Memoir

Dick Gregory was a comedian and Malcolm X was a world-historical figure. But possibly more influential, in literary terms, was a quartet of books by “ordinary” people that appeared in succession in the following years: Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown (1965); Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas (1967); Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), by Anne Moody; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (1969).²⁸ Growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, Claude Brown was involved in gang life and petty crimes. With the encouragement of a mentor he grew close to at reform school, Dr. Ernst Papanek, he enrolled in Howard University and eventually wrote an article about Harlem for the political magazine Dissent. That attracted the attention of an editor at Collier Books, who gave Brown $2,000 to write his autobiography. Unfortunately, soon afterward, Collier was absorbed by Macmillan and the assigning editor departed. In 1964, Macmillan hired a young editor named Alan Rinzler. “I was given a tiny office which had a cardboard grocery box under the desk,” Rinzler recalls today. In it was Brown’s 1,500-page manuscript. Rinzler says, “I realized it was ground-breaking, electrifying, and totally original from the very first pages I kept turning.” He worked with Brown to cut the manuscript down to size and came up with a compelling title. The book made an immediate splash, for its realism and its supercharged language, and for the notion it introduced: that a young man’s story of growing up on the streets of Harlem was the stuff of autobiography. Among many raves, journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Claude Brown makes James Baldwin and all that old Rock of Ages rhetoric sound like some kind of Moral Rearmament tourist from Toronto come to visit the poor.” Manchild quickly reached the bestseller lists and ended up selling more copies than any other book Macmillan has published, with the exception of Gone With the Wind.

Brown’s success paved the way for Thomas (a black Puerto Rican who told a similar tale of his own Harlem childhood and youth), Moody (who grew up in the rural South and was active in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s), and Angelou, a dancer, actress, teacher, journalist, and activist, who had lived the kind of life one would have expected to find in a Toni Morrison novel. She came to write a memoir (according to a New York Times account) because of one day in 1968 when she and some other people were at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer, telling stories about their childhoods. The next day, Feiffer’s wife, Judy, phoned Random House editor Robert Loomis and told him that he had to get this woman to write a book. Loomis asked; Angelou said no. But in a subsequent conversation, the editor told her, “It ’s just as well, because to write an auto biography as literature is just about impossible.” And then Angelou agreed to give it a try. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which tells such a dramatic story and is written in such a fresh, compelling manner that it has been continuously in print since its publication, begins when Angelou is three. Her parents’ marriage ends, and she and her brother are sent to live with their grandmother, a storekeeper in Stamps, Arkansas. A few years later, after the children are returned to their mother in St. Louis, Angelou is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She becomes mute: “I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk.” She didn’t speak again for another five years. By the end of the book, she has moved to San Francisco, worked as the city’s first black female streetcar conductor, and given birth, out of wedlock, to a son. And she ’s only seventeen—meaning that she had plenty of material for her many subsequent memoirs.

These works were actually combining two separate autobiographical traditions into a soon-to-be inordinately popular new one. The first tradition, heretofore largely confined to the British Isles and the Continent, consisted of books that followed the example of Edmund Gosse’s 1907 Father and Son: literary figures, including Maxim Gorky, Edwin Muir, André Gide, and W. H. Hudson, writing memoirs of their childhood and youth, usually in a novelistic style, with scenes, dialogue, and character development. In his book about the genre, When the Grass Was Taller, critic Richard N. Coe gave it a name—the “childhood.” The 1960s American black writers took the concept—in the words of Thomas’s title—to the mean streets.²⁹ In 1967, the young American white writers Willie Morris and Frank Conroy were following their example (consciously or not) when they composed their first books, North Toward Home and Stop-Time, respectively, as autobiography rather than fiction. The critic Paul Fussell commented in 1970: “Twenty years ago, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time would have been costumed as a first novel. Today it appears openly as a memoir.”

