This is not necessarily as modern a concept as one might think, as Henry David Thoreau embarked on a journey of introspection by living in nature and documented the experience in Walden. Stunt memoirs are a sub-genre in which the author takes on some sort of quest or project with the intention of changing something in their lives and/or writing about it. These days, it feels like almost everyone with a significant following has a book out, so just look up a few of your fave celebs and I bet you’ll find something! (Plus it’s a task for this year’s Read Harder Challenge, so there’s no better time to snag one if you haven’t given it a go already!) The hugely popular celebrity memoir gives readers an inside look at the lives of their favorite actors/musicians/athletes/etc. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs are two wildly different but equally effective books of this category. Prominent contemporary examples include 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper (about dying and coming back to life) and Night by Elie Wiesel (about life as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust).Īnother common type of memoir are those about childhood (which often includes some sort of trauma or struggle) and family, which give both author and reader the opportunity to reflect on their defining years. Both can be traced far back in history, to Saint Augustine’s Confessions or Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, respectively. Religion and spirituality have always been a part of human history, as likewise have wars and conflicts. Some of the memoir sub-genres that arguably emerged most early on include spiritual memoirs and war memoirs.
Much more recent examples include Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl (a female geobiologist’s celebration of science), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (an exploration of what it is to be black in America). Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen is a twentieth-century classic about a Danish woman’s experiences owning a plantation in Kenya. The Sarashina Diary is an early memoir of this type that dates back to Heian period Japan, telling of a woman’s life from childhood to marriage and beyond. Many memoirs are quite broad in scope, simply dealing with life, but through the unique framework of the author’s particular circumstances or lifestyle. By signing up you agree to our terms of use Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. While there would be no end if we tried to cover every specific type of memoir out there, here are a handful of the bigger categories that we often see on the shelves. As time has progressed and contemporary memoirs have exploded in popularity, they can now be written by anyone and the range of topics covered has widened massively. Memoirs have been around throughout history, starting out with those of various prominent figures. Though they don’t necessarily give a full, multi-perspective picture, memoirs are special in that they allow readers to see how others see and understand the same world. While lived experiences can’t be fact-checked, every single one is true to the person going through it. While nonfiction, memoirs are unique in their level of subjectivity, given the nature of human memory and perception. They’re about the author remembering, reminiscing, and reflecting on experiences from their lives. At the same time, it is also important to point out that just because a work contains autobiographical elements does not mean it will necessarily be considered a memoir (or autobiography), as is the case with autobiographical novels.īut back to our original question: what is a memoir? The word comes from the French mémoire, meaning “memory.” So in the simplest sense, memoirs are just that. The two can, more often than not, be used interchangeably without issue, as Ben Yagoda does in his book Memoir: A History, where he does a deep exploration of the genre.
Throughout history, various distinctions have been made between the two, but in recent years, it appears that the definition of “memoir” has broadened, while the term “autobiography” seems to be used less and less. Traditionally, an autobiography covers an entire lifetime, while a memoir tends to focus on a narrower set of the author’s experiences. Does “autobiographi cal” mean the same as “autobiograph y”? Well, yes and no. The main defining characteristics of a memoir are that it is 1) nonfiction, and 2) autobiographical.įrom here, it starts to get a little sticky. Let’s start with the basics that everyone can agree on. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the answers here, if any, but I do have quite a few thoughts about one genre in particular: the memoir. There are so many with vague definitions and a whole lot of overlap between them that sometimes it can feel almost arbitrary. Book genres and categories are confusing, to say the least.
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