Title page of Henry Thoreua's memoir, Walden (1854)

A memoir (from French: mémoire: memoria, meaning memory or reminiscence), is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below. The author of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist.

  Nature

Memoirs are structured differently from formal autobiographies (which tend to encompass the writer's entire life span), focusing rather on the development of his or her personality. The chronological scope of a memoir is determined by the work's context and is therefore more focused and flexible than the traditional arc of birth to old age as found in an autobiography.

Memoirs tended to be written by politicians or people in court society, later joined by military leaders and businessmen, and often dealt exclusively with the writer's careers rather than their private life. Historically, memoirs have dealt with public matters, rather than personal. Many older memoirs contain little or no information about the writer, and are almost entirely concerned with other people. Modern expectations have changed this, even for heads of government. Like most autobiographies, memoirs are generally written from the first person point of view.

In his own memoir Palimpsest, the author Gore Vidal gave a personal definition: "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." Memoir is thus more about what can be gleaned from a section of one's life than about the outcome of the life as a whole.

  Types

Cover of Wild Swans, by Jung Chang.

The rhetor Libanius (ca. 314 – ca. 394) 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kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on.

In modern times, memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish their own account of their public exploits. Nineteenth-century examples include rambles in line with Gore Vidal's definition (see above) such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden or George Borrow's Lavengro.

Some contemporary women writers have combined the memoir form with historical non-fiction writing. Examples include Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Heda Margolius Kovaly's Under a Cruel Star and Helen Epstein's Where She Came From.

Other professional contemporary writers such as David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have specialized in writing amusing essays in the form of memoirs. To some extent this is an extension of the tradition of newspaper columnists' regular accounts of their lives. (Cf. the work of James Thurber which often has a strong memoir-like content).

  Collection projects

With the expressed interest of preserving history through the eyes of those who lived it, some organizations work with potential memoirists to bring their work to fruition. The Veterans History Project, for example, compiles the memoirs of those who have served in a branch of the US Military – especially those who have seen active combat.^[1] Many public libraries give Memoir Writing classes that are geared towards senior citizens.^[2]

  See also

• Autobiography
• List of autobiographies
• Creative nonfiction
• Diary
• Fake memoirs
• Category:Memoirists

  References

Look up memoir in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.