Memoir, plot, writing….

Re-reading Dickens, with his magnificently improbably plots of coincidence and far more characters than one can keep track of, reminded me of Memoir.

In Memoir we tend to think that we are at the center of things, and that our view matters. This is true - to an extent. What makes great memoir is the sense that we are not the only story; that all stories intersect in some way. And what readers delight in is the sense that this person's specific story is also a tale for all of us, at all...