In his new book Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda takes on an embattled genre and its “million little subgenres.” What he finds is that much of what vexes us about memoir isn’t new. Literary confidence man James Frey has historical company in the still-unknown author of an invented sailor’s 1816 memoir. It turns out that writers have felt guilty about their literary navel-gazing since at least the 18th century, when most autobiographies began with apologies for the author’s vanity.

Yagoda covers a lot of ground in his survey, charting a path from Julius Caesar’s Commentaries to Six-Word Memoirs and PostSecret. Along the way he touches on early examples of some of contemporary memoir’s favored tropes. The juicy high-end, government-official-implicating madam's tell-all, for instance, finds precedent in the memoirs of 19th century British courtesans, who omitted mention of their patrons only for a fee.

What impresses most in Yagoda’s book is not just the volume and variety of memoirs written recently but how long the genre has been part of our literary culture and how we have come to need and expect it. Our most accessible and democratic genre, it offered especially women and minorities the opportunity, long before the law did, to make their voices heard and circumstances known. Yes, there are countless bad, gushing, fraudulent, so-TMI memoirs. Yagoda leaves us better able to recognize the ones that don’t embarrass and even enlighten us.

Tags: ben yagoda, james frey, memoir

Emily, I think you are spot-on in saying that there is “more than rubbernecking in our continuing fascination” with Sarah Palin. Even a year after the election, I’m not sure what to make of her. She can be dazzling or she can be cringe-worthy. She can make me uneasy or she can make me want to have her and the whole fam over for Sunday dinner.

But here is what I like about her: I love her energy and ambition. I admire her thick-as-hell skin. And yeah, we’re both Republicans, so she and I would probably agree on a lot of policy issues. And while this might not project cool-headed logic on my part, the sneering condescension she encounters from liberals drives me right into her arms. It's as if people can't disagree with her on the issues and yet acknowledge that she made an incredible journey from “hockey mom” to small-town mayor to vice-presidential nominee. At least not without mocking her kids' names or the clothes she wore before the infamous convention makeover. Look, I laughed as much as anyone at this Saturday Night Live skit in which Amy Poehler, as Hillary, struggles to maintain her composure while sharing a podium with Tina Fey as the upstart Sarah Palin. We owe respect and gratitude to the women who spent years getting ahead at a frustratingly slow pace. But I love that we live in a country where someone like Sarah Palin can emerge, where not everyone who ends up in political office got there via the same path of prep school to Ivy League to law school. I might not want her to be president. But I’m damn glad she’s in my party.

Tags: going rogue, Sarah Palin, sarah palin's book

Emily, I too have been reading the dribbles emerging from the soon-to-be-published Palin memoir. You're right that we mine her for insight on sexual politics, and I was particularly intrigued with the information that the AP published about Palin's reaction to Bristol's pregnancy and the McCain campaign's treatment of that pregnancy. According to the AP article, Palin felt that the statement prepared by McCain's team about Bristol "glamorized and endorsed her daughter's situation." As opposed to what? Debasing and shaming her daughter's situation? Making her into a cautionary tale? The attempt at making Bristol an abstinence spokeswoman who appeared on multiple national morning shows was far more glamorizing than any statements the McCain campaign made on her behalf.

I know how inconvenient a teenage daughter's pregnancy must have been for an anti-choice candidate who supports abstinence-only education. Perhaps public "endorsement" of Bristol's pregnancy would have seemed hypocritical for someone who espouses such socially conservative views. But humanity should win out over hypocrisy any day. Palin's already disputing the AP's summary of her book, so it will be interesting to read the full story on her reaction to the public handling of babygate when it emerges.

In an Onion-esque piece of news this week, the New York Times reported that Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered a student newspaper to “tidy up” its coverage of his recent appearance at a high school assembly. Kennedy, an ardent protector of First Amendment rights—and apparently, irony–allowed the young journalists to attend the event on the condition that his office would pre-approve any articles written about him.

