Status Updates From Memoir: A History

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). When an action or quote or detail in a memoir is an obvious servant to its agenda, the standard of truth rises again, along with the reader’s eyebrows.

“The extremely minor writer Augustus Hare produced a staggering six volumes of memoir between 1896 and 1900, consisting of, in the words of critic A.O.J. Cockshut, ‘immense prolixity and innumerable boring anecdotes.’”

The auto biographical details, of course, are far less important than Twain’s wonderful and enormously influential voice, which introduced to subsequent comic memoirists from James Thurber to David Sedaris the near-nuclear power of a self-deprecating narrator deploying hyperbole based on shrewd and perceptive observation.

The American memoir is so capacious that it cannot be contained by just one category; this is the time of a million little subgenres. Even more popular than celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and eccentric-mother memoirs is the one memorably dubbed (by Sarah Goldstein) “shtick lit”: that is to say, books perpetrated by people who under Tooke and unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it.