Back in the 1960s, Brown, Thomas, Moody, and Angelou—and Mal colm X, Dick Gregory, and Eldridge Cleaver as well—were also mining a specific sort of material: the trauma of their pasts. That suggests the second tradition they were reinvigorating, and it was not a heavily populated one. The most notable precedent was the slave narrative itself. The most recent one was four decades old: the World War I memoir. Since the time of Caesar, retrospective accounts of battle had been the exclusive province of generals. But the Great War—shocking in its death and destruction, and fought to a greater extent than ever before by a literate battle force—yielded, for the first time, unflinching personal accounts by soldiers on the ground. Even so, this idea took several years to gain acceptance. In 1919, the English writer Herbert Read wrote a short, unvarnished memoir of battle but could not sell it: publishers, he later reported, were not interested in “anything bleak.” For some years, the only place to find non-whitewashed first-person accounts was in the verse of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. By 1925, the world was apparently ready for Read’s book, Retreat, and it was followed by an influential set of memoirs that focused on the costs, the ironies, and the horrors of war: Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (1929), Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (published in 1930 as a novel but changed little from Sassoon’s actual experience), A. M. Burrage’s War Is War (published in 1931 under the pseudonym “Ex-Private X”), Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality (1932), and Testament of Youth (1933), by Vera Brittain, who had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in London, Malta, and France. A comparable memoir from the German side was Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel.

Interestingly, World War II yielded a smaller group of noteworthy memoirs, though much memorable fiction. The autobiographical accounts tended to be by British writers and to focus on the dramatic, exotic, and often horrific Pacific War. It included Richard Hillary’s account of his service as a pilot, The Last Enemy; George MacDonald Fraser’s and John Masters’s memoirs of Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here and The Road Past Mandalay, respectively; and the American Eugene B. Sledge ’s memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed.

The most horrific aspect of World War II—probably the most horrific event in the history of Western civilization—was the Nazi Holocaust. A number of memoirs by survivors appeared in the years immediately following the war. In her book Writing the Holocaust, Zoë Waxman reports that Yad Vashem, the Israeli archive, library, and museum of Holocaust studies, has counted seventy-five of them published between 1945 and 1949 in a range of languages, notably Yiddish (fifteen books), Hebrew (thirteen), and Polish (twelve). The list included two books that would be translated into English and gain global acclaim years later. Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who, beginning in 1942, was confined in four different concentration camps. Soon after his liberation in 1945, Frankl composed in just nine days a manuscript chronicling his experience in the camps. He had “the firm conviction that the book should be published anonymously,” but at the last minute he was convinced by some friends to put his name on the title page—that version of the book was called (in translation from the German) Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. (It is one of history’s sad ironies that the profound truth of the title should have become one of the late twentieth century’s most vapid clichés.) Still, Frankl never sought glory or to present himself as a “witness”; rather, he wrote years later, “I wanted to convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.” The English edition, published in 1959 and supplemented by an outline of Frankl’s theory of “logotherapy,” was called Man’s Search for Meaning. According to the afterword of a 2006 edition, to that point the various editions of the book had sold more than twelve million copies in twenty-one different languages.

Primo Levi was a Jewish Italian chemist who was captured by the Fascist militia in December 1943. He was transported to Auschwitz shortly afterward and spent eleven months there before liberation. Like Frankl, he felt compelled to tell his story and completed a book quickly: for Levi it took “a few months.” At that point, he recounted late in his life, “the manuscript was turned down by a number of important publishers; it was accepted in 1948 by a small publisher who printed only 2,500 copies [under the title If This Is a Man] and then folded. So this first book of mine fell into oblivion for many years: perhaps also because in all of Europe those were difficult times of mourning and reconstruction and the public did not want to return in memory to the painful years of the war that had just ended.” Republished in Italy in 1958 and, under the title Survival in Auschwitz, in English in 1959, the book was recognized as a classic and Levi as a major writer. In 1963, he wrote a second memoir, The Truce, about his journey from Auschwitz back to Italy. And until his death in 1987, in essays, poems, stories, and his book The Periodic Table—a tour de force that combined memoir, meditation, and a sense of language and form equal to the finest fiction—he kept returning to his experience in the camps.

