The Rise of the Memoir

The Rise of the Memoir traces the growth and extraordinarily wide appeal of the memoir. Its territory is private rather than public life, shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not the achievements celebrated in the public records. What accounts for the sharp need writers like Rousseau, Woolf, Orwell, Nabokov, Primo Levi, and Maxine Hong Kingston felt to write (and to publish) such works, when they might more easily have chosen to remain silent? Alex Zwerdling explores why each of these writers felt they had to write them - that they had no choice - as that story can be reconstructed from personal materials available in archival collections; what internal conflicts they encountered while trying; and how each of them resisted the private and public pressures to stop themselves rather than pursuing this convessional route, against their own doubts, without a reasonable expectation that such works would be welcome in print, and eventually find an empathetic audience. Reconstructing this process in which a dubious project eventually becomes a compelling product - a 'memoir' that will last - illuminates both what was at stake, and why this serially invented open form has reshaped the expectations of readers who welcomed a vital alternative to 'the official story.' -- from back cover.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.