There’s a moment in almost any bad memoir where you start to get the sense that the author is telling you more than he or she actually wants you to know; a moment where the author’s persona, carefully crafted to be winning or fun or poignant or survivorly and magnificently victimized, starts to slip, and you get the sense of a different person trying to speak. This person is less glamorous, or less admirable, or less disgusting, or meaner, or nicer than the person the author is trying to sell you; they’re less fit to be written down. Probably they’re more embarrassing. Typically, it’s the urge to impress the reader that does it; there’s an over-sell, something that makes you see the person pulling the act as deeply unimpressive. The charming, wittily self-deprecating rogue is actually just some dude with Mommy issues pulling an “ain’t I a stinker” act to disguise his many and predictable insecurities; the glorious martyr, strung up on the cross of life for all to behold and weep over, is actually a petty, manipulative, melodramatic child.
It happened, for me, during the first domestic-violence scene in Running With Scissors. (The urge to impress, to give you all the gory details: I come from a family with a history of domestic abuse, too, but I somehow don’t recall it happening in Sensurround and with a script written for the Lifetime channel.) It came early on in A Million Little Pieces, with James Frey getting all hey-bro-check-out-this-crazy-fuggin-shit over severe pain that one wouldn’t imagine a sufferer of said pain to view as entertainment on par with a Saw movie or his nine millionth DVD re-watch of Fight Club. It was all over the J.T. LeRoy stuff, but the experiences described therein were just so godforsaken awful that you couldn’t allow yourself to register it, lest you be unduly skeptical about the harsh realities of child abuse, which is how nobody noticed that the books were written by a woman named Laura Albert until several years had passed and the entirely fictional person of J.T. LeRoy was both a celebrity and a friend of, for some reason, Shirley Manson.
I Love Dick, however, is built entirely on that moment of slippage. To be more precise: It’s as if Chris Kraus started to write, found herself on the edge of that accidental, unflattering honesty — found herself confronting that other person, the uglier person, the embarrassing, un-book-worthy one that other writers try to avoid — and just decided to go with that girl the whole way through. The book is sold as a “novel,” not a memoir. But it’s the truth of it — Chris Kraus is author and protagonist, Sylvere Lotringer is her real husband, Dick is apparently the name of a real (and not unknown) dude who is rumored to have been distinctly un-pleased by the book — upon which the narrative depends. So, where lesser writers (or, in two of the three cases listed above, straight-up liars!) would notice themselves headed for unpleasant, scary, unflattering self-disclosure and steer themselves onto safer ground, Chris Kraus steers right the hell into it. She makes it the road.
