of his life as a series of causative events: childhood begets adolescence, adolescence begets youth, and so on. The author thus organizes the work in strict chronology, usually dabbing in enough of the parents’ past to bring about his birth. (Readers will recognize a format similar to biographies.) As the life collects its periods and phases, the tone becomes self-justifying and is often trained on moral experience. The author’s purpose is to set the historical record straight, an idea based on the assumption that there is a single record and that the person who lived it can best document it. A good writer might tell a gripping story, but it’s not a requirement. What is required is that the author must have accomplished something notable—he may be a scientist whose discovery eradicated a disease, or a military leader whose campaigns were decisive—in order that the tale be written.
Despite the occasional female author, autobiography is a male genre. Such books typically promulgate career, heritage, social standing, or fame. In England and America, tall tales of the great man include The Education of Henry Adams (1907), in which Adams charts his development as an intellectual in the third person, and T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), which is the self-mythologizing reminiscences of his fighting alongside the Arabs who revolted against the Turks in 1916. Books written by public figures have at times been labeled “memoirs,” a literary genre, also concerned with historical events. Rendering the public life means leaving the private life either underdeveloped or ignored. What remains is commonly a tabulation (though it may be exciting to read) of whom one knew and what one witnessed—seldom what one felt. Autobiography and one’s “memoirs” generally avoid introspection and scenic drama and, instead, summarize the significant people and events in the author’s life.
In The Norton Book of American Autobiography, Jay Parini tells us that autobiography “might well be called the essential American genre” (11). This would be accurate were the form widely practiced. But it hasn’t been. In fact, its exclusivity as the story of a notorious or exceptional figure has probably censored more formal life-writing than it has encouraged. Parini, I think, wishes that autobiography were America’s genre because he’s enamored of a few very good books, two in particular: Franklin’s Autobiography and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Like armies massed at Gettysburg, these works pit two autochthonous New World lives against each other: Franklin’s book tells of how his thrift found a home in the burgeoning American economy, while Thoreau’s tells of how his thrift opposed that economy’s intrusions into the place-sustaining lives of Americans. In both stories, the authors attest to their liberation, often more ideologically than experientially. The tales represent political visions, endemic to this country, quite well. In Franklin’s conservative vision, the idea of liberation is harnessed to sin, going against the moral authority of God or church: whatever you’re freeing yourself from means you’ve already overdesired it. In Thoreau’s liberal view, the idea of liberation is harnessed to freedom from narrow-mindedness or enslavement; indeed, some can only be free when they are politicized and seize their rights. (With the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave [1845], a work that predates Thoreau’s, the title tells us that his tale is a personal testament to and a call for the release of a bound people, slaves and former slaves like Douglass. Yes, he’s the one who’s freed, but he portrays his freedom as an example to others.)
Leonard Kriegel has noted of Franklin’s Autobiography that “there is something missing … something essential, an absence not merely of the deeper self but of the very possibility of a deeper self” (213). I read America differently than Parini does: the deeper self is essential to American writers and artists but is not found in traditional autobiography. Unless you lived a life as consequential as Douglass’s or Franklin’s, you wouldn’t have (in the last two centuries) been drawn to write your life story, let alone think of it as such. Without a publisher’s blessing, your biography would not have been written, either. About the closest you would have come to anything full-length and life-assessing might have been the confession, a religious work in which your failings as a sinner would have been assuaged by your atonement. Indeed, some older confessionals are remarkably inner, albeit ideologically beset, in their focus. And yet despite the conditions that severely limited who actually wrote an autobiography, American writers have written auto-biographically. Which is to say, they have used personal experience in story, essay, poem, or travel account—in the short form—in service of a larger subject.
The autobiographical essay has, especially in the twentieth century, flourished as an alternative to, even a comment on, the over-wrought life story. As a memoir-essay, personal narrative, or personal essay, by either known or unknown authors, this compact piece has been published in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. (The personal essay’s most important innovator was the Romantic era’s William Hazlitt. As Phillip Lopate has written, Hazlitt “brought a new intimacy” to the form, “establishing as never before a conversational rapport, a dialogue with the reader” [180].) One of the greatest essayists, who uses the direct personal style in much of his work, is George Orwell. His 1931 tale “A Hanging” ranks among the finest short memoirs ever written. The piece tells of a Hindu man who, during the British occupation of Burma, is hanged in “classy European style,” that is, dispassionately and efficiently. The piece shudders with the Orwellian notion of a blithe state torturing a debased individual as it also glows with a familiar participatory truth. The idea that a personal narrative could be as exciting and intimate as a Hemingway tale has taken time to sink in, in part because the form has had to play second fiddle to the narrative invention of fiction. It wasn’t until Orwell’s several examples (“Shooting an Elephant,” “Marrakech,” and “How the Poor Die”) and those of writers as diverse as E. B. White and Zora Neale Hurston had captured readers with their participatory narrators that the form gained currency. (Of course, today, short and long sections of personal narrative grace books on psychology, economics, travel, science, even literary criticism, by authors whose direct experience gives their subjects greater weight.) The short memoir piece is spare, universal, confessional, and true. Who among us has not been touched by what is perhaps the best personal essay by an American, Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect,” first published in Vogue in 1961?1
The Memoir
It may be that the memoir has risen in the last two decades because the personal essay expanded its singular theme and fleshed out its emotional immediacy. It may be that the life story shrank its garrulous, self-important voice. In either event, the hull of traditional autobiography began to leak sometime during the 1980s. It was then that a new kind of storytelling emerged: short and midlength books, sometimes called memoir, in which the author chose a particular life experience to focus on. Heralding the new in particular were three books of intense interior drive: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), a story of mother-daughter closeness in which both, disturbingly, inhabit each other’s pasts; Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1988), a tale in a boy’s voice of his peripatetic mother and cruel stepfather that reads like a novel with fiction’s narrative punch; and Richard Rhodes’s A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood (1990), a harrowing story of two brothers who endure the abuse of a tyrannical mother and the neglect of a hapless father. Such books felt new, in part, because they lacked the scope of autobiography and the limitation of the essay.
Another publishing event, in 1995, also reshaped our sense of what memoir might be. This was the publication of the unexpurgated edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.2 The new edition included material Anne’s father, Otto, excised from the original when he first published her diary in 1947: Anne’s insight into his character, her budding and more explicit sexual feelings for Peter, and the anxiety she had about herself. Her anxiety was spurred mostly by difficulties she had had with her mother, which she discussed in passages that were also kept out. As great a book as the original edition was, we had not read, for a half century, Anne’s most trying revelations about her family, truths which, read now, only deepen her story. The new Anne Frank blossoms as a memoirist: we can finally see her as clearly as she once saw those suffering around her.
The
