The journey across the frontier from Poetryland into Proseville often seemed to go through Memoiristan. Memoirs in this literary moment have become a major art form, allowing our perceptions of the present to be remade through the personal life experiences, the extraordinary pasts, of memoirists. (Just one recent example might be Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, a powerful, richly written memoir of growing up in Jamaica and needing to break away from a tyrannical Rastafarian father.)
