A DevraDoWrite reader, knowing of my interest in memoir, sent me word today with two references, one to a Wall Street Journal article and the other an NPR interview with my friend Bill Zinsser.
Writers are the custodians of memory, says Bill Zinsser. In the NPR piece On Memoir, Truth, and “Writing Well” Bill talks about the difference between memoir as therapy or retribution, “a debased form” usually written by whiners, and those works written as an act of healing by survivors who write well and often with humor. He believes in writing for oneself, whether or not a work gets published (agents and publishers don’t know what they want until they see it) and he views the writing of family histories as important work. Bill chooses his words as carefully in speech as he does when committing words to the page; I encourage you to listen to this 8 minute segment.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
…publishers plan to put out twice as many [memoirs] as last year…
This spring sees memoirs by a transvestite art director (buttoned-down nerd by day, drag queen by night), a tell-all from the Beatles’ publicist; a book about the year in the life of a Catholic seminarian; a cartoon memoir about surviving cancer; Helen “I Am Woman” Reddy on life as a feminist icon; and a memoir by “Maude” daughter and horror queen Adrienne Barbeau.
Clearly memoir is still “hot” as genres go, and the path is a lot smoother if you are already a well known author, a celebrity of any sort, involved with a celebrity, or have the inside scoop. Not really news to me, but the best part of the article for me was finding a new word — kerfuffle — used as follows: “Given the recent kerfuffle regarding Mr. Frey’s book, publishers say that they’re likely to scrutinize memoirs more closely before releasing them.”
Perhaps you know this word, but I don’t recall ever hearing it before. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
Etymology: alteration of carfuffle, from Scots car- (probably from Scottish Gaelic cearr wrong, awkward) + fuffle to become disheveled
chiefly British : DISTURBANCE, FUSS
And the World Wide Words site provides a little background:
KERFUFFLE
A commotion or fuss.
You will most commonly come across this wonderfully expressive word in Britain and the British Commonwealth countries (though the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used it in January this year). It is rather informal, though it often appears in newspapers. One of the odder things about it is that it changed its first letter in quite recent times. Up to the 1960s, it was written in all sorts of ways—curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, even gefuffle (a clear indication that its main means of transmission was in speech, being too rarely written down to have established a standard spelling). But in that decade it suddenly became much more popular and settled on the current kerfuffle. Lexicographers suspect the change came in response to the way that a number of imitative words were spelled, like kerplop and kerplunk.
I’m going to add kerfuffle to my vocabulary list.