Memoir as Reliquary: Making Your Story Matter

By Allison K Williams

What makes a place, or a thing, matter? In The Late Scholar, Jill Paton Walsh’s continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Golden Age detective novels, Peter Wimsey sees a book once owned by Alfred the Great. The scholar showing it to him doesn’t feel like that adds much significance:

“Well, I don’t get reverent about relics,” said Mary Fowey. “I’m an atheist and a scholar.”

“You don’t get a shiver down the spine at the thought of who might have held this book?” asked...