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Preface

For several years, I have wanted to write an essay on memoir, to immerse myself in my love of the form as writer and reader. My idea was to dwell on the period from now back to the late 1980s, when memoir burst forth sui generis from the castle of autobiography and the wilds of the personal essay. Like any child, memoir had had its issues with its parent, autobiography. In response, the patriarch, steadfast in its tenets and traditions, didn’t want much to do with memoir; so the fledgling ran off to find its own path in the world, going a little crazy with experimentation and daring. On its own for twenty years, the memoir still seems unfettered and undefined. Its persistent self-involvement attests to its exploratory zeal. Even its so-called failings are part of its mission. In our time, memoir dwells in a fleeting paradise, and some of us are trying to preserve the woods before the academic bulldozers enter with reference works and subject heads. To examine this expanse, I have found it best to mix criticism, psychology, reflection, essay, historical and cultural contexts—memoir is an American form—as well as my experience and that of others who are writing the form in the 2000s. To ground my ideas, I offer close readings of the important elements of sixteen memoirs.

Among the questions: Why is the form so popular? What is it people are seeking by writing memoir? Why is it that when we write of what we remember, the effect on us now is so important? Has the form shown a directional purpose in the two decades of its emergence? Based on my reading of more than one hundred contemporary memoirs and the drafts of student writers, I see memoirists focusing on the emotional immediacy of a singular relationship—unresolved feelings for a parent, a child, a sibling, a partner, an illness, a regret, a loss, a death, a phase like childhood or adolescence, a period like college. As they tell their stories, some authors expand the personal to such larger issues as heritage, gender, ethnicity, culture, the spiritual and natural realms, even time itself. In memoir, it doesn’t matter whether the primary relationship is long past or recent or even current, as long as the telling is relational and honest.

Self and that which the self contends with in the world make up one nexus. Another is the meeting between a past self and a present self, one or both impelling the writer’s insights now. Memoirists engage these selves by using the dramatic techniques of narrative, characterization, and description as well as the analytic styles of explication, essay, and reflection. With such stylistic possibility, much tension is created when self and other, now and then, drama and analysis are joined. The tension hurls us into a kind of vortex, whirling judgment, dizzying memory. The only way out of the vortex is to face the truth or, rather, face the paradox of telling the truth. In memoir, we don’t just tell the truth. We use the possibilities of the form to guide us into a process by which we try to discover what the truth of our lives may be.

Watching memoirists explore the possibilities of the form, I’ve been aided by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, in which he calls literature “an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” (6). Memoir is offering to readers and writers its own inexhaustible discoveries, proving itself adept as a literary form and as a means of self-disclosure. I would say that a memoir imaginatively renders our evolving selves and critically evaluates how memory, time, history, culture, and myth are expressed within our individual lives. To understand how the memoir has become a new literary form in our time is the reason I’ve written this book.