Has there ever been a worse word than "memoir"? Is there any other word that calls to mind childhood, self-aggrandizement, long-windedness, and cancer? Is there any other word that so effectively makes you not want to read a book? I just looked over my cubicle wall and asked Charles Mudede for the first thing he thinks when he hears the word "memoir," and he said, "It's going to be boring. It's going to be long. Memoirs don't start, 'I put my dick in her.' They start, 'At night my father came home and had an argument with my mother...'" It's true. Even the best memoir (hell, book?) published in the past decade, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, is a couple hundred pages long and begins with Eggers watching his mother and father die of cancer.
The very awesome new book The Mystery Guest is also a memoir, although its cover doesn't say "a memoir," it says "an account." Nicely played, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The author is Grégoire Bouillier, who has "one of the most passionate cult followings in French literature today" (according to the jacket), who has never been published in English before now (this translation is by Lorin Stein), and who has nothing to say about childhood or parents or cancer. It begins with Bouillier taking a nap in his clothes on a cold Sunday afternoon and being woken up by the phone. The person on the line is a woman who walked out on him with no explanation four years earlier. "I could hear how soft and gummy my voice was, how drowsy sounding, and without even giving it any thought I realized that she must under no circumstance be allowed to know she'd woken me up." They talk. Instead of getting the dialogue, we get his swerving, swirling thoughts, which eventually shape themselves around this fact: She's called because this is her year to bring a "mystery guest" to a friend's birthday party, and she's inviting him. He accepts. He hangs up.
The rest of the book, until its freakishly brilliant ending (which I won't describe), is an extended crisis. "Her call had plunged me into a hellish slough that I'd considered well behind me, and that all of a sudden wasn't, and I fell back into sickening black thoughts I thought I'd exorcised... I felt like tearing the skin right off my face." Pages later, a different mood entirely: "I was desperate to hold our love in my arms one last time, to feel the dizzying force of it..." There is eventually some action, but not much. The buying of wine. The ringing of a doorbell. Seeing her at the party. Smiling. It is not a long book, and it's the opposite of boring, and even though the sentence "I put my dick in her" is nowhere to be found, it's implied everywhere. If this is "an account" then Mrs. Dalloway is "an account." And, actually, Mrs. Dalloway comes into it at the end—
I'll shut up now. 
