Status Updates From Tell Me True: Memoir, Histo...

"you're not writing another memoir, I hope," a celebrated novelist friend whose work I treasure said one day,as if he'd given me long enough to get over my bad habit'. (Hampl, 142)

"Perhaps I shouldn't ask when I realised I was writing memoir. The more useful question would be to ask when the rest of the world began to call books like mine "memoirs". When did memoir become part of the cultural landscape, a literary form whose purpose was understood not as reminiscence but as a kind of contemporary quest literature, a genre of storytelling and essay writing enfolded together". (Hampl)

"A successful memoir is not a product of the self-obsession of a selfish, me-first generation; it is evidence of literate people's recognition that the written word has replaced the story told by the winter fire as our means of establishing and preserving cultural memory".
Many "important" memoirs exemplify this. Equally, there are also many "successful" memoirs that seem written as a means of self-gratification.