Siding

The first rule of reading memoir is to expect an unreliable narrator. Even the most gifted writer can be forgiven for some manner of curation. Memoirists also face potential blowback from their supporting players. Imagine how anyone might feel if their marriage, parenting, or friendship skills were laid bare in someone else’s book.

I think it’s fair to say that truth might be more easily found in fiction than memoir. It’s much easier to get away with a thin veil and a composite when you can also claim you made the whole thing up.

I still love the memoir genre, though, and read it regularly. It isn’t all that often that I have the curiosity to read both sides of a dispute. However, the Woody and Mia story is one that I find endlessly fascinating. What emerges when you read both books in short order?

1. Doomed Love Even with all their eventual rancor, neither disputes that the beginning was rosy. Woody talks about his starry-eyed admiration for both Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn and how inadequate he felt when he first started dating Mia. She was the superstar while he was just a working-class Brooklyn boy. Mia is similarly glowy, describing a courtship of Bach and e.e. cummings that sounds like something straight out of Hannah and her Sisters.
2. The Satchel Effect Both acknowledge that their relationship irretrievably broke down around the time Mia got unexpectedly pregnant. Woody’s take on this is misogynistic, claiming that Mia trapped him with the pregnancy and tossed him aside. He even calls the fetus “a megaball in utero.” It does not occur to him that Mia might have been exhausted with three young ones and that might explain her distance. For her part, Mia cautions the reader that Woody is nothing like the lovable neurotic in his movies. He is often cold to her and her six older children and becomes aloof right around the time Satchel is conceived.

3. Hannah Hate Curiously, neither has much good to say about Hannah and her Sisters, which is arguably their most popular collaboration. The both love The Purple Rose of Cairo, though.