Why would Justice Kennedy do such a thing? Two reasons. First, the Bill of Rights protects speech in part to encourage transparency and create a Millian slurry of ideas in which the creamy globs of truth eventually float to the top. An inaccurate or misleading quotation by reporters with exclusive access to Kennedy's speech would be nearly impossible to correct.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has a deep-seated interest in practicing defensive PR. The Supreme Court is infamous for its impenetrable cone of silence. At first blush, this offense still seems petty and unnecessary—are they really that paranoid of incurring bad press?

Yes. And they should be.

As de facto policymakers who are both unelected and crowned with life tenure, the federal judiciary is uniquely susceptible to charges of anti-majoritarian bias and institutional illegitimacy. If you don't like the President, you can go ahead and vote her out in the next election—not so with judges. Since press statements give us insight into the justices' personal beliefs and political ideologies in a more digestible format than the Talmudic opinions released by the court, it is imperative for the justices to police reporters’ accuracy. This is especially true for Kennedy, the so-called swing justice, whose every syllable pundits pore over and parse like the cryptic utterances of the Delphic Oracle. Think of all the spurious statements daily attributed to congressmen by cable news outlets and political bloggers. If the Court were that promiscuous with its public image, we would have many more incidents like the recent Scalia-Brown v. Board of Ed debacle. It may be benign for the public to know that Clarence Thomas is awed by the complexity of dishwashers, but mistakenly believing that one of the justices of the highest court in the land opposes desegregation is more troublesome.

The Court already struggles with insecurity about its impotence in the face of Congressional legislation and does not need its authority further undermined by comments at a high school assembly. If Kennedy wants to clarify his meaning by bossing around a couple of teenage journalists, I think he can.

Tags: anthony kennedy, censorship, dalton, first amendment, journalism, media, prep schools, Supreme Court

Gina Kolata points out, once again, that diet and exercise have not been shown to affect breast cancer rates. Massive, well-run observational studies and randomized controlled trials turn up nothing. This finding appears to be unacceptable; popular culture rejects it utterly. Women’s magazines continue to preach the holy gospel of five fruits and vegetables a day. Doctors continue to tell patients at high risk of breast cancer that diet matters. The director of one of the (fruitless?) studies tells Kolata that doctors need to “rethink the studies.” Diet and exercise “are likely quite important, but we just aren’t getting the answers.”

Maybe, says the chairman of the department of epidemiology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Or maybe “It’s all sort of nonsense to begin with."

The question is why people so desperately want to believe, in the absence of evidence, that vegetables and treadmills will shield them from cell division. Says surgeon Susan Love, “It’s wishful thinking ... we would like things to be more in our control.”

But it must be something more, because drugs that do help prevent breast cancer—that do put patients in control in a way that accords with scientific findings—go ignored. The drug Tamoxifen cuts the cancer rate in half. The drug Evista does the same, with reduced risk of side effects. And one need only continue the treatment for five years. “It was a spectacular clinical trial,” reports a crestfallen Victor Vogel, who helped run the study. But no one cared: “The world said, so what?” Few doctors bother to recommend the drugs to women at a high risk of breast cancer, and when they do, patients often do not fill their prescriptions. The drugs are not expensive. The message sent to drug companies is that there is no market for cancer prevention drugs, so don’t sink millions into developing them.

My own view is that we want to be in control only in a way that conforms to certain notions of virtue. Eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and abstaining from alcohol are all behaviors that suggest a kind of moral rectitude absent from pill-popping. Popular media delights in reporting that smokers vastly increase their risk of various diseases; it seems that this is how things ought to be—indulge and be punished. Taking a pill called Tamoxifen every morning does not suggest anything of virtue or self-denial. It suggests, perhaps, cheating.

We'll take pills to prevent ailments framed as the natural and blameless consequence of aging, as with heart disease. But cancer—swift, random, terrifying—we still regard as cosmic punishment.

Tags: breast cancer, cancer drugs, Gina Kolata

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week, in conjunction with our ongoing battle against kvetching: Is chronic complaining a vice to be cured or a cathartic means of venting?

KJ Dell'Antonia: Hanna and Jess rightly mock the idea that complaining brings on "negative energy," causing everything from hangnails to cancer—but what perpetual complaining does bring on is more of the same. If you're whining about the weather, your companions will join in. If you're talking about your shiny new rain boots, the conversation will go a different way. If venting were truly cathartic, complaining would release the need to complain, but I find that, instead, it solidifies my way of thinking about my topic of plaint, and leaves me unable to think or talk about it in a different way.

