“In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs. If I
lose a few friendships, so what? On the other hand, I sometimes say the best
way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads it. My books aren’t
indexed. So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the
whole thing.”
That’s Edmund White. I read this quip shortly after I
published my memoir, Culture Clash:
Environmental Politics in New Mexico Communities. It’s only kind of a
memoir, really more of a political analysis of what went on in the 1990s over
control of natural resources in the land based communities of northern New
Mexico. It qualifies as a memoir, I guess, because I was not only a journalist
covering these events but an activist who lived in the communities and played a
role as the battles ensued.
Unlike White, however, I didn’t lose any friends over what I
said in the book—I only went after enemies—but my opinion of them went south when
I realized his second point, that they weren’t going to read the book anyway. I
had to nag my kids to read it (to his credit, one of them had a long
conversation/critique with me about it). One of my closest friends apparently
read it but then never said a word about it to me until I nagged her, too.
Another one, whose book I was helping edit, has obviously never read it.
Several others, whom I informed that it was coming out, never asked me about it
again.
Then I published another book called Stories From Life’s Other Side: People Living on the Margins of Modern
Day Society. I wrote these stories over many years as I encountered the
characters who gave birth to these tales of struggle, grit, and acceptance.
Same story.
So does this indicate that people don’t read or that people
don’t know how to be friends or that everybody is so self-involved that you
can’t really parse any meaning?
Yes, some of my friends and colleagues did read the books: several
of them gave them good reviews in Taos
Friction, La Jicarita, and Enchantment and several others told me
they really enjoyed reading them (including John Nichols and Lucy Lippard). My
thanks to all of you.
So what do I do now? Work on another book that no one is
going to read?
