Readers' Advisory: Memoir
This page briefly defines and discusses the history of the memoir genre of literature, recommends several memoirs of the past ten years in the subgenre of "problem" memoir, and suggests some guides to writing your own memoir.
- Definitions
- History
- Recommended Memoirs
- Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
- The Sweeter the Juice: A family memoir in black and white by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip
- The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
- Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
- The Glass Castle: A memoir by Jeannette Walls
- Recommended Memoir Writing Guides
- References
- Biography
- Any book devoted to telling the life story of an individual by someone other than the subject.
- Autobiography
- A text about the (usually entire) life of the author.
- Memoir
- A text told from the perspective of the author involving a more focused, more emotional, and often more introspective representation of a life than typical autobiographies. Memoir is also distinguished from autobiography for its tendency to emphasize the perspective of the present moment on the past, and frequently, the focus on a particular facet or moment of a life. Memoir is also less frequently about the lives of the famous or infamous than biography or autobiography.
- Problem Memoir
- A subgenre of memoir treating minoritized or otherwise problematized subjectivities (e.g. racial or sexual minorities, the mentally ill or their children, the addicted or their children, the working class, etc.). In her study of memoir, Jill Ker Conway uses the term "grim tales" to discuss this subgenre and argues that "along with the changed sense of time and the abandonment of a central cultural poiont of view has come a new kind of narrative authority for the young, for ethnic subcultures, for those of different sexual persuasions, for the handicapped, for victims of abuse--in short for anyone whose questions about life fall outside the central narrative of worldy success, or of moral and spiritual growth, or of power and its exercise--once the main themes of autobiographical writing" (When Memory Speaks 152).
Perhaps more than many other genres, memoir is difficult to isolate from its relatives and precursors. For example, the narrative of Christian experience has had many of the earmarkers of memoir since St. Augustine's Confessions (c. 400). Similarly, both the travel and wartime narratives of empire's earliest days (e.g. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing in 18th c.) and the slave narrative of abolition (e.g. Oladah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladah Equiano in 1789) have much in common with today's memoir. Autobiographies of the famous and great like Benjamin Franklin's and W.E.B DuBois helped define and redefine the US in ways parallel to the redefinitions of nation and subject in the more recent "problem memoirs" discussed below. Jill Ker Conway argues that since the 1950s, autobiography (and with it, memoir) has become, on the one hand, recognized as a genre of literature worthy of study and, on the other, an extremely popular area for recreational reading. The immediacy and intimacy of the coverage of the current wars have created a new group of recent war memoirs (see Randy Dotinga's "Iraq war books do a quickstep into print" in the Nov. 30 Christian Science Monitor for more information http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1130/p14s03-bogn.html)
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
2002. New York: Picador.
It is a remarkable achievement that a family so bizarrely, so colossally, wrong and unquestionably damaging to a child’s psyche can be described with both uproarious humor and real tenderness. This is Burroughs’s achievement in Running with Scissors. In telling of his mentally ill mother’s abandonment of him to the still crazier family of her therapist, his budding queer sexuality, and his eventual flight from it all, Burroughs balances his hurt with his own awe at the weirdness of his life. Wisely, Burroughs never makes his current healthy outlook on it all seem too easily won.
For more information see Burroughs' website: http://www.augusten.com/index.html
The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip
1995. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Haizlip’s is an epic and fundamentally American story. The Sweeter the Juice is less a first-person account of a life than a kind of archeologist’s notebook during an excavation of one family’s home, complete with family photos. A member of a choicefully black family which was abandoned by other family members who chose to become white, Haizlip is motivated by anger, hurt, and confusion to research and write this book. The Sweeter the Juice is the result of that work and is an important examination of one family's and one nation's relationships to race.
1995. New York: Penguin Press.
With its larger-than-life incidents and characters, The Liars’ Club reads so much like a good, page-turner novel that it is sometimes hard to remember that it is a memoir. It traces Karr’s working class childhood in Texas with a vibrancy and wit that make the reader simultaneously relieved not to have been there during Karr’s painful childhood, wishing they could have known the little girl reflected in the book, and grateful to gotten to know the little girl Karr and her family in the pages of the memoir.
For more information, see Karr's Penguin webpage: http://www.penguinputnam.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_0143035746,00.html
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
1999. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Angela’s Ashes is a painfully beautiful or beautifully painful memoir about the radical poverty of Frank McCourt’s childhood in Ireland. McCourt moves his readers quickly and masterfully between incidents and emotional registers always bringing them back from the edge of too much despair with another wise or wise-cracking present-day reflection. If McCourt’s narrative is moving and his language a delight, it is McCourt himself who is the real reason to read this memoir. The grace, humor, and generosity of spirit he brings to his world and his readers are priceless gifts.
For more information, see McCourt's Simon and Schuster webpage: http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?sid=33&pid=479554
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
2005. New York: Scribner.
The child of radically quirky, if not utterly dysfunctional, parents who chose homelessness over being “on the grid,” Walls grew up denying the deprivations of her childhood and finding success as a journalist in New York. Walls’s is the least introspective of the memoirs recommended here. Despite her desire to tell her story, this emotional distance from the pain of her childhood and its seeming restyling as being at peace with her experiences suggest, at least to this reader, that the author may still be denying something of where she came from and what it means. Even with that said, the world of Walls’ family is well worth visiting, especially because we are unlikely ever to have been anywhere like it before.
For more information, see McCourt's Simon and Schuster webpage: http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?sid=33&pid=504986
Recommended Memoir Writing Guides
Daniel, Lois. 1997. How To Write Your Own Life Story: The Classic Guide For The Nonprofessional Writer. 4th ed. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. 
Ledoux, Denis. 2003. Turning Memories Into Memoirs: A Handbook For Writing Lifestories. Lisbon Falls, ME: Soleil Press.
Rainer, Tristine. 1998.
Your Life As Story: Discovering The "New Autobiography" And Writing Memoir As Literature. New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc. 
Conway, Jill Ker. 1998. When memory speaks: Reflections on autobiography. New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Inkspell. Dr. Z's Education Website. http://www.inkspell.homestead.com/memoir.html