A handful of first-person accounts were indeed published in New York or London in the immediate postwar period, and they deserve mention: Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary and Leon Szalet’s Experiment “E”: A Report from an Extermination Laboratory (both 1945); Albert Menasche’s Birkenau (Auschwitz II): How 72,000 Greek Jews Perished and Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Smoke over Birkenau (both 1947); Ella Lingens-Reiner’s Prisoners of Fear and Gisella Perl’s I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (both 1948). But the books did not penetrate the American public’s consciousness. Of them, only Berg’s, a teenage girl’s record of Warsaw life under Nazi cruelty and deprivations, was reviewed (favorably) in The New York Times. Experiment “E,” a firsthand account of Szalet’s eight months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at the beginning of the war, was listed in an article about forthcoming titles; none of the other books was mentioned in the Times’s pages even once.³⁰

The relatively small number of such memoirs in the immediate postwar period is not surprising. Elie Wiesel, a native of Romania who endured a horrific experience in the camps as a teenager, and who would eventually become the most widely read memoirist of the Holocaust, subsequently explained (in his book A Jew Today):

I knew the role of the survivor was to testify. Only I did not know how. I lacked experience. I lacked a framework. I mistrusted the tools, the procedures. Should one say it all or hold it all back? Should one shout or whisper? Place the emphasis on those who were gone or on their heirs? How does one describe the indescribable? How does one use restraint in recreating the fall of mankind and the eclipse of the Gods? And then, how can one be sure that the words, once uttered, will not betray, distort the message they bear? So heavy was my anguish that I made a vow: not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least ten years.

When that ten years had passed, Wiesel started to speak, and he has not stopped. He began his first book on board a ship to Brazil, where he had an assignment as a freelance journalist. He wrote “feverishly, breathlessly,” and ended the journey (according to his account in his later memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea) with an 862-page manuscript that he called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). On board that same ship, he met a Brazilian publisher, who brought the book out in Buenos Aires. In 1958, a significantly shortened French version was published in Paris under the title La nuit, with an introduction by the Nobel laureate François Mauriac, who had become a friend of Wiesel’s and encouraged him to write and publish his memories.

Wiesel’s American literary agent, Georges Borchardt, began sending the French manuscript to New York publishers. Fifteen turned it down. “Nobody really wanted to talk about the Holocaust in those days,” Borchardt told The New York Times in 2008. A typical comment came from an editor at Scribner’s, who wrote him, “It is, as you say, a horrifying and extremely moving document, and I wish I could say this was something for Scribner’s. However, we have certain misgivings as to the size of the American market for what remains, despite Mauriac’s brilliant introduction, a document.” Finally, in 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang bought it for $1,000. Spare, poetic, and riveting in its unflinching description of the horrors Wiesel experienced, Night got favorable reviews but sold just 1,046 copies over the next eighteen months. The book had legs, however. Passed from one admirer to another, eventually included in many middle school, high school, and college and university reading lists, and given a further boost when Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Night had, by early 2006, sold some six million copies in the United States and been translated into thirty languages. In January of that year, Oprah Winfrey selected Night for her television book club, and one million paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed in a new translation by Wiesel’s wife, Marion, and carrying an “Oprah’s Book Club” logo on the cover. Within a month, Night was number one on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list. It spent the next eighty weeks on the list, selling three million more copies.

The most famous and widely read Holocaust memoir was neither a memoir nor, strictly speaking, about the Holocaust. It is sort of a companion piece to Night, written by a Dutch girl just a year Wiesel’s junior. In 1942, when Anne Frank was thirteen, the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, and shortly afterward Anne and her family were forced to hide in the top floor of an office building. She began keeping a diary and continued it for the next twenty-five months, until the family was apprehended in 1944 and deported to concentration camps. Anne herself died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The only member of the family to survive was Anne ’s father, Otto Frank. After the war, he was presented with the diaries by a friend who had preserved them. They were published in Dutch in 1947, and then in England and the United States in 1952 (with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt), under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was a bestseller and inspired a 1955 play and a 1959 film, both great successes; to date, the book, published in dozens of languages, has sold millions upon millions of copies. In retrospect, it appears as an almost necessary transitional step in the world ’s dissemination of the Holocaust. Within the confines of the book, nobody is brutalized or torn from her family, and only in the last line of a brief epilogue is Anne’s fate (dispassionately) revealed: “In March 1945, two months before the liberation of Holland, Anne died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.” In 1952 and for years afterward readers could not handle anything more than that. Yet the book is neither a whitewash nor an extended euphemism: in and of itself, it is a powerful document that flinches from nothing.³¹ Much of its power comes from presenting the most remarkable case of dramatic irony—a situation in which an audience or readers know important information that a character does not—in the history of the printed word. Anne is very bright and sensitive and eloquent but also a normal teenage girl, with normal worries and concerns, including her crush on the boy who is in hiding with her; her innocence about the happenings in the world outside, and her ultimate fate, lend an overwhelming poignancy to the happenings in the attic.

