A Memoir Of No One In Particular - Hardcover

Harris, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465028446 ISBN 13: 9780465028443

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

Many complain that the memoir has overtaken the novel and has become too influential in our current literary scene. But no one has actually done anything about it. There have been no satires or parodies of the genre-until now.In A Memoir of No One in Particular, our author approaches his life as if he were a specimen in a biologist's petrie dish. Rather than giving the usual narrative account, No One in Particular tells his own personal history as a gay white male by probing the banalities of daily living and the unexplored territory of the commonplace. Dispens-ing with clichéd and romanticized reminiscences, he revels in the minutiae and mundane habits and rituals of modern daily living, and finds his own unique contraption of selfhood amongst this quotidian detritus.Why is he No One in Particular? Although he can hardly claim to be Everyman, this very anonymity sardonically thumbs its literary nose at all those who must tell their unique stories. Equal parts spoof, satire, memoir, essay, literary criticism, and autobiography, this is a radical new book that will dare you to love it.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel Harris is the author of Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic as well as The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. He lives and draws in Brooklyn.

From Publishers Weekly:

While attempting to "use myself as a pretext for probing the banalities of life," Harris realizes that "an effete homosexual... may not, in the final analysis, be an ideal candidate for the starring role of Everyman," but forges ahead as "a kind of living camcorder" in "a Cartesian quest for absolutes" in physical existence. Yet Harris (The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture) is far more interested in the specifics of himself than in the generality of humanity: his teenage diaries, he tells us, are not "outbursts of uncontrollable emotions" but "are in fact complex literary acts"; he details his underwear fetish ("jockey shorts... last far longer than love affairs") and how he "stares into the toilet bowl after I poop." Despite the inoculation of the subtitle, the relentlessly smarmy and self-indulgent prose ("my disgust with the floor is intensified by one of the major obstacles my broom encounters: extension cords") becomes annoying, despite attempts at shock: "fucking for me revolves around a rigidly defined ritual based on the allegory of domination and submission." Such jolts deliver no human insight despite lengthy neo-psychoanalytic ruminations. The idea of reinventing, or reinvigorating, the memoir is terrific, but this is no Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0465028446
• ISBN 13: 9780465028443
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256