A Craft Essay by Tom McAllister
In Praise of the Memoir of the Mundane

The most common concern shared by many would-be memoirists is, “My life is too boring to write about.” Setting aside that often these claims are flat-out untrue (I’m thinking of an undergraduate who insisted he’d never done anything interesting, before timidly asking if it would be okay to write about the year he spent working as a professional gamer in Japan), it is also a limiting way to think about the genre. 

We’re all familiar with explosive iterations of memoir—books about child soldiers, about surviving the Holocaust, about addictions and salacious relationships. And while most writers do not have this well of material to draw on, that doesn’t make our relatively tame griefs, pains, and triumphs any less worthwhile. It’s also a mistake to think of memoir primarily as a plot-driven exercise. While many memoirs have a narrative arc and showcase some change in the narrator over time, you don’t need an explosive event to justify writing about yourself.

For most memoir writers, the goal is actually to embrace the smaller moments in one’s experience. This suggestion is not just a matter of practicality, but also of principle and ethics: through the writing, we get to say that a routine is what makes a life, and even in a routine I am a complicated, messy human whose mind and actions are worth knowing. The author, by virtue of treating their day-to-day incidents with the level of attention we usually reserve for the spectacular, can assert the sacredness of the mundane. 

As I age, I am even more interested in nonfiction that is concerned with the quotidian, that treats our daily tasks and minor annoyances with the kind of focus we usually reserve for broader social issues. Memoir writing is about doing the hard work of digging deep and crafting a narrative from the nitty-gritty of a normal life. (Yes, this advice runs counter to what some in mainstream publishing will tell you. All I can say is that my interest is in encouraging writers to think about how to create better work.)  

**

I joke that most essays I write these days involve me walking my dog. The fact is, I walk my dog a lot; it’s the one daily activity that forces me to interact with the physical world. This physical movement is an essential opening to the narrative; I need to be among people, seeing their bizarre behaviors, watching the subtle changes in their dress and mannerisms, maybe chatting with them, almost certainly passing judgment.  

As the nonfiction editor at the long-running literary magazine Barrelhouse however, I find that submissions have been trending toward larger and broader topics; since the first election/administration of Donald Trump, many American writers have been flailing to say something meaningful about our cruel society. This type of writing has been widely celebrated (look at any edition of Best American Essays from that era and note how many of the anointed pieces are real-time reactions to a recent Trump outrage). I understand the impulse, and I’ve done my own flailing. But on the page, many of the essays fall flat despite the authors’ best intentions. I’ve read hundreds of essay submissions from people animated by a righteous anger—an anger I largely share—that nonetheless feel empty because they are about ideas rather than people. I want to read essays about people. I want to spend six pages inside the mind of a smart, idiosyncratic weirdo at the coffee shop where they go every day and have developed a complicated taxonomy of the other coffee shop regulars. I want Donald Hall in Essays After 80 lovingly detailing what he sees through the window by his recliner. I want Natalia Ginzburg exploring the entirety of a marriage in “He and I” just by describing the ways in which she and her husband differ in disposition. I want what Lucas Mann, in his essay discussing J.R. Ackerley’s book My Dog Tulip, calls, “A virtuoso performance of care.” 

My own essays tend toward this mode anyway because I live a relatively boring, safe life in the suburbs. I am fortunate to be comfortable and content, most of the time. In many ways I have tailored my existence to specifically avoid the extraordinary. I devote quite a bit of energy to maintaining my time alone. If I want to write nonfiction, then, it is incumbent upon me to find new approaches to storytelling. The hope is that the reader is propelled not by pursuit of a thesis or a plot outcome, but by the pleasure of seeing the author’s mind work on the page, the humor and insights and unexpected details. 

**

Mike Nagel’s recent memoir Culdesac is a great example of what I’m talking about. From the start, Nagel makes no bones about the fact that he leads a boring life, and that’s why he’s writing. He and his wife have recently moved to the suburbs, and because he was recently diagnosed with high cholesterol, he takes a lot of walks around his neighborhood. He, importantly, does not condescend to the suburbs in the way some authors might—it’s good for cheap laughs, often from readers who also live in the suburbs and want to feel above it all—but does highlight the minor absurdities and moments of alienation we all experience. He writes:

“Now that I’m halfway through my thirties, very likely halfway through my life—here at the midpoint of this amateur musical theater production of my existence—I’m faced with the very real possibility that I’ve already gotten the gist. That I more or less get what’s going on here. That there’s nothing left to do but make art and walk around in circles and try to act surprised when everything I know is going to happen eventually happens.” 

Of course, he knows he hasn’t gotten the gist, or he wouldn’t have written the rest of the book, in which he experiences small profound insights and meaningful changes in his own outlook on life. But there he captures the essence of what I’m calling for. And the prose: precise, and never gets too caught up in abstraction. The concrete details—the walking—matter just as much. Throughout this book he expertly shifts between these modes, philosophical, jokey, procedural. In the best versions of this kind of writing, you’ll find it all. To write well about the mundane requires intense concentration on the sentence-level, with an emphasis on precise and surprising language, but also on brisk moves across time and place, paragraphs that begin in one spot but end in a new one.