The African-American autobiography of the late 1960s and the Holocaust memoir were both “documents” (to borrow a word from the clueless editor who turned down Night): testaments to the wrongs suffered by a people coming from the pen of a survivor. Given the prominence and success of both genres, it was probably inevitable that the victims of individual, as opposed to social, travail would replicate their stance. Traumatic tales that had hitherto been consigned to vanity publishers, published under pseudonyms, or turned into fiction now were exhibited in the sunlight as memoirs, signed by the authors who wrote them. Such books—many of them, it so happened, by people who were one step removed from celebrity, or who were prominent but not quite famous—streamed forth in the middle and late 1970s. Some notable examples: Conundrum (1974), by Jan Morris, who had originally been James Morris, a noted journalist, and whose book chronicled her sex change; Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express (1975), an account of schizophrenia by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s son; Percy Knauth’s Season in Hell (1975), a veteran journalist’s recounting of his battle with suicidal depression; First, You Cry (1976), by Betty Rollin, a television news correspondent, about dealing with breast cancer; and Haywire (1977), by Brooke Hayward, the daughter of the film star Margaret Sullavan and the agent Leland Hayward, who quotes herself, at the age of twenty-three, summing up her life story to a friend: “I’m the daughter of a father who’s been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I’m twenty-three and divorced with two kids.” Haywire , published by the prestigious house Knopf, was a critical and popular success, spending sixteen weeks on the Times bestseller list. In The Times of My Life (1978), former First Lady Betty Ford described her addiction to alcohol and painkillers. Child abuse entered the memoir via Mommie Dearest (1978), by Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina, and Going My Own Way (1983), by Bing Crosby’s son Gary, both of whom describe being beaten up by their famous (and deceased) parent.

The mid-century normative memoir—the genre of The Egg and I; See Here, Private Hargrove; and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies—was kaput. It soon had a successor, whose parameters were established by a series of books that came out in a period lasting less than a decade. Most of these titles still resonate in the zeitgeist:

1989: This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, Tobias Wolff 1990: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron;

A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, Richard Rhodes

1991: Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey, Martin Duberman; Patrimony:

A True Story, Philip Roth

1992: Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette; Making

Love: An Erotic Odyssey, Richard Rhodes

1993: Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen; A Child Called “It”:

One Child’s Courage to Survive, Dave Pelzer

1994: Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy; Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir, Elizabeth Wurtzel; Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore

1995: The Liars’ Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr; Secret Life:

An Autobiography, Michael Ryan; An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison

1996: Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt

1997: The Kiss: A Memoir, Kathryn Harrison

Not much happy talk here: these books chronicled dysfunction, abuse, poverty, addiction, mental illness, and/or bodily ruin. And there was none of the coyness or veiling strategies of earlier works on such subjects. Thus Girl, Interrupted tells exactly the same kind of story of female adolescent mental illness as had the novelized The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden some thirty years before. The difference of three decades is that Susanna Kaysen leads off her book with a facsimile of the first page of her own case record folder at McLean Hospital (where Sylvia Plath herself had been committed and to which she had given a pseudonym in her novel), complete with her name, her parents’ names and address, her date of birth, and her diagnosis of “borderline personality.” These authors faced the camera straight on and told the truth—the more unsettling, shocking, or horrifying the truth, it sometimes seemed, the better.

