One of the world’s best-known management gurus, Tom Peters, recently took to Twitter seeking opinions on whether he should write his memoir. Alongside, he lived up to his reputation as a crusty, no-nonsense man by adding the caveat that the discussion was professional and not about “for your grandkids”!
Memoirs are easy pickings in the books business. Even minorly famous personalities including starlets from films and entertainment, celebrity chefs and journalists, feel the need to tell us everything there is to know about their lives. Sadly most of them are disappointing and even embarrassing. Take this extract from a recent memoir of a Bollywood actor: “Why do you take on these extreme challenges? I’m often asked. Why do you always choose the most difficult way to do things? Why can you not stop wanting to do something more challenging than what you have already done? Now those are questions that I can answer. And the simplest, most succinct answer is this—because it’s such a massive, glorious head-rush. You see, there are many routes to wisdom.”
Well!
Not surprisingly, in his tweet Peters dubs most memoirs, “mostly an ego trip and a monument to self-aggrandizement”. And former PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi, whose biography My Life in Full is just out, says in an interview with Mint: “I didn’t want to write a memoir. This book has my story as a backbone but also lessons that came out of it. That’s why its not a tell-all or a book with incidents that make people uncomfortable.”
Peters, though, is an institution, a veritable school for practitioners and students of business. Fortune magazine sized up his contribution pithily: “We live in a Tom Peters world." Nor is he new to writing, having authored hundreds of articles and over 20 books including the seminal In Search of Excellence, co-authored with Robert Waterman and often considered among the greatest business books of all time. Judging by their content, his autobiography should be an absolute page-turner. To date, there have already been three biographies about the man: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon, by Stuart Crainer; Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution, by Robert Heller; and Narrating the Management Guru: In Search of Tom Peters, by David Collins.
When such a man baulks at the idea of doing a memoir, there has to be something truly frightening about it.
Over the years, there have been several kinds of memoirs, mostly terrible but with some honourable exceptions. There are those by famous people who have done fascinating things throughout their life, and give us a peek into it through their memoirs. In this category there’s Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom or even I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai. Then there is the more tangential memoir of the kind that’s the best-selling Becoming by Michelle Obama, whose role as First Lady of the US placed her in the unique position of being an observer to a momentous period in the country’s history.
Both kinds are frankly a bore. They are relevant as a record but their literary merit tends to be stifled by too much goodness. Even the honest bits somehow tend to show the reader his place. They also do little to enhance the already considerable reputation of their authors and much to cast them as hypocrites.
And then there is the utterly execrable memoir of the celebrity by accident of birth who has little to show for his life but insists on telling us about it. This is the dime a dozen book that you will find littered across bookstores at airports mostly stacked around the jewel of that kingdom Confessions of an Heiress by Paris Hilton. Sport books are a variation of this category, being equally self-obsessed and full of inconsequential details with Greg Norman's Greg Norman, and Lance Armstrong's It's not about the bike, perfect examples. The latter, in fact, needs to be classified as fiction in the light of what we now know.
The truly moving memoirs, the ones that inspire, frustrate, amuse or depress us, without ever leaving us cold, are few simply because they call for a very high degree of honesty and detachment. And almost always they are written by self-effacing authors who have a story to tell, not a face to sell. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is a perfect example of that.
Of course, Peters is a celebrity, and his intellectual baggage might be too heavy for a memoir.
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