November 28, 2011
I don’t get myself sometimes. I recently read and reviewed Richard Hell’s Go Now, his 1996 novel(la) about a junkie road trip from Hell. It’s a good read, if you like junkie road trips. Me, I’m not big on them. I have a hard time connecting with junkie characters.
However, Richard Hell and his character Billy aren’t the same person. I know that. I would be disappointed if they were, to be honest: writing your life as fiction is a beginner’s move. It’s a necessary step on the path to being a great novelist/fiction writer. Which means that yes, shoved under a bed somewhere — probably my parents’ house because they hang on to that sort of sentimental stuff — is a book where the main character is an autobiographical version of me.
So… why am I not more eager to read Richard Hell’s memoir? I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp.
Maybe because even the title make me think of Billy. Maybe because in the press release I found, there’s not a lot of information included.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. I’m not sure why I’m so resistant, to be honest. After all, this is what I do. Rock Fiction, Rock Memoir… if it’s about music, it’s what I’m about. Which means at some point, this will cross my threshhold and I’ll read it and… well, we’ll see where we go from there.
Shah Wharton
November 29, 2011 8:36 am
I’m not big on memoirs – they are often self-indulgent (by definition :D) and well, too real-life I guess. I read quite a lot of memoirs by women (survivors of something usually) years back. You know, before they were everywhere on every book shelf. But out of around seven only two were any good. Good, in the sense that I learned something from them or I got into the narrative and forgot I was reading ‘about’ someone real. It was then that I realized, memoir wasn’t for me, if the only way I could get into it was to imagine it was fiction.
Re junkie stories – too close to home with my dear departed Dad. And I worked with drug users too. No intrigue there for me either. 😀
Shah.
http://wordsinsync.blogspot.com/2011/11/life-after-nanowrimo.html