Memoir  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 08:51, 30 July 2008

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As a literary genre, a memoir (from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory") forms a subclass of autobiography, although it is an older form of writing. Memoirs may appear less structured and less encompassing than formal autobiographical works as they are usually about part of a life rather than the chronological telling of a life from childhood to adulthood/old age. Like most autobiographies, memoirs are generally written from the first person point of view.

Gore Vidal, in his own memoir Palimpsest, writes that "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." It is more about what can be gleaned from a section of one's life than about the outcome of the life as a whole.

History

Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. In the eighteenth century, "scandalous memoirs" were written (mostly anonymously) by prostitutes or libertines: these were widely read in France for their vulgar details and gossip. In another vein, the pagan rhetor Libanius framed his life memoir as one of his orations, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on.

The term "memoir" has begun to replace "autobiography" in its popular use.

Women writers have been in the forefront of combining the memoir form with historical non-fiction writing, which can be seen in Helen Epstein's Czech-based Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History and Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Maxine Hong Kingston's well known book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is also an example of a memoir that combines factual material with fictional material as it tells the author's story and the story of her family.

Another category of memoir is the eyewitness account to history by private citizens; Slave narratives fall into this category as do Holocaust memoirs, such as by Primo Levi, Heda Kovaly, and Elie Wiesel.

Famous authors of memoirs (listed alphabetically)

• Martin Amis
• Samuel R. Delaney
• Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
• Bob Dylan
• Fanny Hill by John Cleland
• Primo Levi
• Vladimir Nabokov
• George Orwell
• Sylvia Plath
• Pyrrhus of Epirus (On the Art of War)
• Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich)
• Elie Wiesel