Memoir: An Introduction

It was the best of times for memoir; it was the worst of times. So might it be proclaimed some years from now, people scratching their heads over memoir’s enormous popularity in view of the critical condescension it sometimes receives. Ben Yagoda’s 2009 Memoir: A History offers the remarkable statistic that sales in various subcategories of memoir ‘increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008’ (7). But alongside such evidence of a robust audience for memoir, the genre continues to be misunderstood*if not downright maligned. In a 2011 review of three memoirs in The New York Review of Books, for example, Lorrie Moore admits to ‘having some sympathy’ with the idea that ‘if your life were all that interesting, someone else would write a book about it’, and quotes Neil Genzlinger’s more disparaging remark that ‘‘‘unremarkable lives’’ should go ‘‘unremarked upon’’’. The autobiographical move in poetry and fiction hardly registers as unseemly even for younger writers; nor do we insist that novelists apprentice themselves to their own lives before writing a first book (consider the scramble to publish Zadie Smith’s manuscript White Teeth, when she was a first-year Cambridge student and barely 22). But the scorn for much contemporary memoir seems to cling to an old-fashioned notion of autobiography as the cumulative record of an older person, usually a man, thickly embedded in the forces of history. Anything else risks the charge of indecorous ‘navel-gazing’, even as readers line up for the next account of addiction or parental intrigue or the worldly travels of the author’s cat. It also happens that the truthfulness of memoir leads some to minimise the genre’s artistry, as if adherence to the facts of life obviates an author’s imaginative skills and makes a good memoir easy to write. Again, Moore reveals the bias, stating that ‘even’ so fine a memoir as Nabokov’s Speak, Memory fails to deliver ‘the brilliantly vivid and coherent dreams of his novels*because it simply can’t’. The fault is not so much Nabokov’s as memoir’s: the form cannot rise to the status of literary greatness. G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir: An Introduction takes stock of these contradictions as it elucidates memoir’s history, its formal relationship to the novel, its many contemporary iterations, and its rightful place on best-seller lists. Couser is an established scholar of life writing whose most recent books have concerned Life Writing, 2013 Vol. 10, No. 3, 353 356, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.802201