On I, Asimov

If you're fascinated by other people to the point that you people-watch and regularly view documentaries about famous figures, sooner or later--if you're a reader--you'll start reading biographical nonfiction. It was this interest that eventually lead me to read a book by, and about, one person who, along with his work, had fascinated for years.

The person was Isaac Asimov; the book was his third volume of autobiography, I, Asimov.

To call the book an "autobiography" is actually inaccurate. It's really a memoir (it even says so on the cover). What is the difference though? Aren't they shelved in the same section of the nonfiction area of every book store? Isn't one word merely a superfluously sophisticated synonym for the other? (I'm glad you asked).

The differences between the two start with the names (clearly), which indicated the difference in writing style--particularly the tone and structure--used by the authors when approaching their subject..

Autobiographies, by their very names, are ascetic. They're written in a purely factual and objective style and serve to accurately recount, in chronological order, the events of a person's life. You could describe them as the product of the subject coldly assessing and reporting the facts of their life. That is the ideal, at least.

Memoirs, however, are more personal works.

The very name conveys this. Memoir is closely related to the word memory. Memories are subjective, both in emotional content and in terms of importance. Two people who witnessed the same event can experience it in two different ways emotionally, and therefore the event can stand at different levels of importance in each of their minds.

Thus, Memoirs are compendiums of personal recollections and reflections, creating a tone intimacy. The subject of a memoir undertakes the task of not only recalling the major events, places, and people of their lives that shaped who they became at the time of the book's composition, but they also take the pain, or sometimes the pleasure, in commenting upon said significant matters.

For this reason, I think memoirs are more interesting reads. You not only get the personal narrative of the author, but you also invariably get a sense of their personality, of their self-perception You learn how it is that they view their life from their commentary about whatever subjects they choose to focus on, what they believe to be the most significant events, places, and people that shaped them into the figures we know them as.

This subjectivity of course also makes memoirs biased and, at times, unreliable.

Oprah famously got suckered into believing that several books she'd selected as an Oprah's Book Club Titles, which were in fact largely fictitious, were memoirs. The essayist and poet Clive James published a book of memoirs himself, illustrating this flaw outright, titled Unreliable Memoirs.

Historian David McCullough however noted that this greater subjectivity can actually also tell you a lot about the subject of a memoir as well. To paraphrase him, what a memoirist chooses to omit from their life story can be just a revealing about their feelings towards an event or person as what they choose to include. In fact, it may reveal a genuine emotional wound of some sort.

I, Asimov, however, contains little to no such events.

Biographical nonfiction produced by most writers rarely contains such things because the lives of writers are frequently boring. Unless they're producing a piece of reportage on a unique or out-of-the-ordinary topic they're experiencing, such as the work George Plimpton produced, biographical nonfiction by writers is always boring. What does a writer do? They get out of bed, got to a desk where a computer or notebook rests, and they put one word after another until whatever it is that they're working on is complete. Then they rewrite it and revise it until its exactly right, after which it's then published (or not), and they move on to the next thing. Not very exciting.

Unless you're a Norman Mailer, an Ernest Hemingway, or a Mark Twain, all of whom lead interesting lives before and during the time they became famous writers, and did so (in Hemingway's case at least) to keep their minds off the business of writing or (in Mailer's case) to help them generate more material for their writing, the memoirs of such people are not going to be of great interest.

Except to people like me

All writers in their early days, when they're figuring out their processes, want to know how others who came before them did it. That's probably the greatest appeal of Asimov's memoir.

He devotes several chapters to describing how he developed his style and his process. His two most notable editorial influences being his friend Fredrick Pohl and the famed editor of Astounding Science Fiction (now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact), John W. Campbell. The book also reveals insights into how his early life, particularly the time he spent working in his father's succession of candy stores, affected his work ethic for the better. Orwell said writers are all vain, selfish, and lazy. I don't thing that last one can apply to a man who produced enough work to span nine of the ten categories of the Dewy Decimal System.

The other two traits are certainly applicable in Asimov's case however.

You have to have a certain level of vanity to compose, not one, not two, but THREE volumes of writing on your own life, with the third volume alone being 559 pages in length (in the Kindle edition that I read at least). As for selfish, well Asimov was certainly no angel, but who can be since angels don't exist? He states in the introduction to the book how, "In 1977, [he] wrote [his] autobiography. Since [he] was dealing with [his] favorite subject, [he] wrote at length and [he] ended with 640,000 words." You have to be self-centered and self-absorbed to have that much to say about yourself, even if, "there was no great excitement in [one's life]." To be a writer though is to be rather selfish in nature. You have to shut yourself away and get the solitary work done, one way or anther, and in a world like ours, that promotes sociability and extroversion, the work of being a writer is damn hard to do. "Writing is a lonely job," Asimov says, "When he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his typewriter or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter." And he's right.

