Memoir is not autobiography, which is intended to cover the whole life to date, but a short and significant stretch of a life—like a novel.
It’s also different from “autofiction:” it takes its obligation to truth seriously and it’s almost always written in the first person. Memoirists employ a reliable or unreliable narrator to tell their stories. Why and how does a story become a memoir? Why do some books seem as if they had to be written as memoir, and couldn’t have worked in fictional form? What is the shape of a memoir, and what are its boundaries? And how does a memoir turn real people—including its narrator—into characters?
We’ll read some extraordinary memoirs, but classes will be focused on students’ writing, submitted in advance.
