Sherman Alexie and the Tricky Art of Memoir

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/books/sherman-alexie-and-the-tricky-art-of-memoir.html

Version 0 of 1.

It’s not often that a memoirist warns you about believing him. But Sherman Alexie is not your usual memoirist.

“I’m always going to tell the better version,” said Mr. Alexie, allowing that, for him, storytelling takes precedence over full disclosure. “In this era, keeping a secret is the most subversive thing imaginable. There are things I would not write about.”

This celebrated novelist, young-adult author and three-time poetry slam champion was seated in the Museum of Modern Art’s noisy cafe on an overcast afternoon, reflecting on his new work, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” an assemblage of 156 confessional essays, vignettes and poems inspired by the death of Mr. Alexie’s mother from cancer in 2015. The book, to be published this week, is a high point in a prolific career that includes “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” a 2007 best-selling semi-autobiographical novel that won the National Book Award for young people’s literature.

With his well-coiffed salt-and-pepper hair, tailored blue suit accented with a pink floral-patterned handkerchief, and fine leather shoes, Mr. Alexie could pass for an ad executive or the world’s warmest don. It’s a striking evolution from the mullet-wearing Gen X wunderkind whose 1992 poetry debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” depicted the hopes and struggles of basketball-playing, myth-spinning Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. At 50, this Spokane-Coeur d’Alene tribe “activist artist,” as he describes himself, is a literary celebrity whose 26 books have sold over 2.5 million copies and been translated into 25 languages.

Mr. Alexie’s path to his current renown was harder than most. Born hydrocephalic, with an excess of cerebrospinal fluid squeezing his brain, he required lifesaving surgery at 5 months, suffered from seizures until he was 7 and was later found to be bipolar, a disorder that he believes he inherited from his mother. Bullied at school for his lisp and his looks, he grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash., in a decrepit one-bedroom house that he shared with his parents, four siblings and a rotating cast of friends and relatives.

“Poverty was our spirit animal,” Mr. Alexie writes, “but there is a good story in everything,” and “You Don’t Need to Say You Love Me” is a catalog of that everything: funerals, fame, family, abuse, colonialism, salmon restoration, grade-school humiliations and high school superlatives, midcareer brain surgery “and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss.”

The memoir charts this stormy weather pattern. “The big lie I’ve been telling in my autobiographical fiction is that my mother is not the source of my art,” he said in the interview. “My mother is the source of my art, period. All the love and forgiveness and the things I could never deal with, the rage, the cruelty, the towering arrogance. I wanted to think of myself more like my father because he is a gentle, passive person. Which I am not.”

Mr. Alexie characterizes his mother, Lillian, as the community historian — “the reservation Medea” — their tribe’s “last connection to the ancient stories and songs.” But she was also a stubborn, verbally abusive woman he “never stopped being afraid of.”

There was a lot to fear in his childhood home, from violence, to alcoholism, to reservation parties that combined both. Other tribal members posed a threat, too. He writes of a New Year’s Eve party at his parents’ house, where several sexual abusers, including his own, were present.

With a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts grant, Mr. Alexie was able to quit his day job as a secretary for a high school exchange program and write “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” a searing collection of much-anthologized stories about the bleak realities of modern indigenous life that he later adapted into the 1998 feature film “Smoke Signals.”

“I could define my parents as baffled by not necessarily my success, but that anyone would be interested in reservation Indians,” he said. “I remember I showed my dad some of the first poems I ever wrote, and he said, ‘Well, these are good for me, but who else is going to want to read this?’”

Success has not been without the occasional dust-up. As an editor of the “Best American Poetry” collection in 2015, Mr. Alexie’s selection of a poem written by a white poet under a Chinese-sounding pseudonym ignited a firestorm in the literary world.

“The right thing to do, the thing that would’ve gotten me celebrated, was not to publish and in fact to write about it, to chastise him,” he said. “And then I would’ve been the hero of the brown poets, instead of the controversial figure. What kind of idiot chooses not to be the hero? This idiot.”

But the overwhelming takeaway from Mr. Alexie’s memoir is triumph, that of one writer’s ability to overcome hardscrabble roots, medical bad luck and generations of systemic racism — all through an uncommon command of language and metaphor.

“Onstage, sometimes, I will talk about my success in comedic terms, also honest terms,” he said, comparing his occasional boasts to those of a rapper. “It’s arrogance as a political weapon. I got here despite all the barriers you put up against me.”

Mr. Alexie continued: “When you come from such a highly traditional culture, when you canonize the past so much, it can prevent you from becoming new. I think that’s the biggest dilemma in Native literature.”

Even at his most assured moments, Mr. Alexie is quick to acknowledge the larger factors at work. “I’m never not the pizza man I was,” he said of his former job delivering pies. “I just happened to come along at the right time. A big part of it was, I started my career when there were, what, over 4,000 independent bookstores, when ethnic studies was at its early peak, when it was new and exciting. It was all these forces combined.”

When asked whom he considers his primary audience, he responded: “College-educated white women. That’s who buys and reads our books in mass numbers. To say otherwise is to either be purposefully or accidentally a liar. That said, my ideal reader is a poor, weird brown kid. And I get enough letters from them. When a weird brown kid says, ‘This story meant this to me,’ that’s the power.”