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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Jim Knipfel has lost almost all his vision, suffered life-threatening seizures, attempted suicide and spent time in a mental hospital. He's also one of the driest, funniest memoirists working today.
Jul 27, 2004 | It's always worth reading someone who can make ordinary events like walking down a dusky city street burst with mystery and menace, or become an amusing corollary for existential doubt. It's that rare quality -- the ability to ignite a reader's interest in intensely personal reflections -- that distinguishes the best personal memoirs, which are by definition subjective and run the risk of floundering amid their own locutions or delving into exaggeration, apologetics or self-pity.
Over the past couple of decades, the memoir has become a familiar staple of American literature. Almost every season one or two books from the lively "I've lived through this!" subcategory draw the sort of media attention that is, unfortunately, more of a testament to the author's wily self-promotion or an unbelievable premise than to the quality of the book.
There's a common cycle that most burgeoning literary genres go through, and the hyperpersonal memoir is no different. Since the late '80s, a seemingly exponential number of writers have been gleefully violating tacit boundaries of taste as though punching through tissue paper, producing a motley catalog of risqué adventures and uncomfortable confessions. Many became underground sensations or the sources of literary gossip, but with the emergence of Oprah and her peers, a new level of fame was possible for the confessional memoirist. Combine that with a creative-writing industry churning out higher and higher numbers of self-conscious graduates every year, and a crush of authors emerged to publish their own stories, like prospectors converging upon a newly discovered gold find. Eventually the genre became so glutted with familiar-sounding stories that the entire genre ended up a limping parody of itself.
Of all the brands of reminiscence -- pained childhood secrets, grimly determined autobiography, the faux-exquisite (and sadly, often exaggerated) reports of sexual excess -- the frequently shrill drinking-drugs-disease-depression beacon is a popular destination. Part of this is because over the years a number of brilliantly wry and moving books have appeared, such as Fred Exley's quasi-fictional "A Fan's Notes," Jim Carroll's "Basketball Diaries," Jerry Stahl's "Permanent Midnight" and, more recently, titles such as Andrew Sheehan's "Chasing the Hawk." But these kinds of memoirs have increasingly become fodder for late-night TV hosts' monologues, the province of sensationalists who traffic in stereotype and Silly Punctuation Gimmicks.
Among all these there's Jim Knipfel, one of our most talented memoirists, who has just published the last book in what he terms "an accidental trilogy." Knipfel is an oddity in that his unadorned writing understates the many horrific incidents he recounts. His first book, "Slackjaw," chronicled his physical deterioration; then he took note of his mental breakdown and incarceration in a mental ward in "Quitting the Nairobi Trio." Now he delves into his soul in "Ruining It for Everybody," which begins with "Whenever I hear the word 'spiritual' I reach for my revolver.'" Knipfel's books aren't the type of easily summarized, life-affirming tales you find on talk shows, though his expert storytelling and sardonic humor make them compelling, sometimes exciting, reading.
Perhaps most impressively, Knipfel somehow avoids the self-pity he'd be within his rights to invoke: He has gradually lost most of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye disease that has left him with a view of the world "kind of like peering through two toilet paper tubes all the time." He also suffered a lesion on his brain that caused seizures and bursts of uncontrollable rage and depression, which prompted numerous suicide attempts that led to intensive care and stays in mental institutions. Yet his books are suffused with such guileless, bracing honesty and such a finely tuned sense of humor that his tale ends up being tragic and funny and memorable all at once.
His previous work has received critical praise from such disparate sources as Thomas Pynchon, who called "Slackjaw" "an extraordinary emotional ride," and Newsweek, which termed him "a master of making art out of illness."
While Knipfel appreciates the recognition, it's an uncomfortable predicament for him. Unlike many authors who double as carnival barkers, Knipfel is an intensely private man, a somewhat unusual paradox for a memoirist and a full-time columnist who has published over 850 columns in his journalism career. (He is currently a staff writer at the New York Press. About his employment, he says, "In general, I find myself a job and do what I do there until I'm asked to leave.")
After taking this interviewer's arm to navigate a dim restaurant that to him represented total darkness, Knipfel talked about his new book, his dislike of readings and the writing scene, and a favorite '70s TV horror show that prompted him to become a journalist.
How is "Ruining It for Everybody" different from your previous two memoirs?
It's the first thing I've written that has a happy ending. Also, I kind of look back at some of the things I was recounting in the first two and assess them with an older set of eyes, after having been through more experience, to kind of look back at these things that I had done that were less than pleasant and begin to reconsider how to deal with the world as I get older and my body continues to break down.
At heart, it's really just another book about a bunch of stuff that happened, but it was later stuff that happened.
