Ten Years of Writing about Memoir Has Taught Me This

Memoir is the most entrepreneurial form of writing. It attracts inventors who are willing to take risks and use nontraditional skills and interests. Though their goal might be as simple as recording history, or telling stories, or finding meaning, their materials are original. They may use stand-up comedy (Jeannett McCurdy, Trevor Noah),  advocacy (Ibram X. Kendi, Andrea Petersen), or poetic expressions (Philip Levine, Hisham Matar); they may be naturalists (Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau), or biblio-autobiographers (Samantha Ellis), or social analysists (Joan Didion), or quasi-novelists (Karl Ove Knausgaard), or survivors (Hua Hsu, Václav Havel). We see ourselves in their words.