"Memoir: A History"

What is Memoir?

The word memoir is from the French mémoire, meaning memory or reminiscence. Gore Vidal said, “A memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double-checked.” Nancy Miller, said, “I could write down what I remembered; or I could craft a memoir. One might be the truth; the other, a good story...” (Both quotes are from page 3, Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda, an excellent book on the genre.)

On page 62, Yagoda points to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions (1782) as embodying four principles that were “revolutionary at the time” and are now “commonplace among contemporary memoirists.” These are:

1. A belief in total frankness and honesty

2. An emphasis on the inner life of the mind and emotions rather than on the external one of action

3. A significant attention to childhood and youth

4. A recognition that mundane matters can be as earth shattering as a grand battle.

Yagoda says (page 268),

“Memoirs have all kinds of agendas. Some are narrow (settling scores) and some large (glorifying God); some have to do with craft (telling a good story), some with commerce (selling a lot of copies), and some with politics (bringing about the end of slavery)."

A good memoir tells a good story, and only some rise above the fray. Speaking of which, James Frey sullied the genre with his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in which he depicted his experience with addiction. The book is a page turner, and Oprah named it for her book club, helping it become a best seller. Unfortunately, it was discovered to be highly exaggerated and then re-marketed as a semi-fictional novel. But the story has a prequel! On page 246 of Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda writes, “Whenever a scandal erupts, one particular response is guaranteed to be uttered. It is a rhetorical question to this effect: ‘It’s such a good story—why didn’t he [or she] just call it fiction?’ A short answer is that James Frey tried just that with A Million Little Pieces and found no buyers until he changed the label to memoir.” If I were including books here that are semi-fictional or quasi-memoirs, I would include it and certainly almost anything by David Sedaris.

In this introductory guide, I’ve called out seven memoirs published between 1933 and 2018 that I had not read before. My least favorite of this selection is the 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London because George Orwell reveals little of himself or his thoughts and acts more as a journalistic observer. (He is not of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau school of confessions.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the present, Sally Field's In Pieces, is full of self-revelatory insights. In Pieces, and Fun Home (2006) by Alison Bechdel, are my favorites of this selection for their honesty, fair assessment of themselves and others, and a generous intimacy with the reader about how they grew and evolved. This is what helps one memoir rise above the rest. Good writing and a sense of humor help, too.

Note: The page of "Lists" is only skimming the surface of memoirs in each category, and there are many more categories, too. I could have included lists of rock and roll musicians (but many of them have ghost writers or "help from," including Keith Richard's wonderful Life.) I could have included memoir lists of athletes, scientists, atheists, artists, critics, CEOs, etc., etc., but I hope over time that this site will grow and evolve to include refinements and more information.

How Can Libraries Support the Genre?

A librarian at the University of Alabama, Benita Strnad (sic), says two things in her 2012 blog:

1. “Memoirs have become a hot genre in the last few years. A recent article I read claimed that memoirs comprised the largest title list in the non-fiction area of publishing, and it is growing. The reason: people are reading them.”

2. “Memoirs are how the author remembers his or her life. Since memoirs aren’t fact checked they tend to be vague and disputable.

It is for this reason that I don’t usually read memoirs.”

But she goes on to make an exception for Frank McCourt’s three memoirs, Angela’s Ashes, Teacher Man, and ‘Tis. Though she refers to them as “misery memoirs,” she admits she became “engulfed in Frank McCourt’s world.”

There may be a resistance to memoir as a genre from librarians for the second reason Ms. Strnad cites above. Some may think they fall dubiously between biography and fiction. Using the same logic that if a child who will read a picture or comic book may be on their way to other reading, perhaps librarians can think of memoir as a step in the direction toward getting people to express themselves, even if a disreputable person like James Frey mars the genre occasionally. Not every genre includes only superlative examples of its kind in libraries.

Ben Yagoda writes (Memoir: A History page 239): “Dictating his own memoirs, At Random, in the late 1960s, Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, commented that when he started in the publishing business, in the 1920s, 'fiction outsold nonfiction four-to-one. Now that ratio is absolutely reversed, and nonfiction outsells fiction four-to-one.' The reversal reflects the craving we have developed for the literal. Fiction has become a bit like painting in the age of photography—a novelty item that has its place in the Booker Prize/Whitney Museum high culture and in the genre-fiction/black-velvet-Elvis low but is oddly absent in the middle range.”

Reading and writing are natural partners. In the future, I would like to start a memoir writing group for anyone who wants to try their hand at journaling, for starters. It can be daunting to reach deep and put a pivotal, painful or meaningful memory "down on paper." This kind of effort is being made in as unlikely places as prisons and nursing homes and can be very healing. Who might have an Orange is the New Black in them that hasn't yet been written?

Yagoda writes (page 240): "Thus while only a handful of recent memoirs, such as This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club, can take their place with literature of the first order, the boom has spawned hundreds—if not thousands—of worthwhile books.”

Ben Yagoda, pictured above, is the author of Memoir: A History (2009). This book gives a thorough and brilliant history of the memoir "genre," from Julius Caesar to James Frey. You could study this book for a year for the breadth and depth of the insights and the many works discussed.