for the New Yorker, love affairs in India and America, and the trials of house building in Maine. The unifying theme is loss, and the recovery, in unexpected places, of part of what has been lost. Going from his blindness, Mehta adds other privations, such as his bad luck with...
...Letters, the fairy tale takes a turn into darkness. The principal character of this last book is not Mehta himself but his father?fittingly, since the memoir cycle began with Daddyji, a portrait of the elder Mehta. The Red Letters gets going when father and son write a story together. To Mehta's surprise, it becomes one of extramarital infidelity. Eventually it is revealed that the story is an account of an affair that his father had, years ago. He learns of the letters that his father exchanged with his lover. He understands what his father's affair...
...struggles, whether with parents or lovers. Yet the difficulties seem to be overcome too smugly; the books too often end with a complacent cadence that seems to say: "Thus I prevailed over this hardship too. Thus I grew." Perhaps this will always be one of the shortcomings of the memoir: that it takes a superhuman effort on the part of the writer to distance himself from these stories that are, after all, his own life. Continents of Exile, now that is completed, will probably induce other memoir writers to undertake works of corresponding scale and ambition. But it should also...