Why Daphene Merkin No Longer Teaches the Memoir Class at the 92nd St. Y

Date: April 11, 2008
Author: should have been me
Venue: 92nd St. Y
Free Drinks: no
Q & A: no
Book signed: NA
UE check number: 987378


Philip Roth, Daphne Merkin and Me :
What I Learned in Memoir Writing Class at the 92nd St.

These are some of the things I learned last March and April when I was a student in Daphne Merkin’s class at New York’s 92nd St. Y.

Merkin said “Philip Roth is no longer a good writer,” and “Most men are incapable of emotional intimacy.”

Grace Paley got off easier. “I have mixed feelings about Grace Paley,” while poet Mark Strand got a left- handed compliment. Merkin said he was a “dull poet, but a handsome man.” She didn’t temporize about Seymour Hersh. “One of my least favorite journalists.”

Merkin, who gained notoriety for her 1996 New Yorker essay about the pleasures of getting spanked, has taught the memoir writing class at the 92nd St. Y for several years. She is the author of a novel, a collection of essays and frequently writes for the New York Times magazine, where she is a contributing editor. She also writes for the New Yorker, Slate and the Bergdorf Goodman catalogue.

If the last outlet seems out of place in the list, Merkin thinks so too.

“A friend told me the Bergdorf Goodman catalogue was below me,” Merkin excitedly told our class. Merkin said she’d changed a lot of details in her story for the catalogue story, which is about the death of the dinner party, so that the person she was talking about wouldn’t recognize herself in the piece. “I didn’t think she would read it, but maybe her mother would.”

Merkin’s memoir writing course, “Through a Writerly Eye,” met six times in March and April from 6:30 to 8:30 on Thursday nights. It is one of the 92 St. Y’s “master” classes, which means that students must qualify for admission by submitting manuscripts, which are presumably read by the instructor. At $375 for the 12- hour class, each of us paid about $30 an hour to be instructed by Merkin. There were 12 students, three men and nine women.

The following observations grow out of my attendance at five of the six class sessions. All quotes are from Merkin unless otherwise identified.

Taking Merkin’s class was like being allowed to look in on a gruesome scientific experiment in which the instructor’s ego, freed from any of the customary restraints of a superego or some controlling administration, was free to thrash around the room. Naomi Campbell or any other free-to-act-out diva would be one comparison, but it was a class and we were paying for it.

It is doubtful that Merkin’s approach to teaching, blending a logorrheic stream of name-dropping and references to her career, her likes and dislikes, and her travel plans with what can be at best described as a casual approach to things like showing up on time would play for long at most colleges. If we weren’t treated to at least one name-drop or self-referential aside every 15 minutes, it was rare. Usually, they flew fast and furiously.

Nor would her laissez-faire approach to scheduling the consideration of student work fly in other settings. After all, one basic tenet of most writing classes is that student work is read and commented on by the instructor and the students. Thus, if one person gets twenty minutes of class time and another, two hours, there is a problem. Merkin couldn’t be bothered to allocate class time equally. Note: You don’t want to be the last one to go on the last night of a Merkin class. That was the woman who got twenty minutes.

“I don’t wear a watch.”

But the 92nd St. “Y” isn’t a college. Nor are all its classes like Merkin’s. April Reynolds’ advanced fiction workshop was sublime.

It’s OK to hold strong opinions. It was the self-absorption that was off-putting, the “as I said to my friend Kathryn Harrison,” or “ Roy Blount whom I sat next to at a dinner last night,” combined with the blatant lack of interest in teaching the class that gives a memorist of Merkin as instructor such rich material.

Merkin let us know that her important social interactions were elsewhere.

“I just spoke on a panel on Virginia Wolf with Peter Gay.”

“Brian Grazer, a director I know . . .” Actually, Wikipedia said he is a producer.

Merkin had trouble remembering student’s names and couldn’t recall who had presented their work and who hadn’t.

But one student said, as the class complained about Merkin’s late arrivals and lack of focus, that it’s always like this when you take a class with a “star.” She said film class at NYU with Martin Scorsese had been similar.

