Justifiable Conduct

Erich Goode is Sociology Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University. He has published ten books including Moral Panics (coauthored with Nachman Ben-Yehuda), The Paranormal, Deviant Behavior, and Drugs in American Society; seven anthologies; and articles that have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and an array of academic journals. He is a Guggenheim fellowship recipient, and he has taught at half a dozen universities, including the University of Maryland, New York University, and the University of North Carolina.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1 IntroductionCharles Van Doren, “Herb Stempel Was the First to Agree to the Fix”Jim Bouton, “If We Explain We’re Shooting Beaver, They’ll Understand” The Transgressive I, the Exculpatory Account2 Autobiography and MemoirMemoir and AutobiographyThe Memoir ExplosionLiteral Facticity: Does It Matter?James Frey, “I Honestly Have No Idea”3 Autonarrating TransgressionThe “I” and the “Me”Vocabularies of MotiveIs to Explain to Condone?The Presentation of SelfAccountsTechniques of Neutralization: Theory or Concept?To Whom Are Self-Exculpations Addressed?In Sum: Neutralizing Deviance4 Criminal BehaviorJoe Bonanno, “This Is How I Earned My Living”Edward Bunker, “What Else Could I Do?”Jack Henry Abbott, “If You Behave like a Man, You Are Doomed”Jordan Belfort, “$12.5 Million! In Three Minutes!”Accounting for Crime5 Substance AbusePete Hamill, “This Is What Men Do”Susan Cheever, “Drinking Was Part of Our Heritage”Steve Geng, “I Was Romanticizing Lives of Crime”William Cope Moyers, “I Was Doomed to Fail No Matter How Hard I Tried”Accounting for Substance Abuse6 Sexual TransgressionsRoman Polanski, “Everyone Wants to Fuck Young Girls”Kerry Cohen, “My Parade of Boys Continues”Melissa Febos, “I Took Aim and Flicked the Whip toward Him”Kirk Read, “I Wanted to Be Shirley Temple”Accounting for Sexual Transgressions7 Political DevianceElia Kazan, “I Was Notorious, an Informant, a Squealer, a Rat”Norman Podhoretz, “The Theory Circulated That I Had Gone Mad”Malcolm X, “I Never Have Felt That I Would Live to Become an Old Man”Cathy Wilkerson, “The Intention Was Not to Cause Carnage but Chaos”Accounting for Political Transgressions 8 Accounting for DevianceHow They Account for ThemselvesSearching for Common ThreadsLooking BackReferenceIndex

"Erich Goode's Justifiable Conduct is a deeply considered and wildly fascinating look into the craft of memoir. This book should be required reading for those who read, write, love, or loathe memoir. This important contribution to a genre that has become a heated topic of debate, in both literary circles and popular culture, is a must read."-Emily Rapp, Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design; member of the MFA faculty at the University of California, Riverside; and writer