I grew up at a time of sharp gender distinctions, but as a young intellectual I mostly kept out of the fray. For example, failing out of contact sports didn’t bother me. I did try a few other things I consider manly, like constructing a small rustic end table from lumber. And I changed the oil on my car a few times, and even changed the brake pads once. But the male stereotype I adhered to most ferociously was the shallowness of my interest in girly emotions.
I was curious about those exotic creatures, of course, who clearly had about a thousand times more insight into style and emotion in one day than I had in a year, but I never expected to find a pathway that would enable me to feel their feelings.
Looking back on it, I can see how my ignorance was supported by the reading material of the day. Throughout my youth in the sixties, Huck Finn, Great Expectations, the Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Alan Poe’s short stories, and the whole genre of science fiction, all shielded me from the experience of being a girl.
But the wall that separated me from the inner life of women rapidly crumbled when I discovered memoirs. When reading memoirs by female authors, I not only think about women. I spend hours vicariously thinking like one, allowing me to feel those complex emotions for myself. For example, reading books by mothers about the loss of a child took me on a journey through some of the most heart-wrenching emotions I’d ever experienced. [For example to read an essay I wrote about such a mother’s memoir, Lorraine Ash’s Life Touches Life click this link.]
I held back on the feminine experience of romance though, viewing it as a sort of final frontier that my male mind hesitated to cross. I did try reading a couple of romance novels, but I felt as though they were written in a foreign language, and could not let go in order to enter them vicariously. I needed to find a good romance memoir and build up the courage to read it.
Then last year I took a baby step in that direction. B. Lynn Goodwin’s memoir Never Too Late was the perfect starting point for my expanded emotional intelligence. Because her deep, heartfelt relationship happened later in life, between two people who leaned into pragmatic choices rather than emotional storms, I didn’t have to expose my logical male sensitibilities to more than I could handle.. But it broke the ice. [Click here to read my essay about that experience]
This year, my memoir romance reading jumped up a notch (or ten). Paris Blue by Julie Scolnik is a beautifully written book. It has all the vulnerability of a romance novel, but with the intense authenticity that arises from a heart-felt first-person account.
Paris Blue empowered me in the same way all memoirs do, to get me out of the limitations of my own approach to life in order to experience someone else’s. As her story awakened primal feelings of being swept away in love, I remembered when I felt that intoxication too! Through the magic of vicarious experience, I remembered those delicious moments as a young man when I felt swept up in that fascinating, fun, intricate, sensual, and sweet aspect of human existence.
Paris Blue, about the author’s most intimate moments, is yet another reason to celebrate the dawn of the Memoir Age – sharing stories lets us make better sense of each other’s inner worlds – like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which enabled modernity to understand ancient hieroglyphs, the existence of a modern library of interior life journeys can help us speak to each other more openly and with deeper insight. In this way, memoir reading and writing will change the world.