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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, often a public part, rather than the chronological telling of a life from childhood to adulthood/old age.
Gore Vidal, in his memoir "Palimpsest", adds another clarifying point for separating memoir from autobiography. He 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.
[edit] 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kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on.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. Until recently, memoirs were most commonly written by political and military leaders. Recently, however, several American professional writers such as David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers have become famous almost solely for writing interesting or amusing memoirs. Maxine Hong Kingston's well known book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is an example of the genre which mixes 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 by Primo Levi, Heda Kovaly and Elie Wiesel. Women writers have been in the forefront of combining the memoir form with historical non-fiction writing (see Helen Epstein's Czech-based Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History and the Chinese Wild Swans)
[edit] Famous authors of memoirs (listed alphabetically)
- Martin Amis
- Maya Angelou
- Russell Baker
- Carol Burnett
- Roger Caron
- Giacomo Casanova
- Bill Clinton
- Frank Conroy
- Jill Ker Conway
- Annie Dillard
- Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
- Bob Dylan
- Helen Epstein
- Marianne Faithfull
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Basil Liddell Hart
- Fanny Hill by John Cleland
- Maxine Hong Kingston
- Miklos Horthy
- Primo Levi
- Frank McCourt
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Richard Nixon
- Irene Gut Opdyke
- George Orwell
- William Alexander Percy
- Andrew X. Pham
- Sylvia Plath
- Pyrrhus of Epirus (On the Art of War)
- Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Kate Simon
- David Sedaris
- Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich)
- Władysław Szpilman (The Pianist)
- Leon Trotsky
- Elie Wiesel
- Tobias Wolff
- Paramahansa Yogananda
[edit] See also
- List of political memoirs
- MemoryArchive, a wiki collecting memories
- Writing and Publishing Program: How to Write a Family Memoir online course (from Simon Fraser University)