Meredith Maran - Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature

Ive given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You cant divorce a book.

Gloria Swanson

G lorias right. You cant divorce a memoir. But, as the twenty successful authors in this book attest, you can (and some do) divorce, disown, de-friend, or defame a memoirist. If you want to ruin your life and/or others, theres really no more surefire method than writing a true-life tale according to you.

Why, then, do so many authors risk public, private, and/or professional excoriation for the dubious pleasure of writing about themselves? What is it about sharing ones deepest thoughts, feelings, and experiences with others that makes it worth the mayhem and mishegas?

Without demand, of course, there would be no supply. So we must also ask why we read memoirs. For centuries, readers, reviewers, and social commentators have been gobbling up first-person narratives, all the while diagnosing the books authors with attention-seeking disorders. Is the urge to read memoirs the same urge that makes us peek into strangers undraped windows at nightnot just because were nosy, but to learn something from how other people live, in order to live better lives ourselves?

Whatever the reasons for our attachment to memoir, its a phenomenon thats unlikely to go away anytime soon. The genre has been around since St. Augustine wrote his thirteen-volume Confessions around A.D. 400. In one form or another, memoir lives on todayin the journal entry, blog, confessional e-mail, or Facebook post you wrote an hour ago. Forgive us, Descartes; todays philosophy of existence might best be expressed thusly: I overshare, therefore I am.

People who love memoirs claim that the telling of the true-life story is the contemporary incantation of oral history, an invaluable contribution to the enlightenment, the collective consciousness, perhaps even the evolution of the species.

People who dont love memoirs say the genre is a scourge upon the human race, a playing field upon which attention-craving, sensationalistic, crass, and craven narcissists head-butt and navel-gaze their way to the bestseller lists.

Between the covers of this book, twenty very different memoirists share their very different reasons for doing what they do and their sometimes different, sometimes overlapping approaches to the controversies that surround the genre.

Im always asking myself if material I have from my own life would be best used in a novel or a memoir or a short story or an essay, says Cheryl Strayed. I was moved to write Wild as a memoir because I thought that was the best way to tell that particular story.

I actually never intended to publish a book, says Ishmael Beah, whose bestselling