The first memoir on the above list was in some ways uncharacteristic of the flood that followed, but it did much to establish a template for the genre. Picking up This Boy’s Life today, one encounters several key conventions even before starting to read it. The first is on the cover: the subtitle, A Memoir. As was noted on page 2 of this book, the singular form (as opposed to the plural “memoirs,” a venerable, slightly pretentious equivalent of “autobiography”) had previously been a designation for an author’s extended reminiscences of another person.³² I credit Tobias Wolff with inaugurating the current usage. Also immediately apparent is the book’s lack of photographs and an index: subtle signs that it is more literary than literal. (Books of history and biographies almost always have this apparatus; novels, never.) Still, before the text proper comes a list of Wolff ’s previous works—two short story collections and one novel. Thus he was countering the tradition among literary folk in which your auto biography was the last, or nearly the last, book you wrote, the tradition followed by Gibbon and Trollope and Henry James and William Dean Howells and H. G. Wells and W. Somerset Maugham and nearly every other author of the past two centuries. Finally, between the dedication and the epigraphs comes an author’s note, where Wolff thanks some friends and colleagues, and notes:

I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I’ve allowed some of the points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make this a truthful story.

The manifesto is brief but remarkable. It begins with the suggestion that any factual discrepancies in the narrative to come—Did an event occur in February or March? How good-looking was the dog?—are trivial. But then, with a misleading stylistic affability that masks his will, Wolff asserts his power as a storyteller. He writes, “I’ve allowed some of the points to stand,” but what he means is, “I’m going to tell this the way I want to.” Memory is an impression, not a transcript. Doing one’s “best” to tell “a truthful story” involves not conducting interviews or reading dusty clippings but consulting one’s heart. That is the baseline position of the modern memoir. Surprisingly, Wolff neglects to say that he has changed the names of all characters in the book except for himself and his mother. Subsequently, it would become standard practice to have a small-type statement on the copyright page. I quote semi-randomly: “This is a true story. To protect the privacy of the participants, the names of most of the characters have been changed, as have some details about them and the events recounted here.” (This one—the inevitable reaction to which is “What part of ‘true’ don’t you understand?”—comes from Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man.)

But I mentioned that This Boy’s Life was to some extent atypical of the many books that followed it. This is clear once you read the opening sentences, which are:

Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. “Oh, Toby,” my mother said, “he’s lost his brakes.” The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us.

By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff ’s edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder.

For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.

The quality of the writing—simple, assured, specific, and vivid—is unusual enough. But the key to the brilliance of This Boy’s Life is the second sentence of the final paragraph quoted, which, in the adult Wolff ’s unsparing rendering of his younger self, is about as good as a sentence can be. A one-line précis of the memoir would probably cast it as being about young Toby’s abuse (mostly verbal) at the hands of the man his mother eventually marries, Dwight. But in its characters, its perspective, its insight, and its wit, the book transcends the trauma it recounts.

Probably not coincidentally, Mary Karr was a student of Wolff ’s at Syracuse University, and The Liars’ Club, though its writing was demotically lush where This Boy’s Life’s was spare, was a worthy literary successor. So was Angela’s Ashes, about Frank McCourt’s miserable Irish boyhood, also stylistically a world apart. Both Karr’s and McCourt’s memoirs were also fabulously successful, taking residence on the New York Times bestseller list for a year or so each and ringing in a period in which publishers opened up their checkbooks and paid big (usually too big) bucks to ordinary people with troubled youths. Many of these memoirs, from the early 1990s through the present day, revolved around, were defined and branded by, a particular ailment or condition. Their value tended to be less literary than social or journalistic in putting a human face on the problem; this value sometimes was lessened by the authors’ self-pity or self-aggrandizement and/or a not wholly convincing happy and redemptive ending.

