A cursory glance at my bookshelf affirms this, crammed as it is with recent examples, including grief memoirs, graphic memoirs, memoirs grounded in urban history or critical theory, memoirs elucidating trauma, from abusive forms of love to the painful dislocations of migration - even memoirs in the guise of literary biography.
The new literary memoir considers the quandary of writing one, seeding its own ambiguity by contending with the limits of conventional forms to address the complication and constraints of identity.
HISTORIES OF MEMOIR tend to begin with St. Augustine's "Confessions" around 397 A.D., but there's no doubt that the form enjoys a particular centrality in our individualistic country. Memoir has turned out to be the perfect genre for Americans, perfected by Americans, a nation of oppositions narrating themselves into existence. Morrison, notably, never wrote a memoir; in 2012, she admitted that she'd canceled a contract to do just that, claiming that her life wasn't interesting enough, though one wonders if she simply preferred not to invite that level of scrutiny into her private life. The idea of writing as cathartic release is skeptically looked upon in most of these new memoirs. Html">Men We Reaped," which tells two stories, one - of the author's childhood in Mississippi and journey to becoming a writer - in chronological order, the other - of the deaths of her brother, cousin and friends - in reverse, the two narratives converging at their emotional apex, the grieving self and the expressive self meeting at a painful join: "You hear about bones having to be re-broken and reset so they can heal in healthier ways, and that's the way I think about what the memoir did to me," Ward explained in a 2013 interview with The Writer magazine.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/t-magazine/memoirs-books-nonfiction-identity.html
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