On Memoirs and Autobiographies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I don't blog much on Saturdays and Sundays. But, I've been away and now it is all spilling out. So... here's a bit to read on defining memoirs. Here's a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2006\/01\/14\/on-memoirs-and-autobiographies\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Memoirs and Autobiographies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I don't blog much on Saturdays and Sundays. But, I've been away and now it is all spilling out. So... here's a bit to read on defining memoirs. 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{"id":948,"date":"2006-01-14T05:55:23","date_gmt":"2006-01-14T10:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/jesuscreed\/2006\/01\/14\/on-memoirs-and-autobiographies\/"},"modified":"2006-01-14T05:55:23","modified_gmt":"2006-01-14T10:55:23","slug":"on-memoirs-and-autobiographies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2006\/01\/14\/on-memoirs-and-autobiographies\/","title":{"rendered":"On Memoirs and Autobiographies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I don\u2019t blog much on Saturdays and Sundays. But, I\u2019ve been away and now it is all spilling out. So\u2026 here\u2019s a bit to read on defining memoirs.
\nHere\u2019s a good link on Memoirs at Inkspell<\/a>.
\nHere\u2019s another: Memoir Cafe<\/a>.
\nAnd Judith Barrington<\/a>.
\n Wikipedia has<\/a> some too.
\nHere\u2019s a comment from a friend who is an English professor, who knows I like Mark Twain\u2019s Autobiography<\/em>, which is mostly fiction. But with whom I disagree on lots, if not most, things. (By the way, we were with a house-full of colleagues as we wished a colleague who retired many blessed years, and our table agree completely that Frey\u2019s book should be fiction and not memoir. But here from a more postmodernist side:
\nQuote:<\/p>\n

A memoir, like any account, even historical accounts, will inadvertently stray from the actual truth or (un)intentionally embellish the truth. It\u2019s impossible to transcribe reality. No one is privy to THE truth of the original, and even if we were, we\u2019d lose it as we tried to transcribe it. We have only versions of the truth, ie per-versions.
\nHowever, given the genre as it now stands, an audience assumes that the author of a memoir has done his best to recollect and record the facts, granting him \u201csome\u201d leeway to recapture the spirit and atmosphere of events and of course to reconstruct dialogue etc. But the assumption is that the account is based on fact, on experiences that actually occurred. I think Frey constructed events ex nihilo [?] to help develop his \u201ccharacter.\u201d At that point he has crossed the line into fiction, a fictionalized memoir (aka a novel) [See P. Roth who is a master of this genre, and who admits that this is fiction.]
\nFrey is, nonetheless, in good company. Mark Twain\u2019s autobiography is one of the finest works of fiction ever perpetrated on the reading public. I\u2019m afraid, however, that Twain thought it was the truth. (Even here tho, we get at some truth: Twain\u2019s deluded self-image.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t blog much on Saturdays and Sundays. But, I\u2019ve been away and now it is all spilling out. So\u2026 here\u2019s a bit to read on defining memoirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[476,1741],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing-blogging"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Memoirs and Autobiographies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I don't blog much on Saturdays and Sundays. But, I've been away and now it is all spilling out. So... here's a bit to read on defining memoirs. 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