The most commercially successful of all these books was Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It.” In prose that occasionally descends to melodramatic cliché but is usually simple and straightforward, it tells the story of the abuse Pelzer received at the hands of his alcoholic mother, who systematically beat him, burned him, starved him, humiliated and verbally abused him, and on one occasion stabbed him in the stomach. The book takes him to the age of twelve, when concerned teachers alerted authorities and he was placed in a foster home. Originally published in 1993 by a small Nebraska press, it was picked up in 1995 by Health Communications, a self-help publisher known for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Spurred by Pelzer’s appearance on Montel Williams’s talk show and his never-ending lecture tour, the book cracked the New York Times paperback bestseller list in 1997 and stayed there for an astonishing 333 weeks—almost six and a half years. Pelzer continued his story with The Lost Boy, about his years in foster care, which spent 228 weeks on the Times list, and A Man Named Dave, about his adult life, which in 2000 checked in for a stay of “only” 82 weeks.³³

As popular as Pelzer’s books were in the United States, they had an even greater impact in Britain, where they not only sold brilliantly but, in concert with more literary efforts like Angela’s Ashes, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, ushered in a new genre: the “misery memoir.” By roughly 2000, these tales of extreme woe had established themselves as a major player in publishing, with their nearly interchangeable titles and pastel covers with a photograph of a plaintive child. Marketed mostly in supermarkets and to women, the genre reached its peak in 2006: according to The Bookseller, 1.9 million misery memoirs were sold that year, accounting for eleven of the one hundred top-selling paperback titles.

The extreme misery memoir is a particularly and somewhat alarming British taste, like Marmite or mushy peas. (BBC Online columnist Carol Sarler suggested that the phenomenon shows that “as a nation, we seem utterly in thrall to paedophilia. We are obsessed with it. And now, with these books, we are wallowing in the muck of it. It’s all rather disgusting.”) But though the American version has been milder, it started earlier, is more wide-ranging, and has provoked more harrumphing.

Starting in the early 1990s, the flood of memoirs was met with criticism, regret, and annoyance—often expressed in arguments and tropes that had been first used as far back as the 1830s. The most satisfyingly bilious early volley came from the critic William Gass in a 1994 screed in Harper’s magazine. Gass had a few choice words for celebrity autobiographers—“celluloid whores and boorish noisemakers whose tabloid lives are presented for our titillation by ghosts still undeservedly alive.” He saved the bulk of his scorn for the genre itself:

Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety? . . . To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster. . . . Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, “I was born . . . I was born . . . I was born”? “I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A’s.”

To the familiar charge of narcissism came a new accusation: extreme unseemliness. Michael Ryan’s Secret Life, a well-known poet’s story of sex addiction brought on by childhood abuse, includes an oft-cited scene of the author having sex with his dog. (This was actually not a first: the British writer J. R. Ackerley also had some man-on-dog carnality in his posthumous 1968 autobiography, My Father and Myself.) In Making Love—a follow-up to A Hole in the World, in which he recounts his childhood physical abuse at the hands of his stepmother—Richard Rhodes describes every aspect of his sexual history, including a chapter on his formidable masturbation regimen. Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man describes, in (literally) painful detail, his own loss of virginity to a stranger in a London bed-sit. He recognizes this will unsettle some readers, and he doesn’t care. He quotes a friend, now dead from AIDS:

Is this more than you want to know? as Stevie used to say, listing the weirdo side effects of chemo, the propulsive diarrhea. . . . When I’d talk about this book before he died, balking at the details of my first fuck . . . Stevie would wag his finger at me and say, Rub their faces in it, Paulie. Nobody told us anything. You tell them.

It’s one thing to sacrifice your own privacy or dignity. But a memoir necessarily involves at least some members of the rest of the world, and recent memoirists have frequently been chastised for their alleged betrayal of family and so-called friends. Traditionally, the characters who had come off worst in memoirs were dead at the time of publication, which makes sense, since the dead can’t sue the author for libel or invasion of privacy, punch the author in the nose, or air the author’s dirty laundry in a memoir of their own.³⁴ The classic modern case is Ernest Hemingway’s brutal treatment of his long-deceased friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, which he completed in 1960, just before his own suicide. He starts with their initial meeting, in which he was struck by nothing so much as Fitzgerald’s feminine looks: “He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.” That leads to a series of chapters in which Hemingway appears determined to chip away at the reputation of a rival. The final set piece is almost predictable: Fitzgerald confides to Hemingway (of course, no one else is present) that he is insecure about the size of his penis.

