Yesterday I read The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon. (The title is never explained and makes no sense at all). The book jacket should have been enough to warn me away: “We are all so curious.  Hungry for the truth…. how many times a week do you have sex?  What prescription drugs are you on?  Are you happy?  Really happy?”  The truth I hunger for after reading this book is how did this woman, forty-four going on eighteen, get a book contract?  Her book is a not “the story of a woman’s quest to reignite passion, beauty, and mystery” (there is not even the whiff of a match or blow-torch or even Bic lighter-type effort to re-start anything); instead it is a collection of chapters detailing how she compares to other mothers, other families, other lifestyles and hairstyles, and skinnier, fitter (but divorced, she thinks smugly to herself) women.  She asks if her readers are happy not to find out if we are happy but to know how she stacks up against us.  She is betting – and hoping – that we are as lost as she is, wondering “is this all there is?”  No, there is so much more out there but unless she gets her eyeballs out of her belly button, she is going to miss it all.

Not that there is anything wrong with taking a good hard look at yourself to find meaning in your life but Gideon doesn’t do that: her inner-seeking is a competition as well as a seeking of validation (which is why she reminds me of a teenager and not of a grown-up); it is not a questioning of the standards she has been holding herself to all her life but an accounting.  We are all harsh judges of ourselves, and if Gideon had gone beneath the surface of how she stacks up and instead questioned the validity of stacking up, she might have emboldened her readers to question and eradicate, for once and for all, the silly standards of weight and fitness and cooking and cleaning and child-rearing and organic gardening that are sold to us in every magazine, catalog, TV show, and popular movie.  Now that would have made an interesting book.

Gideon does not dig deeper into herself during her memoir; she does not dig at all.  For example, why is it important to her to look younger than her age?  Let’s hear about that.  Why is she so needy of straight hair?  Let’s talk about that.  Why does she have to be first in line at school pick-up?  Answer us truthfully and deeply, Gideon, and you would have us as your audience and we would care.  But instead she sticks to short, snappy sentences, quips really, that add up to a surface appraisal of her life that feels neither genuine nor convincing: she is out to entertain and also to assure herself that she is one of millions who feel just like her.  And there are: her rantings are the kind of stuff women throw around at book group meetings and girls night outs, but there is nothing new here.

The Slippery Year falls within the category of the tepid memoir, a routine reporting of  incidents in life.  If only Gideon could have been funny, like Nora Ephron in her screamingly funny I Feel Bad About My Neck, she could have at least re-ignited laughter (since passion, beauty, and mystery fell by the wayside). The best memoirs I’ve read this year have been Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, and Julia Blackburn’s The Three of Us; those books exposed the authors fully as they used their own exacting intelligence to look hard at life, both from the inside of their own experiences and from the outside, making connections to life all around them. These books showed in very different ways the importance of living fully within the world but defining for oneself what is important (rejecting the standards of others) and knowing oneself (without obsessing).  These books underscore that laughing, learning, loving, working, and really, really seeing the people and landscapes and possibilities all around is the best of what life offers: what we see and what we connect to is what we get and that is plenty. There is a “me” in “memoir” but the best memoirs see the connections – and not the petty comparisons – between the “me” and the rest of the world.