I recently read My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul. As the first official biblio-memoir that I’ve read, I must say I’m inspired but not impressed.

Though I have only one semester/quarter left in my MFA program (I graduate in August!), my mentor noticed that I love to write (and talk) about books. I recognized this noticing as factual. As a kid, I’d corner my mother in long car rides with pesteringly long recounts of whatever book had gripped me at that moment. I was impossibly giddy whenever I discovered someone was reading the Percy Jackson series at the same time as me, no matter if we were in the same book or not, if they were farther along than me in the series or not. I was just excited that someone wanted to talk to me about something I had spent hours of my life thinking about thus far. I’m an external processor, too. It’s hard for me to digest a book without chewing on it, either through speaking or writing about it. And I forget books I don’t digest; the words flow through my eyes and bounce off my brain, unstuck. So as I mentioned, my mentor noticed this. There’s a level of enthusiasm that consistently pokes its head out in my literary analyses, which in contrast can sometimes hide in my creative writing. She mentioned biblio-memoir may be my niche, or at least a niche I should explore.

In my final semester/quarter, I’m feeling oddly directionless, so the biblio-memoir mention is a welcome genre to latch onto. Maybe this would be my niche, or maybe it would be a dead end. The only way to find out is turn in its direction, full-speed. I googled “biblio-memoir” and found My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul to be one of the most common examples of modern biblio-memoir, so when I found it a day later at Chattanooga’s favorite used bookstore, McKay’s for $6, I knew it was fate.

It’s clear Paul is an excellent writer and far more well-read than I am, but her style of prose and “personality” wasn’t always my favorite. In fact, I was convinced I didn’t like the book until chapter 14 or so (about halfway through). It wasn’t until then that I started to realize what Paul was doing, at least in my perception and understanding of biblio-memoir. When I first heard the term, my mind went through all the different ways it could be defined, and a few google searches informed me that an “official” definition doesn’t technically exist. The only official definition I found was actually a new word suggestion on a site called “Collin’s Dictionary.” Collin’s definition states, “a memoir about the books one has read.” Still, Paul’s book as a whole seems to operate as a definition in and of itself – each chapter seems to serve as a different way to define the term.

For example, the book is written in mostly chronological order as Paul moves through Bob, her “Book of Books.” Bob is a notebook in which she has recorded every book she’s ever read. Rather than diaries or journals like most writers keep, Paul keeps Bob. The book follows the various stages of life she was in at the time of reading certain books, moving through her life as a 17-year-old (when she started Bob) all the way to the present (the time of My Life With Bob’s publication). Much of the beginning of the book sounds juvenile, and I feared the entire book would read this way. However, part of Paul’s “genius” is that the book seems to grow as she grows. Her voice matures as she matures. In the first few chapters, her reading list and recounting of her life at that time operate more like a series of events, with little critique or digestion of the books she’s reading. Of course, she connects the plot, characters, even narration techniques to her life as a teenager and young adult, but the books don’t seem to change her or meaningfully inform her thought processes, at least not on the surface. Many of those first few chapters seem very surface level, and Paul admits to sometimes reading just to fill in the pages of Bob, rather than really ingesting and digesting the text. I felt slighted in the fear that biblio-memoir consisted more of tasting books and comparing and contrasting them with the writer’s “real” life, rather than really chewing on and living with a book.

However, as the book progressed, so did Paul’s ingestion and digestion of the books she recorded in Bob. By chapters 14 and 15, Paul had married and divorced her first husband. Their divorce, Paul details, stems from a large fight they had over a book they’d both read and understood differently. It is revealed later that the book is not what they were actually fighting about; their differences in politics, which stemmed from larger differences in beliefs, ultimately caused the schism. But their engagement with the book brought the differences to light. This was one of the forms of biblio-memoir that I was hoping and searching for when I started My Life with Bob, and it wasn’t until these chapters that I figured out Paul’s genius. Biblio-memoir can exist as an “alongside” writing, where a writer weaves the plot points and character defects or virtues alongside her own story, as in the first few chapters. At the risk of judging an entire genre on the basis of a few chapters in one book, I was sure I wasn’t a fan of biblio-memoir, or as my mentor had commented, that much of the writing in this genre has not been done well. But after chapters 14 and 15, Paul’s life with the various texts grows more critical. She sits with the texts and allows herself to chew some things up and spit them back out, rather than soak everything up like a sponge, only to have it seep out unnoticed.

Paul’s book in many ways follows a similar pattern of a coming-of-age story, but I appreciated how each chapter could be used to interpret the genre “biblio-memoir” differently. I also appreciated her use of quotations; as someone who relies too heavily on a quotation to do the work for me, I found Paul to be an excellent instructor on how to incorporate quotations that have been fully digested in her thought process and argument. She doesn’t gem-display, as my mentor has so aptly put it.

Overall, My Life with Bob was definitely not my favorite book, but Paul’s work has definitely inspired me to begin writing my own versions of “biblio-memoir,” especially as a spring-board of sorts. And I cannot wait to read more in the genre, especially now that I’m convinced there is no “right” way to write it. Paul defined the term in as many chapters as her book, so I’m also convinced I can do the same.

Have you ever read biblio-memoir? If so, drop some suggestions in that comment section. Ya girl needs all the help she can get!