That Fitzgerald could not sue or protest is a pragmatic matter. What about doing the right thing? Can other people, alive or dead, be honorably sacrificed to the betterment of someone else’s commercial enterprise, i.e., his or her book? The better memoir writers had always been aware of the moral ambiguity of the enterprise, and implicated themselves as much as or more than anyone else. Maxine Hong Kingston began her classic and unclassifiable The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977) with this unforgettable self-indicting sentence: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’ ” In his 1991 Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth describes cleaning up his elderly father’s shit. Mr. Roth says, “Don’t tell Claire,” referring to Roth’s companion (and later wife), Claire Bloom. The writer replies, “Nobody.”³⁵

As the 1990s progressed, those nuances and complexities were cast aside, a process crystallized in three memoirs that appeared at the end of the decade. In the much-publicized The Kiss: A Memoir (1997), Kathryn Harrison details a longtime incestuous relationship with her living father. Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World: A Memoir (1998) describes her creepy and, in her account, borderline-abusive sexual relationship with a man old enough to be her father, the exorbitantly reclusive (and alive) J. D. Salinger. Published the same year, Lillian Ross’s Here But Not Here: A Love Story recounts her decades-long affair with Salinger’s buddy and editor, the almost-as-private William Shawn. True, Shawn wasn’t living at the time of publication, but his widow was. And no one who knew the longtime New Yorker editor could possibly think he would have been happy with passages such as this one:

Bill was attracted physically to all kinds of women. He lusted for beautiful models pictured in magazines; for wild American movie stars, such as Louise Brooks; for French movie stars, such as Simone Signoret or Annie Gi rardot or Françoise Rosay or Jeanne Moreau; for English movie stars, such as Julie Christie; for Italian movie stars, such as Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren; for Swedish movie stars, such as Liv Ullmann or Bibi Andersson; for big brains, such as Susan Sontag or Hannah Arendt; for singers who phrased like Mabel Mercer or Rosemary Clooney; for women with little-girl looks; for women with Alice-in-Wonderland hair or gamin haircuts; for strange women he had noticed for an instant, days or months or years earlier, getting into a taxi or buying a newspaper; for fat women (the fatter the better); for elderly women who resembled his mother (full-bosomed); for athletic women, as long as they resembled the tennis star Evonne Goo lagong; for women wearing aprons or silk-print dresses or sleek suits or nothing. In later years, he was attracted to Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave, and Madonna.

In 2000, Dave Eggers made an impressive attempt to kill the memoir, or at least to deconstruct it until it was unrecognizable. Eggers was an exorbitantly talented young writer who had had an eminently memoir-worthy experience: when he was twenty-one, both his parents died of cancer, and he became largely responsible for raising his seven-year-old brother. He wrote a sprawling manuscript about what happened, called it A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and adamantly refused to use the subtitle A Memoir, choosing instead Based on a True Story (this was dropped for the paperback edition). He included sections where characters acknowledge their existence in the book, scenes of pure fantasy, and various prefaces, footnotes, and addenda in which he comments on the text, or on anything that happens to cross his mind.

The book was an impressive tour de force, a critical hit, and a big bestseller, all of which may have been why it did nothing to slow, much less stop, the parade of memoirs. Even the doubters and haters had to admit defeat. Back in 1996, at the peak of the memoir backlash, the critic James Atlas put in his two cents on the deficiencies of the genre. “We live in a time when the very notion of privacy, of a zone beyond the reach of public probing, has become an alien concept,” he lamented.

THE CRITICS WERE RIGHT about some long-term trends that contributed to the memoir boom: more narcissism overall, less concern for privacy, a strong interest in victimhood, and a therapeutic culture. As long ago as 1956, the critic V. S. Pritchett noted a “tremendous expansion in autobiographical writing” and ascribed it, in part, to the “dominant influence of psychological theory.” The understanding that it’s not only an acceptable but a good thing to lie on a couch in public, as it were, and disgorge personal stories has only grown since then. Carolyn See, author of the 1994 memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, shrewdly pointed to the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous and the recovery movement as another key forebear: “Those people in AA in the late 40’s and early 50’s can be said to have reinvented American narrative style. All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for a great pitch.”