The Fifth class

Our second to last class was the best, or worst, example of Merkin’s approach. On Monday, emails were sent out notifying students that Thursday’s class was cancelled. On Thursday morning, emails were sent out saying it was on. I wasn’t confused because I didn’t get any of the emails.

In any event, most of us showed up. By now, we knew the one sure thing was that Merkin would not arrive for the class on time. To her credit, Merkin never missed a class this year. A former student in this same 92nd St memoir class told me that she just didn’t show up for classes that year. So even as I paint this picture of Merkin as a dysfunctional, uncaring, self-absorbed instructor, I have to say she didn’t blow off the class altogether this year.

At 6:45, Merkin’s assistant Lila arrived. She told us that Merkin missed her plane in London and was running late. But she was here in New York and was at her apartment reading the second of the two student manuscripts we were to consider.
Lila told us Merkin said she’d be there in 15 minutes, but added that meant at least a half-hour in Merkin time. She had instructions to read us an essay of Merkin’s from a collection called “The Reading Room” to occupy us.

But while most of the class members rarely objected to Merkin’s approach, this was a little much. The woman whose memoir was getting a quick read from Merkin said we should reschedule the class. The other student whose turn it was agreed with her.

In light of this rebellion, Lila called Merkin, moving into the hallway for privacy. They talked for about ten minutes. Lila returned to the classroom to say that Merkin was alright with cancelling, but if we did that, there wouldn’t be any rescheduling because she was going to Israel for Passover. That would exclude what would have been the seventh week of the class. Merkin was too tightly scheduled to squeeze in a make-up session any time after that.

That the chance of escaping from teaching one of the classes appealed to Merkin wasn’t a big surprise since she had said it be great if she could somehow get out of the last class during an earlier session. Lila’s news left the two writers undecided about what the best course of action would be. The rest of us were confused about what to do also.

At this point, the student who presented the memoir that among other bits contained some Ariana Huffington stories said we should just go through with it tonight. She might have had a point, but since the luck of Merkin’s chaotic approach to scheduling had given her nearly two hours of Merkin’s and our time in a previous class, I thought she should leave the decision up to the two writers whose night it was.

Minutes later the unlucky two whose turn it was that night caved. They asked Lila to tell Merkin we’d have the class that night.

At 7:30, Merkin arrived, made an apology and was about to start the class. But first, she told Lila to call an editor again and find out whether a reference in a story of hers he was working on had been cleared up. At that, Lila, said, “Are you kidding?” Presumably she meant that at 7:30, the guy wouldn’t be in the office or maybe it was the thirteenth time she’d been asked to contact him.

Merkin then joined the ongoing discussion of the first memoir we were looking at. She stayed until 9:10 that night, so while we didn’t get the two hours we paid for, we got more than one. Incidentally, the writer whose initial impulse was to reschedule got Merkin’s and our attention from 8:30 to 9:10. Would she have done better another night? Hard to say.

One mystery about the class is whether Merkin actually read our submissions in the application stage. As I mentioned, the deal with these 92nd St. Y Master classes was that getting into the class was a selective process. Presumably, the teacher picked the twelve best memoirs for the class. I don’t know whether Merkin read our manuscripts, skimmed them or how she selected us.

Merkin often had little recall of student work when as a class we reviewed stories that the writer said were either the same or a reworked version of their application piece. The former Merkin student who told me about Merkin’s no-shows the year she was in the class doubted that Merkin would take the time to read the submissions. She said that when she took the class, a few years ago, it wasn’t a Master Class. Given her exposure to Merkin’s teaching methods, she doubted that Merkin changed her approach when it became a “competitive entry” class.

If the class was less of a meritocracy that it was supposed to be, it would explain Merkin’s concentration on things that might have been taken for granted in an advanced class. More than once, Merkin went on at great length about M dashes, information we could have easily gotten from a style book. She also pointed out the linkage between reading and writing and said we should read a lot.

It wasn’t just me who felt like Merkin’s commitment to teaching wasn’t all-engaging. On the train ride home from a class, I suggested to a fellow classmate that we should invite Merkin out for a drink after the last class. This writer, a bit quicker than me in picking up on the Merkin style, said, “Oh, I don’t think that will happen. I think that would be a nightmare for Daphne.” I came to see how right he was.