Binyavanga Wainaina

is the name of this consummate Kenyan writer, and "“One Day I Will Write About This Place" is the new book. The New York Times Book Review by Alwxandra Fuller gets right to the point:

Harried reader, I’ll save you precious time: skip this review and head directly to the bookstore for Binyavanga Wainaina’s stand-up-and-cheer coming-of-age memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place.” Although written by an East African and set in East and Southern Africa, Wainaina’s book is not just for Afrophiles or lovers of post­colonial literature. This is a book for anyone who still finds the nourishment of a well-­written tale preferable to the empty-­calorie jolt of a celebrity confessional or Swedish mystery.

Wainaina's real life thing is reading. And writing. And this is his memoir. A sample after he drops out of the university to read:

“Over the past year,” he writes, “as I fell away from everything and everybody, I moved out of the campus dorms and into a one-room outhouse. . . . My mattress has sunk in the middle. Books, cigarettes, dirty cups, empty chocolate wrappers and magazines are piled around my horizontal torso, on the floor, all within arm’s reach. If I put my mattress back on the bunk I am too close to the light that streams in from the window, so I use the chipboard bunk as a sort of scribble pad of options: butter, a knife, peanut butter and chutney, empty tins of pilchards, bread, a small television set, many books, matches and a sprawl of candles, all in various stages of undress and disintegration.”

And so the book chronicles Wainaina's unwillingness, which he apparently treats not as his choice, but as his inability to do anything except read. Pause at that point. I did. What, I wonder, would have happened to me all those decades ago if I had made the same choice? And look at the enormous array of reasons, real and imagined, theoretical and economic that arose and made it a "bad choice" to do so. Wainaina apparently didn't have the same issues. And he certainly didn't cave in to them. And the results have been remarkable. Fuller explains:

Wainaina was catapulted into the literary spotlight when his autobiographical novella “Discovering Home” was awarded the 2002 Caine Prize, sometimes called “the African Booker.” The work arose from a long, late-night e-mail to a friend, and it retains an unedited familiarity. “There is a problem,” it begins. “Somebody has locked themselves in the toilet. The upstairs bathroom is locked and Frank has disappeared with the keys. There is a small riot at the door, as drunk women with smudged lipstick and crooked wigs bang on the door."

Wainaina followed up that success with “How to Write About Africa,” a provocative essay that appeared in Granta in 2005. “In your text,” he wrote, “treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.”

That's enough for me. Time to head for Barnes and Noble and get reading.

The Memoir Genre Takes Another Beating

Last night, 60 Minutes ran a piece about inaccuracies in Greg Mortensen's book, Three Cups of Tea. Today, the New York Times reported on the controversy. The memoir genre is taking yet another beating.

What emerges is that those inspiring, charming stories people always tell when they are at a cocktail party or sitting around drinking beer, telling anecdotes and stories from the past, exaggerating, making stuff up, having a great time, making themselves bigger or smaller than they really are, those products of the raconteur's art, they don't work when they are written down and called "memoirs" and are alleged to be 100% factual. There's a big problem. A memoir is supposed to be 100% factual. And the genre absolutely depends on this. If you want to inflate or deflate a story, or make something up, or spin it around, your book should be in the fiction aisle. It shouldn't be called a memoir. This is not a radical proposition.

“It really is the responsibility of the author to write the truth,” said David Black, a literary agent. “If a publisher were to establish a fact-checking department the way a magazine fact checks, given the length of the works and the number of books they are dealing with, it would become very difficult to publish a lot of nonfiction.”

William Zinsser, who is the author of “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past,” said on Sunday that publishers have had a “slippery” standard for accuracy in memoirs.

“I don’t think they much care whether it’s true or not,” Mr. Zinsser said. “To me, the essence of memoir writing is absolute truth because I think everybody gains that way.”

One has to assume that the writer, in this case Greg Mortensen, knows whether what he is saying is completely accurate. There are, of course, people who can't pass this entry level threshold, but I don't think Mortensen is one of them. People who don't know the difference between truth and falsehood definitely should not quit their day jobs to become memoirists. The rest of us presumably know an inaccuracy (a lie, if you will) when we write it down. Supposedly we know it when we tell it, we know when we're being inaccurate.

There is, of course, nothing the matter with making up stories, creating simulacra, telling outrageous lies. I do it all the time in my stories. And so do my characters. They do that because like most humans they tell lies, to themselves, to others, to everyone. Anybody who can write, though, knows whether s/he is writing facts or fiction.

If it's fiction, it should be labeled fiction. That grand dame, memoir, shouldn't have to put up with another beating by somebody whose understanding of the rules is impaired.