Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

So I listened and learned some things. Another woman wearing a matching sky blue velour sweat suit insisted that anger could be a good thing, a positive thing (she did not say what, if anything, this had to do with the book); a man (he was the only other man there; I thought this near-total absence of men meaningful, even though I couldn’t be certain of what it might mean) in his fifties, wearing a shiny warm-up jacket scarred with multiple zippers and Velcro patches, said that he read the book in one sitting and then immediately went and hugged his father’s gravestone. The man explained that he had hated his father for years for reasons he couldn’t quite remember, and that he had also hated his father for dying on him before they could talk about the hate and the mysterious reasons behind it. “I felt lost, so lost,” the man said, “and it was my father’s fault.” In his resentment the man had let his father’s gravestone fall into something of a ruin. The man said that he hugged the gravestone for a long, long time, just so that his father would know that he loved him and that all was forgiven. “I got all dirty from hugging the gravestone,” the man said, “but I don’t care. It felt good to get dirty.”

“Bring on the dirt,” one of the women said. She was a white woman wearing wide-wale corduroys and penny loafers and she had the most severe of all the severely blunt, sensible haircuts, but she said, “Bring on the dirt,” in a vaguely black-gospel fashion. This clearly gave the lone black woman in the group some pause. The black woman cleared her throat and got up to get some more coffee and left her book on her chair unattended. I made sure no one was looking, then picked up the book. On the front cover was a drawing of a coffee cup, the coffee steaming from inside. The title of the book was Listen. On the back cover was a picture of the author, a benign-looking, bearded man with a long-billed fishing cap, sitting in an Adirondack chair, drinking a cup of coffee. On the inside back cover was a list of topics for discussion, and the number one topic for discussion was “How does this book make you feel about the Human Condition?”

It made me feel good, all right, about the Human Condition and about the women (mostly), too. I hadn’t read the book, of course, but as far as I could tell, neither had anyone else, and besides, that wasn’t what it was there for: the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they’d already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn’t actually read. The confessions made everyone feel better, I could tell, because the café was now filled with their bright, non-book-related chatter. The book had made them happy! This was a revelation to me because I remembered how unhappy reading books had made me back when I read them — they were full of things I didn’t entirely understand and never would, and they made my head hurt. Books had made my parents unhappy, too, even though they professed to love them. My mother, for instance, taught The Scarlet Letter every year, and every year after she read and taught it, she looked miserable and depressed and angry about Hester Prynne and her A and her Dimmesdale, as though she would like to take the book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat it over the head, too. The look on my mother’s face had told me that she was certain that the Human Condition would have been grateful for the beating. Put me out of my misery, would have been the Human Condition’s sentiment, according to my mother.

But that happened only if you read the book, or if you read certain kinds of books. The women (mostly) had put aside the book and were now talking about ordinary, worldly things — money, clothes, food — and they seemed happier now that they’d confessed and unburdened themselves. It wasn’t just that they were happier, either: they seemed lighter, and if it weren’t for gravity I was sure they’d have been floating up somewhere near the ceiling with their cups of coffee. Their voices were optimistic and clear and not at all afraid or weepy anymore; they were the kind of voices that made you forget that there was pain and longing and fear and dishonesty in the world, and for the moment I forgot all those things existed for me, too.

There was only one more matter I needed to clarify. I walked up to the woman who’d said, “Bring on the dirt,” pointed at her copy of Listen, and asked her, “Is this book true?”

“It’s a memoir,” she said.

“OK,” I said, not really sure whether that meant yes, it was true, or no, it wasn’t. The bond analysts had been working on their memoirs in prison, but I hadn’t been sure whether they were true or not, and for that matter the bond analysts never seemed too clear on the distinction, either, and had spent many hours engaged in debates over the relationship between creative license and the literal truth. I knew better than to press the issue further, because when I’d done so with the bond analysts, when I asked them whether they were telling the whole truth in their memoirs or not, they laughed at me as though the question was just another addition to the house of my bumbling. So instead I asked the woman if she liked the memoir.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s so useful,” she said without hesitation.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” I told her, because now I knew the answer to the judge’s question: books were useful, they could produce a direct effect — of course they could. Why else would people read them if they could not? But if that were the case, then why did my mother get rid of her books? Was it that some books were useful and some were not and weren’t doing anyone any good and so why not get rid of them? Clearly my mother had read the wrong books. But I would not make that same mistake.

I took my leave of the women (mostly) and the café and began wandering through the bookstore proper, making my way to the memoir section. It didn’t take too long. The memoir section, it turned out, was the biggest section by far in the whole bookstore and was, in its own way, like the Soviet Union of literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry. On the way there, I passed through the fiction section. I felt sorry for it immediately: it was so small, so neglected and poorly shelved, and I nearly bought a novel out of pity, but the only thing that caught my eye was something titled The Ordinary White Boy. I plucked it off the shelf. After all, I’d been an ordinary white boy once, before the killing and burning, and maybe I could be one again someday, and maybe this book could help me do it, even if it was a novel and not useful, generically speaking. On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York. I opened the novel, which began, “I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York,” and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn’t all that different from the memoir shelf after all, and I decided never again to feel sorry for the fiction section, the way you stopped feeling sorry for Lithuania once it rolled over so easily and started speaking Russian so soon after being annexed.

Anyway, I moved on to the memoir section. After browsing for a while, I knew why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told, so much advice to give, so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves? I flipped through the sexual abuse memoirs, sexual conquest memoirs, sexual inadequacy memoirs, alternative sexual memoirs. I perused travel memoirs, ghostwritten professional athlete memoirs, remorseful hedonist rock star memoirs, twelve-step memoirs, memoirs about reading ( A Reading Life: Book by Book). There were five memoirs by one author, a woman who had written a memoir about her troubled relationship with her famous fiction-writer father; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her mother; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her children; a memoir about her troubled relationship with the bottle; and finally a memoir about her more loving relationship with herself. There were several memoirs about the difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write-a-memoir memoirs: A Memoirist’s Guide to Writing Your Memoir and the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me — without my even having to read them — that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.