Nevertheless, Asimov's memoir does reveal several of his great virtues as a person.

Honesty is one of them.

Never once in the whole book--again, 559 pages--does he seem to wince away from telling it like it was, or how he felt it was, about either himself or about the people he knew. The fact that at the very start of the book he says that he's so self-centered proves that. Some readers, especially today's readers who develop good bullshit detectors, would've never believed him had he claimed to have retained the humbleness that his early years might've instilled in him. Copping to his flaws immediately endears him to his readers, and some of them (like me) are willing to go through his life story with him. He also doesn't spare any of the people he writes of this trait. His entry on Robert Heinlein for example focuses more on how he viewed his fellow "Big Three Author" as a lackluster human being. His in-laws of his first marriage, particularly his mother-in-law, are also given a blunt assessment. Still, Asimov's already innate self-awareness of his own imperfections as a person and levity of tone seem to make these assessments come off less like character assassinations (something writers have a long history of doing in their work) and more like honest impressions. He is frank, but in a gentle manner.

His other great virtue, at least from my reading of the book, was Love.

Asimov devotes several chapters to his family. He discusses his first marriage--which was not a happy one, but did result in his two children--with great candor. His second wife, Janet, turned out to be the love of his life, and he discusses at length their relationship over the course of several chapters. He devotes several chapters to his children, writing particularly lovingly about his daughter Robyn. Prominently, he also talks of his parents and siblings (he was the oldest of three, and he had a brother and a sister), flaws and all (his honesty ever present), all of whom had an undoubtable impact on his life.

This love doesn't just apply to his family however. Asimov also takes time to write about his many relationships with his fellow science fiction writers and editors. Two of the most endearing chapters are the ones be devotes to Frederick Pohl and Harlan Ellison. He talks of how in awe he was of some of them, even going so far as to say that Harlan was a far superior writer than he was.

Spread throughout the book, Asimov also writes of his other great love: his work. Asimov's greatest non-human love is his work, which is the universal case for all writers. He talks about it, at length, in different ways. He first describes how it was that he came into Science Fiction, which firmly hooked him into his writing life. He then transitions into how he started writing non-fiction, which in the end is what he produced most because, to paraphrase him, it was easier to write than fiction yet still gave him the pleasure of the "actual operation of writing." He also discusses how and why he came to develop his signature clear style of writing, along with how and why he wrote so much over his lifetime.

He makes this love abundantly clear in Chapter 66 titled "Prolificity." Asimov writes:

"How does one become a really prolific writer? It is a matter to which I have given much thought and it seems to me that the very first requirement is that a person have a passion for the process of writing. I don't mean that he must enjoy imagining he is writing a book or enjoy dreaming up plots. I don't mean the he must enjoy holding a finished book in his hands and waving it triumphantly at people. I mean he must have a passion for what goes on between the thinking of a book and its completion. He must love the actual operation of writing, the scratching of a pen across a blank piece of paper, the pounding of typewriter keys, the watching of words appear on the word-processor screen. It doesn't matter what technique is used as long as he loves the process. […] I have that passion. I would rather write than do anything else."

Now, for a fellow--though less successful--writer like me, you might think that Asimov's thoughts on writing would be all that I'd find interesting. However, though I did find his insights interesting, the part of his memoir that I ended up enjoying the most was the section on his early years. The parts I connected to the most in particular were his reflections on his immigrant experience.

Asimov had been born in Russia, sometime between November 1919 and January 1920, shortly after the Russian Revolution. In 1923, he and his family came to the US, so he had no real memory of his native land. His parents never taught him Russian, though they did teach him Yiddish, so his primary language growing up was English, which he learned in school, leading to him, as the oldest of three children, to act as the unofficial interpreter for his parents when dealing with non-Yiddish speakers.

These small details resonated with me the most because they mirrors some details of my life. I was born in Honduras and came here with my parents and older brother at the age of 1. I grew up with the knowledge that I wasn't a native-born American, even though I was an America citizen (thanks mom). However, I didn't learn Spanish growing up (mainly because I had a hard time learning to speak and read English and ESOL programs didn't become commonplace until I was a high-schooler), so English is my first language. Also, like Asimov, I have two siblings, but unlike him, I'm the baby, not the oldest. Like him though, I had a fairly rocky relationship with both of them over the years while still managing to remain close to them.

Though the memoir was a hefty, door-stopper, drop-it-on-your-foot-break-all-your-toes sized tome, I found myself continuously compelled to keep reading. Asimov's clear and direct style allowed me to fly through in, section by section, page by page, and his informal and jovial tone making me want to keep going. In a way, it was like reading the text of a great monologist as he spun the many yarns and meandered into the many digressions that both make up his life and give you and insight into his mind. If you've never read memoir or biographical nonfiction before, yet are curious to try, you couldn't have a better beginning than with I, Asimov.