A couple of days ago I wrote a post posing the question, “Is my life interesting enough for a memoir?” Searching the web yesterday to review posts on memoirs and family histories as I often do, I was struck with some new thoughts on the subject.
Second, the people doubting that their lives are interesting enough for a memoir misunderstand the difference between memoir and autobiography. An autobiography seeks to factually and completely document one’s entire life. A memoir does not necessarily do either. A memoir may deal only with an episode or a slice of life. Novelist Gore Vidal said of memoir, its “how one remembers one’s own life.” A memoir is less an effort to document than to reflect upon something memorable. The subject can be mundane like Peter Mayle’s, A Year In Provence, which is simply an account of his domestic life in the South of France, or tragic like Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she tries to sort out a chain of events in which her daughter suffers septic shock and is placed in a drug induced coma and her husband of 40 years, novelist John Gregory Dunne, dies of a heart attack. A memoir can just as well be of a moment as a lifetime.
May I Speculate in a Memoir or Family History?