Jim Knipfel - Subsequent Memoirs

Subsequent Memoirs

After Slackjaw, Knipfel wrote two additional memoirs, Quitting the Nairobi Trio (2000) and Ruining It for Everybody (2004). In contrast to his first book tour, Knipfel remained in New York City to promote Quitting the Nairobi Trio, a chronicle of the six months he spent in a locked psychiatric ward in Minneapolis following his last suicide attempt. Critics were largely impressed with Knipfel's second memoir, although there was one recurrent caveat: the chapters containing descriptions of Knipfel's personal hallucinations while at the ward did not work. Ellen Clegg in The Boston Globe believed that while personal hallucinations are "important to the beholder don't always translate in the wider world" and Daphne Merkin in The New York Times expressed how her interest flagged "only when went into lengthy descriptions of his wearyingly vivid dreams". In the introduction to Quitting the Nairobi Trio, Knipfel explains that although he has had hallucinations in the past, "they've always faded in time", and yet the hallucinatory events of those first few days, as he settled into the psychiatric ward, are easier for him to recall than very recent events, because these hallucinations mysteriously have "a tenacity and clarity unattributable to any simple unconscious reaction in the brain's biochemistry".

A few years after his third memoir was published, Knipfel stated in a 2007 interview with Leonard Lopate that he was finished writing memoirs, and instead would concentrate on fiction. His sentiment on his memoirs was: "I had three of them out before I was forty, and I think that's just asinine."