These trends came together in the empathetic 1990s, the era of Bill Clinton’s feel for pain, of Oprah Winfrey’s furrowed brow and concerned nod. Oprah and her many fellow TV and radio talkers were crucial not merely in setting the mood but also in selling the units. In the publishing environment of the time, promotion was seen as the key to commercial success; the key to promotion was getting on talk shows; and the best way to get on a talk show was with a dramatic or unusual personal story. Once a novelist answered the “Is it autobiographical?” question, the only thing left to discuss was No. 2 pencils versus Microsoft Word. But Elizabeth Wurtzel could talk about how Prozac helped her manic depression, and Mikal Gilmore could talk about what it was like to be Gary Gilmore’s brother! Julie Grau, the editor of Girl, Interrupted, explained to Vanity Fair in 1997 why memoir trumped fiction in the marketplace: “You can send the ‘I’ out on tour.”

There were other factors as well. 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. Certainly, when it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction’s day is done. Referring to her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Abraham Lincoln called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who started this Great War.” But that was then. The most recent novels to have had a social impact, or that were even paid attention to in any national debate, were the muckraking works of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair in the first decade of the twentieth century. Today, for a didactic text to be taken seriously or even attended to, it requires a certification of documentary truth.³⁶

On the other hand, the memoir—defined and determined by its subjectivity—dovetailed with a doubt or denial of “objective truth” that gathered force throughout the twentieth century. In the 1980s, an unfamiliar pronoun began to appear in works of academic philosophy, history, literary criticism, anthropology, and other fields: “I.” An especially popular formulation was “I want to argue that,” introducing a clause that, twenty years earlier, would have been the entire sentence. (A 2009 search on “Google Scholar” for the phrase “I want to argue that” turned up 9,060 hits.) The natural culmination of this trend was for scholars to eschew scholarship in favor of actual memoirs; and sure enough, this was done in the 1980s and 1990s by professors Frank Lentricchia, Jane Tomkins, Cathy Davidson, Alice Kaplan, Alvin Kernan, Paul Fussell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others.

Memoir is to fiction as photography is to painting, also, in being easier to do fairly well. Only a master can create a convincing and compelling fictional world. Anyone with a moderate level of discipline, insight, intelligence, and editorial skill—plus a more than moderately interesting life—can write a decent memoir. The classroom cliché “Write about what you know” is a cliché for a reason: intimate familiarity with the material is the most important factor leading to strong prose. Thus while only a handful of recent memoirs, such as This Boy’s Life and The Liars’ Club, can take their place with literature of the first order, the boom has spawned hundreds—if not thousands—of worthwhile books. Many have shed light on an impressive variety of social, ethnic, medical, psychological, regional, and personal situations. And many are just plain good. The memoir boom, for all its sins, has been a net plus for the cause of writing. Under its auspices, voices and stories have emerged that, otherwise, would have been dull impersonal nonfiction tomes or forgettable autobiographical novels, or wouldn’t have been expressed at all.

The ascendance of memoir as a boffo category made it easy for publishers to spot prospective authors; the equation was: Compelling personal story equals potentially lucrative memoir. Some of these deals led to crummy and/or self-indulgent books. But a lot of them led to memorable and creditable ones, and that seems the important thing. In the early 1990s, a biracial man from Hawaii was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Naturally, a publishing house signed him up to write his memoirs, and Dreams from My Father was published in 1995. It didn’t turn up on the Times bestseller list until 2004, a few weeks after its author, Barack Obama, delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Another biracial man, a journalist and musician named James McBride, confirmed only as an adult that his mother, who had always claimed she was “light-skinned,” was in fact Jewish and white, and had passed for black for years. In 1996, McBride published the story as a memoir, The Color of Water. The book, like many other memoirs, confirmed the wisdom of the writing-class bromide “Write about what you know.” It is compelling and authoritative and close-to-the-bone honest. In another era, the story would have been told in a magazine article, or a not especially believable first novel. Thanks to the memoir boom, it is a fine book.