Can You Write a Memoir in the Third Person?

The first-person insights of memoir serve epiphany and discovery, as though all confessions are truthful. The distance of third person makes these moments of reflection more meaningful, as though part of the book’s journey is young B’s discovery of a language that might capture how he feels inside. Occasionally, Dillon writes in the second person, addressing B directly but also universalizing the young man’s plight. “Always on your mind is the prospect of wasting your life, which means doing what you are told and doing it poorly, but well enough to find, in time, a job and a station in life that will blight all ambitions and all attachments to art, language, thought, desire.” These are moments for us to wander into the text and measure ourselves against his fire.

“Ambivalence” is set between 1986 and 1995, a time when Dillon was “always imagining how things will be in about six months’ time: how he will dress, how he will speak and move in the world, what adjustments he will have made to his character and how he will be understood by others—perhaps even loved.” There were other important people in his life during this span—a path-changing academic mentor, a torturous sibling, his father—but the engine of “Ambivalence” is his personal syllabus. He reads Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and, as he falls into the text’s dizzying similes and metaphors, he grows infatuated with the “richness of substitution, conjuring one thing out of another, proving all things subtly or strangely not themselves. This is also that.” Descriptions of lovers or of his best friend, “S,” feel hazy and thin, yet he ponders at length about what passage from the book he wants read aloud at his funeral, rather than who will be in attendance.

All criticism is autobiographical, in the sense that it clues a reader in to the touchstones or influences that make a given critic’s taste unique. Dillon’s unusual approach throughout “Ambivalence” slowly comes into focus when B becomes hypnotized by the tenets of postmodernity, such as the mutability of the self, or the impossibility of fixed truths: if we are always works in progress, rather than stable selves awaiting discovery, then the most truthful account of one’s life would be one that denies discrete turning points or the grand illusion of ever being fully formed. Dillon’s fondness for italicized phrases and his occasionally grave tone are all part of a performance, something that he has learned from reading French theory. The very look of Barthes’s and Derrida’s writings inspires a way of living, “a dream of italicizing everything, inflecting every utterance, making language and life lean away from the solid, upright and reasonable. Obliquity is everything.”

B grows fixated on the “subjective, vulnerable, unmastered” style of Barthes, as the French thinker’s approach to essay writing “splintered” into something messy and strange, working through evocation and juxtaposition rather than persuasion. The closest “Ambivalence” comes to breakthrough is when B realizes that writing is where you figure these things out, even if the resulting essay is shaggy and abstruse. At one point, he is comfortably settled in graduate school, measuring his perception of self against how he seems to others. “Later he will learn that some of his fellow postgraduate students think he is pretentious, and he will feel amused, gratified, properly seen at last.” He wonders if he could ever fall in love with someone who does not read Derrida. Probably not.

For many years, I taught a writing workshop on cultural criticism that began with students composing a taste biography. What were the pivotal encounters that shaped their sense of what art could be and how it might affect them? Was it always love at first sight? We talked about the difference between merely liking a film and allowing it to transform you, the aspirations we might have to one day understand something we currently find difficult or unruly.

I still believe that the songs or books we love contain blueprints for how we hope to live, and Dillon’s memoir embodies how these personal canons inflect the way we understand and express ourselves. B fears being outed as a poseur, meekly copying the outline of some micro clique, rather than a true aesthete “driven only by curiosity and love.” Fifty pages in, the author observes that he has “not yet, in any meaningful sense of the verbs, begun to read—or write.”