You should absolutely critique memoirs!
but for the love of god don't give them a star rating
Here’s something I’ve seen a lot of recently: Readers expressing their discomfort with the idea of reviewing memoirs, usually as a preface or postscript to their review of, well, a memoir.
It’s a discursive move that’s always present as a background hum on book platforms, but it appears with more frequency whenever the season’s it-book is a celebrity memoir. In June, that happened to be Elliot Page’s Pageboy and, sure enough, the top two reviews on Goodreads open with a disclaimer about the difficulty of rating someone else’s life story:
It feels odd to rate memoirs, as it feels inherently like rating the details of one's life as they lay them out so nakedly, so I want to be clear when rating and evaluating this book, in no way am I rating the actual content (stories/experiences) Page is recounting here, but rather just the way they are told narratively.
And:
I always feel so weird giving someone's memoir a 'star rating', particularly if it is someone I like or someone who's had a pretty rough time of it. Elliot Page is both those things, and I was really looking forward to this, read it in a day and felt really disappointed.
I don’t think this discomfort is wrong, nor do I think a reviewer expressing these feelings is necessarily bad. But the urge to frame a review in this way is worth interrogating to see what it can tell us about the practice of critique and, perhaps, how reviewers can do better.
First, we should be honest about what this feeling of discomfort can do: If someone feels uncomfortable reviewing a memoir, they’re probably less likely to do so. Or, if they do pen a review, they may hold back criticism for fear of seeming like they’re attacking the author. (I admit I’m speculating here; there’s obviously no empirical data on the number of reviews that people didn’t write. But this heightened possibility of self-censorship seems logical to me.)
The first reviewer of Pageboy makes an crucial distinction, though: They draw a sharp line between Page’s lived experience and how that experience is organized into a narrative, reserving their criticisms for the latter. I like this critical move: I truly believe we can and should be able to say “this story is poorly told” without making a judgment about the author’s life. In other words, saying “this memoir is not well-crafted” is not the same as saying “this memoirist is a bad person.”
Being able to make this distinction is vital if we’re going to have a healthy culture of criticism. Discernment is important! We should hold memoirs to a high artistic standard, and if a celebrity writes a disastrous autobiography, we should be willing to say so. (I haven’t read Pageboy, so this isn’t me offering a judgment on its quality, but there are undeniably some real garbage memoirs out there, from famous and non-famous writers alike.)
Moreover, readers just deserve good books! Criticism, ideally, is a way to signal our desire for works that are actually worth our time and attention. Writer and critic put this well in an essay about the unfortunate necessity of nasty reviews:
When it works as it should, a good pan functions much the same as plague or famine in an unbalanced ecosystem. It puts participants in the artistic community on notice that there are critical eyes and ears in the world who expect good artistic and intellectual value from the books they read, the concerts they hear, the galleries they visit. And inevitably, the message of every good pan—those that are functioning well in this ecosystem—is that someone has gotten high on their own supply: they have lost touch with the moral, intellectual, or artistic community that provides both the background and the reason for their work.
The idea that critical feedback can help improve the quality of the publishing industry is under severe strain in the present era of review-bombing and other forms of weaponized negativity. I’m no fan of Elizabeth Gilbert, but I don’t think the one-star harassment campaign inflicted on her forthcoming (now-canned) novel about Russia helped raise the standard for literary fiction in any way.
Still, that brings me to another point about reviewing memoirs, this one inadvertently raised by the other Goodreads reviewer of Pageboy. This person described feeling weird about giving the memoir a star rating in particular (and then proceeded to give the book one star anyway). And you know what? This is a case where I feel discomfort is warranted and an indication that reviewers need to change their practices.
As a rule, star-ratings and numerical ratings (i.e., giving a book 5/10 or whatever) are detrimental to criticism. They project an illusory aura of objectivity, as though criticism is a standardized test or a tool of scientific measurement. While assigning a star-rating doesn’t preclude a deeper, more substantive engagement with a book — a reviewer can of course do both — its use does suggest books can be definitively ranked and their worth quantified, especially when sites like Goodreads aggregate reviews into an overall rating.
This problem is particularly acute with memoirs. Yes, thoughtful reviews can, as I’ve already argued, criticize artistic and narrative choices rather than the content of person’s life. But there’s no flexibility or nuance in the star-rating as a tool of analysis. It’s a hammer, not a scalpel, and that’s true whether you’re awarding five stars or one.
The Goodreads reviewer who gave Pageboy one star also provided a very long and carefully considered assessment of why and how they think the book fails. But if you’re going to provide this kind of in-depth written critique, why bother with the star rating at all? Why participate in a reviewing practice that offers such shallow assessments? Why pretend that people’s life stories can be slotted into system of quantitative standards?
In this case, I think people’s instinctive discomfort is a sign that we should be doing something different. So let’s pan memoirs when they deserve it. But let’s not also undercut that useful work with the deplorable pseudo-rigor of the star-rating.