**

In my book It All Felt Impossible, I wrote a short essay for every year of my life. By its nature, this project meant I was going to have to write about a number of years in which nothing all that noteworthy happened to me. So I tried to spotlight small details, one tangible item that could ground the essay and give me the opportunity to layer in more complex thinking. In “1984,” when I was two years old, I focus on the ashtrays that are abundant in photos from the time, using those objects as grounding element as I consider my father’s years of smoking, as well as his eventual death from cancer. In “1993,” a bad haircut is the gateway to discussing the racist neighborhood in which I was raised, as well as my desperation to fit in with the cool kids at school. In “2005,” my struggle to carry a bulky old TV up the narrow stairwell of my apartment becomes the means through which I discuss my unhappiness at grad school, my long-distance relationship, my desperate coping through watching televised sports. 

The book does include some essays driven by more traditionally momentous occasions: weddings, funerals, natural disasters. Even still, I made it my goal to emphasize the person in the center instead of the Big Event. In “2006,” I describe an F2 tornado ripping through Iowa City while I hide in the basement of my apartment building. Rather than dissecting weather patterns, my focus is on the sound of my annoying neighbor playing a handheld Sonic video game at full volume while the rest of us tried to listen for updates on my battery-powered radio. Then, the focus shifts to the eerie night air after the storm as I walk to a friend’s house to check in. The feel of bugs on our skin as we discuss whose cars are missing, whose roofs have been torn off. These details accrue and remind the reader that if the essay is “about” anything, it’s about being alive. 

I believe writers can avoid the trap of Aboutness in nonfiction, the notion that any piece could be boiled down to a thesis sentence. In doing so, you risk reducing your work, flattening your multifaceted and messy self into a mouthpiece for a message. Rather than Aboutness, I seek nonfiction that models the totality of human experience by lowering the microscope on one small aspect of it. This kind of movement invites the reader to access bigger philosophical ideas without being pushed around by the author (at its worst, Nonfictional Aboutness treads very close to propaganda). 

In workshops, I encourage my students to be assertive about who they are and what they’ve seen, not to tiptoe around their lived experience but to own it on the page. Nobody can take away your perception of an event, nor your interpretation of those events. Nonfiction writers often try to glom on to large social issues because they lack confidence in their own stories, and haven’t done the work to understand what they’ve seen or done, or what it means to them. Focusing instead on a Big Idea can be tempting, a shortcut to seriousness. 

**

In her essay “On Recently Returned Books” (from the great collection Any Person is the Only Self), Elisa Gabbert begins by discussing the pleasure she takes in picking random books off the “recently returned” shelf at her local library. This generalized pleasure shifts into a particular scene when her husband returns home with some books in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. Next, we move into a scene where Gabbert describes cooking dinner with the random ingredients her husband was able to find at the grocery store, and makes a connection between the sense of discovery she finds in both the library and the kitchen. What follows is a beautiful, lengthy meditation on the ways we learn about ourselves through our daily activities. It begins like this: 

“I often thought about how much of ‘normal life’ I had taken for granted. Before, when I had needed something, or simply wanted it, I could just go out and get it. I had never appreciated that my routines weren’t dangerous. … Nothing new was happening. I watched a movie on my laptop, hyperaware of how often the characters touched their own faces. I had an anxiety dream that I’d accidentally gone to a party.”

In this case, Gabbert is focused on the loss of routine as a means of understand oneself, an experience we all shared to some degree five years ago. That period was one in which everyone was taking stock of their own habits, desires, interests. During the summer of 2020, writers on social media rolled their eyes at the eventual “covid novels” they imagined being published, a feeling I initially shared (what’s more annoying than the publishing industries chasing after trends three years too late?). But over time I’ve come to believe there is nothing more inherently valuable than taking those moments as seriously as possible, treating them with the care and depth they warrant. Our lives were, collectively, upended. Permanently. It’s urgent to define who, and how, we are. 

I hope I’m not overextending my argument by connecting my desire for smallness in essays to current events, but in a time of rising fascism we are hearing continuing calls for great art. “The world needs your story,” people are fond of posting. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do feel confident that world does not need another dystopian thriller or even another angry nonfiction treatise. If the world can be said to need any new books, the priority might be a return to storytelling that prizes the run-of-the-mill and treats our quiet moments with the dignity and sacredness they deserve. We owe it to ourselves as much as we do to our readers not to forget about the in-between times. Through artful juxtapositions and subtle movements of language, the ordinary becomes elevated to the sublime.

Tom McAllister is the author of four books. His newest book is It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays from Rose Metal Press. He teaches at Rutgers University-Camden. Visit his website here.