Joyful Recollections of Trauma
While so many memoirs could be considered documentary practice, I wanted to highlight this hilarious, heartbreaking book by comedian and podcaster extraordinaire Paul Scheer. I read it twice, once via audiobook and once via hardcover. I recommend either one - he reads the audiobook and if you're a fan of his immensely popular How Did This Get Made podcast, there are some fun easter eggs in the audiobook for you.
In the intro, Scheer talks about what led him to write down these stories: collecting. He's been a collector since childhood, collecting ticket stubs, matchbooks, journals: what we who work in archives call "ephemera." The ephemera of his childhood and adulthood lives in plastic boxes, in his garage. When he looks through the boxes on occasion, he'll remember a story, "I laugh touching the playbill for Martin Lawrence's You So Crazy Tour, thinking about how my dad got us last-minute tickets to see my favorite comedian at the time (we assumed the material would be like his TV show but quickly realized we were in for a very different night when Martin opened talking about how many girls wanted to fuck him...I learned a lot that night)."
The word "ephemera" comes from medical Medieval Latin, initially meaning "fever lasting but one day." In archives, ephemera applies to those paper products, the proof that something happened, a happening that people wanted to see and love, if only for a day. They are lovely, transitory objects. So - what lasts? Scheer says, "Sometimes it feels like I'm essentially re-creating the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark - boxes and boxes organized and stored, each full of stories, but with no one to tell them....These are stories that only a handful of people actually know. So for the first time, I'm opening my boxes up and putting my collection of stories on display for all to see." Though his impetus is to tell the stories behind the boxes, Scheer delves far deeper than the ephemera, letting us into a challenging childhood, hard-won truths and making us laugh along the way.