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Memoirs Find a Home
Many thousands of memoirs are in print. However, until now it's been a challenge to find any comprehensive listing of them. You could have looked on the Internet, in Books in Print or in bookstores, all in vain. Generally they've lived kind of like Harry Potter, the poor, orphaned relative, under the staircase, without a real room or home of their own. But now right here, on these very pages, memoirs have a place they can call home.
So what are memoirs? Well for one thing, they differ from biographies (or autobiographies). Usually memoirs deal with just a part of a person's life. In The Birthday Party by Stanley Alpert, the victim of a random kidnapping, the author deals with less than a week in his life, the time during which he was held captive.
Contemporary memoirs use many of the literary techniques of fiction, dialogue in particular, often making for some great reading. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is full of his family's Irish dialect. And memoirists generally rely on (surprise!) their memories, choosing to try to tell a good story rather than one that is totally accurate in every detail. Thus they rarely use footnotes to document their claims of fact.
Memoirs tend to weave just one or two major themes through their stories. In The Mascot, Mark Kurzem, retraces his father's past to try to understand how a small Jewish boy his father survived by being taken under the wing of Latvian SS soldiers. But the author wastes no time discussing his father's working career or other topics that detract from his main theme.
Finally, memoirists and biographers select different subjects to write about. Autobiographies are written by people who are known to the public. Memoirists on the other hand, can be obscure people who have interesting stories to tell, whether about themselves or perhaps about a family member.
So welcome to the home of the memoir book. We have reviews, more than 1000 titles, and a great list of writers conferences. Please wipe the mud off your shoes, come on in, take off your coat, pull up a comfortable chair, put on your reading glasses and take your time looking over our titles.
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