Description
Book SynopsisHow memoirs justify deviant behavior from crime to sex to politics
Trade Review "Erich Goode's
Justifiable Conduct is a deeply considered and wildly fascinating look into the craft of memoir. This book should be required reading for those who read, write, love, or loathe memoir. This important contribution to a genre that has become a heated topic of debate, in both literary circles and popular culture, is a must read."—Emily Rapp, Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design; member of the MFA faculty at the University of California, Riverside; and writer
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Charles Van Doren, “Herb Stempel Was the First to Agree to the Fix”
Jim Bouton, “If We Explain We’re Shooting Beaver, They’ll Understand”
The Transgressive I, the Exculpatory Account
2 Autobiography and Memoir
Memoir and Autobiography
The Memoir Explosion
Literal Facticity: Does It Matter?
James Frey, “I Honestly Have No Idea”
3 Autonarrating Transgression
The “I” and the “Me”
Vocabularies of Motive
Is to Explain to Condone?
The Presentation of Self
Accounts
Techniques of Neutralization: Theory or Concept?
To Whom Are Self-Exculpations Addressed?
In Sum: Neutralizing Deviance
4 Criminal Behavior
Joe Bonanno, “This Is How I Earned My Living”
Edward Bunker, “What Else Could I Do?”
Jack Henry Abbott, “If You Behave like a Man, You Are Doomed”
Jordan Belfort, “
$12.5 Million! In Three Minutes!”
Accounting for Crime
5 Substance Abuse
Pete Hamill, “This Is What Men Do”
Susan Cheever, “Drinking Was Part of Our Heritage”
Steve Geng, “I Was Romanticizing Lives of Crime”
William Cope Moyers, “I Was Doomed to Fail No Matter How Hard I Tried”
Accounting for Substance Abuse
6 Sexual Transgressions
Roman Polanski, “Everyone Wants to Fuck Young Girls”
Kerry Cohen, “My Parade of Boys Continues”
Melissa Febos, “I Took Aim and Flicked the Whip toward Him”
Kirk Read, “I Wanted to Be Shirley Temple”
Accounting for Sexual Transgressions
7 Political Deviance
Elia Kazan, “I Was Notorious, an Informant, a Squealer, a Rat”
Norman Podhoretz, “The Theory Circulated That I Had Gone Mad”
Malcolm X, “I Never Have Felt That I Would Live to Become an Old Man”
Cathy Wilkerson, “The Intention Was Not to Cause Carnage but Chaos”
Accounting for Political Transgressions
8 Accounting for Deviance
How They Account for Themselves
Searching for Common Threads
Looking Back
Reference
Index
