Plenty

When I was seven, my route to school was carefully planned. Eastward on Alfred Avenue I'd walk, over the train tracks, around the corner, usually down Manitoba Street, sometimes down Burrows because it took me past the spire of St. John Cantius -- after all, he was the Patron Saint of Poland, often mentioned by our nuns, a great scholar who taught for many years at Kracow University. Sometimes I'd go straight up Alfred to Arlington, where my school was, Margaret Scott Elementary, named after an energetic nurse who had worked hard to improve life for the working class immigrant enclave of the North End. I pictured someone pretty and blonde, like our school nurse, handing out...what? I wasn't sure, but something good and useful, maybe mercurochrome?

By either route, I made sure to pass the two corner grocery stores that lay between me and my destination. Originally modest little homes, they had been transformed by rectangular boxlike additions to their fronts, one stuccoed and the other clad in faded wooden siding that matched the original house parts, both with big square windows. Unlike regular houses, they came right up to the sidewalk, pushed out onto the street, metamorphosed into that magical incarnation, the grocery-home.

Nowadays corner stores have extras like fax machines or photocopiers. But their essence remains the same: foodstuffs up front and the families living in back, with a TV or radio usually playing from somewhere in the living area. Often one of the family members will be sitting on a chair squarely placed between the two realms, one eye on the TV and the other on shelves of Campbell's soups, Heinz Ketchup, Kraft Dinner, Ritz crackers, Libby's Fruit Cocktail, canned pork n' beans, various candies and chocolate bars, cigarettes up high beyond the front counter -- Players, Matinées, Export A -- a cooler holding bottles of milk and tubs of ice cream, and so on.

In those earlier days, the grocery-home fascinated me. It was all I could possibly want, an absolute contradiction to my mother's stories of starvation in Siberia, fights for a potato during the war, hunger rations in the DP camp. Here there were shelves and shelves of glittering canned goods, candies, drinks -- everything, unlike the limited and sometimes barren larder at our little chanda (shack) by the tracks. When you stepped inside a grocery-home, often there was no one even there, in the store part, I mean, no one guarding the hoard, and for a moment you'd be alone in this treasure trove of goodies, transfixed by plenty, like some Aladdin stumbling into a genie's cave of wonders. Then the father, mother, or son/daughter school-kid clerking between bouts of homework came in, to see who was there and to ring up your order. Tantalizing smells drifted from the darkened domesticity beyond, where the rest of the family stayed, inside the home part, having supper maybe, or lunch, a cup of coffee or tea.

Often I entered not to buy anything, because I didn't have any money, but on a personal reconnaissance mission, researching all the different grocery-homes in the neighbourhood, not just the two on the route to school. Each was a little different, and I just liked to meditate on the cans of soup, tins of salmon, boxes of Corn Flakes, cookies with names I didn't understand (Oreo?), the oddly shaped corned beef cans from Argentina, all in somewhat odd arrangements, to dream...

But it was a perilous business, my obsession. The grocery-homers looked at me strangely. Some would ask rudely what I wanted, then send me sharply on my way. And one day a huge Great Dane jumped unexpectedly out of one of the grocery-home's tiny fenced yard and attacked me. It leapt up, yowling in a deep-throated basso profundo, then stopped. For a moment we stood eye to brown shiny eye. It scrutinized my face uncertainly, and then clamped its huge salivating black mouth on my left wrist. It was a token bite that didn't even break the skin. Still, I was terrified, and remained afraid of dogs for many years after.

Another day, I came across a stack of newspapers on the corner of the street where one of the grocery-homes stood, tied with twine, just sitting there, maybe fifty copies, obviously having fallen from the sky, or been lost by someone. I stooped to contemplate this gift, not quite knowing what to make of it. I twisted a few copies of the Winnipeg Free Press out of the pile, then started for home, not sure what to do with the newspapers since neither of my parents read English and I didn't read period -- when an angry grey-faced man in a flannel robe and slippers ran out and yelled at me. I dropped the papers and ran. It was years later I realized that was how papers were delivered to corner stores, just dumped on the street or sidewalk in front of them.

Despite these close calls, at bedtime I still prayed my family might one day own one of those miraculous grocery-homes where we would all live happily. In the morning, when I woke up, I'd stay in bed for a minute or two, eyes shut, imagining what it would be like to wake up in a grocery-home instead.

Everything would be different: in my pyjamas, I'd pad downstairs while the household slept, turn on the lights in the store part, go out among our laden shelves before we were open for business, wander up and down, and then reach up and grab: anything I wanted, anything I felt like. No shortages, always a surplus -- that was true freedom. It meant never having to worry again.

Excerpt from Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market by Julie Rak

From the Introduction

This book is about the memoirs that are written, published, sold in bookstores, and circulated by public libraries for people like my grandmother: ordinary readers who are interested in the world around them but who also want to read about places and people that are not accessible to them in their immediate lives. It is also about books that my grandmother wouldn't have had access to yet, the books that are part of what is called the “memoir boom, ” a period roughly spanning the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the production and public visibility of American and British memoirs by celebrities and by relatively unknown people sharply increased. I do think that my grandmother would have greeted the memoir boom with delight, and perhaps even enjoyed the increasing numbers of memoirs by ordinary people who have led extraordinary lives just as much as she liked reading about the lives of the famous. In this she would have joined the thousands of people who participate in the memoir boom by buying, borrowing, downloading, and reading the memoirs that are part of it.

This book is not about readers, however, because other groundwork about what the memoir boom is, how it is produced, and what it means in contemporary life needs to be laid first. Even though she was not part of the current interest in non-fiction books about the lives of others, the focus I have placed on my grandmother as a reader does make evident something about non-fiction, and especially what critics often call life writing, that often gets overlooked. My grandmother, and readers like her, are the reason that the memoir boom exists, but so far, little critical discourse about memoir has had much to say about the books produced for this readership. The books of the memoir boom are produced by mainstream presses for large audiences, and perhaps that is why critics of autobiography tend to overlook them or not teach them in their classes (Couser 2012, 14). And yet, millions of readers like my grandmother still seek out these kinds of books precisely because they are not fictional. What is more, many readers appear to enjoy reading about the lives of others, in apparent ignorance of a chorus of disapproval about the books written for them. Why are so many of these stories produced and eagerly read today? Why are cultural pundits so suspicious of them? How can we understand the ways in which they are produced and received? In mainstream journalism, most analysis of the phenomenon, with the exception of Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History (2009), has taken the form of backlash against aspects of the memoir boom. Other studies, like G. Thomas Couser's recent Memoir: An Introduction (2012), try to understand the memoir boom in light of the history of autobiography production in the United States. In this study of contemporary memoir, I wish to do something a bit different from the other kinds of studies of American memoir in circulation, whether they are by journalists or scholars of life writing. I want to change the way that we have understood memoirs so that we can see them as part of a production cycle as a way to explain how the memoir boom came about, and how it continues. I think that understanding how the book industry works today can help us see why the production of non-fiction has assumed so much importance. I also think that memoirs, particularly those of non-celebrities, have the potential to change the imagined relations their readers have with the lives of others: this is the source of their power and fascination at the present time, and the reason publishers continue to produce them. But exactly what does this change mean? What does it mean to want to enter into imagined relations with others at this time? Does it signify an emergent interest in community? Is it the latest development in neoliberalism that emphasizes the cult of the individual apart from community (Gilmore 2010, 658)? Is it a media industry takeover that sucks the life out of literary production because anybody can write a life story as part of a culture of self-help?