Emily Bazelon: This morning, I told my kids about the no complaining project, pledged to try it—and then promptly launched into a description of an expense form I had to fill out that was driving me crazy. My husband reminded me of my promise. But my 9-year-old son Eli pointed out that I wasn't whining—I was explaining a problem, and this should be called an "explaint." I like it. I also found that, duly categorized, my rant turned more rational and moderate. I worked myself out of a lather rather than into one.

Tags: complaining

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While conceding that Huffington Post might write headlines for its celebrity bloggers, I still have to admit that I knew no good would come from an article titled "Don't Forget To Have Kids." This myth of the woman who "forgets" to have kids is so common that we don't stop to think about how sexist it really is, since the implication is that women are prone to such heights of stupidity that they could forget about the existence of marriage and babies, even in a world that has multiple cable channels (especially TLC) dedicated to marriage and babies. If you think about the myth of "forgetting" to have kids even for a moment, it falls apart, because the more common problem is forgetting to use contraception, and having kids because of it.

The post's author, Mika Brzezinski, did nothing in the article to dispel my eye-rolling prejudices, either. She clearly thinks her intended female audience is stupid. I can't think of any other explanation for her expecting us to believe her when she says that it's much harder to find a man and have a baby than it is to start a career in a competitive industry (like hers) in your 30s and compete against people who didn't take a break to procreate before their careers even started. That's right—she's not only arguing that you should take time to have kids, but that you should actually have kids before your career starts, and trust that when you enter the workforce a decade after everyone else, it'll be a breeze to catch up. I noticed that Brzenzinski doesn't assume that men are so stupid that they can also be told that it's harder to find someone to marry you than it is to start a career in a competitive industry.

I know we're all supposed to nod politely when someone says that having kids is much harder than getting a job in an incredibly competitive industry, because we know that the people saying this have suffered a great deal of sleep deprivation in their lifetimes and we should honor that. But c'mon! We live in a country with a high teen birthrate, so we have got to know, deep down inside, that platitudes about parenthood like this are off the mark. 16-year-olds find someone to impregnate them and raise kids. But you don't see many 16-year-olds hosting their own talk shows on major news networks. Having a baby is a lot of work, absolutely, but if it required the genius-level capabilities, the human race would have died out a long time ago.

Brzenzinski also sneaks in the insulting premise that the right husband will invariably be the one you meet early in life, and if you wait to get married, that somehow will mean that he's never coming along. We have statistical evidence that this belief is pure poppycock. States where early marriage is encouraged and long-term cohabitation is discouraged also have the highest rates of people marrying three times or more. I guess even people who take Brzezinski's advice find out what the heathens already knew, which is that your personality changes too much between your late teens and late 20s to really believe that the person you find compelling in your youth will be the same kind of person you want to be married to in your maturity.

And let's not forget how these arguments sound to people who can't have kids, because they're infertile or for some other reason. Telling women that having kids is the most important thing they can do makes the deliberately childless laugh at you, but for women who can't have kids, it's much like telling them they aren't even real women.

Photograph of a mother and her baby boy by George Doyle/Getty Images.

Tags: childless, children, marriage

Intra-party warfare starring Sarah Palin—who can resist the leaks about the jagged bits of her new book, Going Rogue? She makes the bizarro accusation that the McCain campaign stuck her with a $50,000 legal bill for her own vetting. (Convenient confusion over the cost of defending herself against ethical accusations in Alaska?) She goes after Katie Couric while at the same time claiming the McCain people said “right on” about her first interview with Couric. (Blinded by those lights from Russia?) She was awed by the clothes and told they were “part of the convention.” That one actually sounds plausible to me.

There is something more than rubbernecking in our continuing fascination with Palin, I think. We mine her for insight into class conflict, rule breaking, and, of course, sexual politics. Another tidbit: Animal Farm is reportedly one of her favorite books; the lesson, Gawker says, is if those pigs can beat the odds, so can I. The Palin twist on Orwell: Forget who is holding power, to what ends, and go grab some.

Tags: going rogue, sarah palin's book