My Struggle With Memoirs: - Review by Sean Contris

My Struggle With Memoirs:

Or brief reviews of Billie Holliday’s “Lady Sings The Blues” Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” and my first impressions of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.”

Despite being the most densely populated place in all of North America, New York city sure can make an innocent tourist feel mighty lonesome. I’m probably just lonely, but I can’t help but feel that my need for interaction is not being met by the local population and this has left me feeling kind of empty. Perhaps it’s this longing that has lead me down the road of exclusively reading other people’s autobiographies for the past three weeks. In the past two days I finished learning every detail about the life of legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday through her autobiography “Lady Sings The Blues.” Following that I immediately picked up the memoirs of the not so legendary but respected New York artist, Joe Brainard titled “I Remember.” Now as I sit here typing this, I find it difficult not to pick up my copy of book one of literary current it book, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” So what’s the deal with memoirs? Well unfortunately I can’t really tie any of them together, so I figured I might as well just talk about them all individually.

First up was Billie Holiday’s autobiography “Lady Sings The Blues.” Written as a collaboration between Holiday herself and writer William Dufty, “Lady Sings The Blues” examines the life of one of jazz's greatest vocalists from her birth until about, five years before her death at the age of forty four. While Duffy did ghostwrite the majority of the novel, what one finds here is unquestionably Lady’s own words and her own voice. She tells her life story with a direct bluntness that apparently, was quite controversial at the time, and even had to be censored due to the good Lady’s unlady like language. Holiday recollects in varying degrees of detail her entire life story; from her troubled childhood working as a call girl in a Brooklyn based brothel to hear the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, all the way to her run ins with the law and her struggles with drug addiction. Lady whose legacy is so immense that to add anything to it feels like throwing words into a whirlpool and watching them vanish into a vacuum of nothing, is already beyond discussing in terms of her musical ability. Though I must say I prefer the voices of Sarah Vaughn and Nina Simone to that of Holiday’s (a damnable sin in the world of jazz.) With all of that said one of the key things that I believe one can take away from reading Lady’s autobiography is the nature of which she can be considered a tragic figure. Because of the nature of her death (addiction mixed with a lifetime of poor health decisions) Holiday has taken on the image of a tragic figure, but I think to focus on how she died is a great disservice to the real reason why we should think of the great jazz singer as a tragic figure. Holiday’s blunt descriptions of her brutal struggles with racism, class, and a non-understanding judicial system are not only startlingly universal to the underprivileged in society, but continues to be just as profound and as upsetting in a modern context. Holiday’s struggles and hardships directly contributed to her style of emotional singing that allowed her for to the voice that so many were able to, and continue to identify with.

Next I decided to pick up a copy of Joe Brainard’s unique memoir “I Remember.” A brief highly original mesh of poem, novel and autobiography, “I Remember” features Brainard recalling his childhood in the 1940s and 50s beginning every brief section of memory with the words “I remember.” The book is charming, funny and at times moving with a particular emphasis placed on Brainard’s identity as a queer man. Part of what makes “I Remember” so likeable is the way in which it is written. It’s charming style of prose is extraordinarily natural but can still cross the threshold into sounding poetic. There’s a certain childlike innocence to this book, and let’s be real here, it’s just such a brilliant concept that it’s a miracle that no one had thought of it before.

As I said, this review has probably taken me longer to write simply because I am currently entrapped in the world’s current literary sensation, book one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic autobiography “My Struggle.” Though I have gone through 60 pages of the books 4’600, I shall be like any great critic and simply pretend to know what I’m talking about even if I don’t. Thus far, I can only seem to think that Knausgaard is a magician, the 60 pages I have gone through were done in a single sitting, desperately trying to fend off this writing assignment. I sat there thinking to myself just one more page, another sentence, just keep going. This thought was typically followed by me saying to myself “yes strange Norwegian man tell me more about your children that I will never meet and don’t give two cares about.” Yet I still can’t figure just what it is about this book that makes it so absorbing. Ill probably report back in the year that it will likely take me to finish all six volumes of the rather poorly named “My Struggle.”