empathy

"Empathy and pity are strong and necessary emotions that deepen our sense of connection to others; but they depend on a kind of metaphorical imagination of what others are going through. The facile assumption that we can literary "feel others' pain" can be dangerous to our sense of who we are--and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too." --Daniel Mendelsohn NYT OpEd March 9, '08.

Mendelsohn's response is to the fraud perpetrated by recent pseudo- memoirists--DeWael and Seltzer. It interests me because I teach the memoir and am writing a memoir. Why these writers did not just write fiction I will never know. Does the memoir in the popular imagination connect more to the truth than fiction? Why for heaven's sake. I want my students (and myself) to write memoirs because they allow us to write our histories and present them to a reader who will, if they are written with energy and a dramatic flare, connect to them because we have given them an experience. And the experience does not have to be horrific; it can be something that is merely (ha!) observed with precision and depth.

The idea of employing "a kind of metaphoric imagination" is just what the memoirist has to do when telling his/her story as well as those of others. It starts with discovering the emotional truth of memories that can then become universal--the action of any good metaphor.