Last month Jill Biden and JD Vance came out with memoirs. Both made a big splash.
Both of them are awful. Vance’s is shamefully flawed. Biden’s is understandably fatally flawed.
I am going to write two columns about memoirs. The first is about those two weaklings.
The next one, featuring a good memoir, will probably surprise you because it’s no national get-on-talk-shows best seller.
It’s former Hawaiʻi Gov. Ben Cayetano’s memoir, “Ben: A Memoir, From Street Kid to Governor,” published 17 years ago and seven years after he left the governor’s office.
How can you tell a good memoir from a bad one? The best advice comes from the memoirist and poet Mary Karr, who describes a memoir as “an act of memory, which is innately corrupt,” as Karr puts it, discussing her own memoir.
Memory is a memoir’s foundation and the danger at the same time.
There are two ways of being dishonest in a memoir: including false information and omitting critical information.
In both Biden’s and Vance’s memoirs, omission, leaving things out, is the big problem.
The story JD Vance tells in the first part of “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” is about his conversion to Catholicism.
His conversion is a compelling story that follows the path that makes the song “Amazing Grace” so powerful: “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” Describing that journey, he is introspective and forgiving.
Vance says that he began to write this memoir in 2017. But we are not in 2017 anymore. Vance ignores this, and the more he moves away from his 2017 life, the sketchier and more omissive he gets.
He skims over or ignores the elephant in the room — almost everything important that’s happened to him since then, like his entire political career
His conversion story states that he will use his new religious principles as a guide to his political work.
According to Vance, he decided to run for U.S. Senate as a “Christian statesman” who would bring Christian values to the economy.
“If Christianity is true,” Vance says, “it must be true for the whole human person at all times of life. We are not merely private moral actors but also public ones.”
Except he never explains how a “whole human person,” namely himself, does this. And there is plenty of evidence that in fact he doesn’t.
It’s amazing how little he talks about Trump, or his other conversion from a Trump critic to supporter. You might disagree with evangelicals’ religious defense of Trump, but at least that defense is out there to be considered.
It shouldn’t be up to the reader to fill in these blanks or to work Vance out of this jam.
By default, then, so much for Vance’s political role and worse yet, so much for the link between Catholic principles he’s adopted and how he applies them to political life, especially his own work.
The book reads like a politician pontificating about religion in the first part of a speech, kind of to establish rapport, then moving on.
As a recent article in Slate put it, the tragedy of Vance’s new book is that it reminds us of “how far he has fallen from the thoughtful young man who once had something original to say.”
This is how a conservative writer who supported all three Trump campaigns as well as Vance’s rise to vice president now describes Vance: “one of the most disingenuous, ideologically flexible politicians (I’ve) ever encountered.”
An omissive memoir leading to bipartisan shaming. Not the buzz the vice president prayed for.
Like “Communion,” part of Jill Biden’s memoir, “View From the East Wing: A Memoir,” is informative and unpretentious, an insider’s view of the day-to-day occurrences in the White House.
It’s her discussion of Joe Biden’s aging that makes her memoir so weak and misleading. Joe, she claims, had slowed down a bit, like any person his age, but that he was not cognitively impaired in any way. In short, no reason to think that the president couldn’t continue his job.
Jill Biden asserts that she is in the best position to talk about this. In fact, she was in the worst.
First of all, anyone looking at an old person’s physical or cognitive condition would not rely on a spouse’s views precisely because they are so close. Very often, spouses are in denial about what they see. It’s hard to admit that your loved one may be losing it.
And it’s not any ordinary 80-year-old that Jill Biden is talking about. It’s the president of the United States. The decision about whether Joe Biden was too old to do the job was not simply a personal family decision or even just a medical decision. It’s the public’s decision.
Well before the 2024 election it was clear that voters thought Biden had lost the cognitive ability and stamina to do the job. More and more, people thought Biden’s staff was covering up.
Jill Biden omits that key part of the political equation. Instead she talks about Joe Biden’s aging as if he were just some ordinary retired civil servant living on his pension and puttering around the house.
Then her story about Joe’s aging takes a surprising turn, as she describes her reaction to President Biden’s terrible debate performance against Donald Trump.
“I wasn’t horrified,” she now says. “I was frightened. I had never seen Joe that way before. As I watched it, I said, ‘Oh my God, he’s having a stroke.’”
In the interviews immediately after the debate she defended Biden and said nothing about her fears. Even after that, when so many people began to turn against the president, she as well as some of his key supporters continued creating a revisionist history that minimized Joe Biden’s health and argued that he could still do the job.
The book says nothing about the extensive reporting after the election that showed how much Biden’s aides had covered up his aging.
Jill Biden’s account is a shining example of the weakness of memoirs. It’s about her feelings without adding any facts.
“East Wing” is a perfect example of the difference between memoir and history. The book is simply a story of one person’s views. When a fuller story is told, say by someone writing a Biden biography and that’s sure going to happen, Jill Biden’s memories will just become one small source of information about the Bidens’ later years.
“View From the East Wing” will move from a memoir to a controversial memoir to a mere memoir.
Which is the fate it deserves. Jill Biden contributes to these limits by omitting information that could change the way she and the rest of us think about this.
Two bad political memoirs, each by a person who has an axe to grind, an agenda that cripples the quality instead of enhancing it.
Part of the problem lies in the nature of memoirs, those first-person account weaknesses I talked about earlier.
But another weakness falls on the two writers themselves. Jill Biden and JD Vance try to sneak things past us, Vance by skimming over key questions and hoping that we will take him on faith and Jill Biden by wrapping herself in the aura of a personal story so much that she spends no time thinking about the need for her own conversion.
“Ben” shows that it’s possible to write a good memoir. At the same time, though, “Ben” shows how hard it is to avoid the flaws of omission because he has some of them too.
As you’ll see next time when I put the three together to consider what memoirs can — and can’t — tell us about politics.
