Memoir

Memoir

Nowadays it seems we are simply deluged with memoirs. Recent years have seen the publication of memoirs from and about dogs and cats, rock stars and groupies, bad dads, good dads and alternadads, politicians from states red and blue, celebrities from the A-list to the D-list, and describing afflictions from autism to Asperger’s and addictions from methamphetamines to sex. Reading the intimate revelations of others has become our national obsession, and now in Memoir, critic Ben Yagoda gives us a much-needed biography of the autobiography.

Beginning with early chronicles like Caesar's Commentaries, Yagoda spans the history of the genre, from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, considered to be the first autobiography ever written, to Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors. And he analyzes the hallmark memoirs of the Western tradition, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

While Yagoda uses the words autobiography, memoirs and memoir to mean more or less the same thing, he points out that for years an autobiography had been understood to cover the full span of a life with the focus on the self, while a memoir might cover only a portion of it, with the focus traditionally on others and with an obligation to be exact about the facts. Yet he observes that in more recent memoirs the opposite has come to be true: in a modern memoir the focus is on the self, and a certain leeway or looseness with the facts is actually expected.

Of course these days the looseness may have gotten a little out of hand. Yagoda discusses the many memoir scandals of the 2000s, most notably the controversy over the numerous fabrications in the Oprah-anointed memoir of James Frey, A Million Little Pieces. Yagoda also discusses the history of completely fabricated memoirs, focusing on the “golden age of autobiographical fraud” of the last four decades and including the story of Clifford Irving’s famous fake autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

Yagoda examines a variety of historical trends and subgenres of memoirs, including Native American captive memoirs, slave narratives and courtesan memoirs (where men would occasionally be forced to pay so as not to be mentioned). And he looks at contemporary genres including canine memoirs like Marley & Me and the “shtick lit” books like Julie & Julia, written by people who undertake an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it, a genre that Yagoda notes actually began with Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Yagoda’s elegant examination of memoir is at once a history of literature and an absorbing examination of our thirst for gossip and our desire to remember—and to rewrite—our past.

Hardcover: 304 pages

Publisher: Riverhead Bks/Mbr Of Penguin Putnam ( November 12, 2009 )

Item #: 28-4710

ISBN: 9781594488863

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.76 inches

Product Weight: 15.0 ounces