As a literary genre, a memoir (from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory") forms a subclass of autobiography, although it is an older form of writing. Memoirs may appear less structured and less encompassing than formal autobiographical works as they are usually about part of a life, often a public part, rather than the chronological telling of a life from childhood to adulthood/old age. A memoir also tends to lack the more intimate focus on the author's own memories, feelings and emotions that an autobiography tends to have.

Gore Vidal, in his memoir "Palimpsest", adds another clarifying point for separating memoir from autobiography. He writes that "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." It is more about what can be gleaned from a section of one's life than about the outcome of the life as a whole.

In recent years, with the resurgence of memoir as a means of expressing wisdom gained from one's life, many folks nowadays hold the opinion, "If you think your story is unique check with someone else before you write a script or a book and force it upon the world. It would save us all a lot of trouble and heartaches. No one wants to read a book by a dog that lived in the Whitehouse, at least intelligent people shouldn't." - Richard Markman, literary professor in an interview with the campus newpaper "Grapevine."

History

Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. In the eighteenth century, "scandalous memoirs" were written (mostly anonymously) by prostitutes or libertines: these were widely read in France for their vulgar details and gossip. In another vein, the pagan rhetor Libanius framed his life memoir as one of his orations, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on.

The term "memoir" has begun to replace "autobiography" in its popular use. Until recently, memoirs were most commonly written by political and military leaders. Recently, however, several American professional writers such as David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers have become famous almost solely for writing interesting or amusing memoirs. Maxine Hong Kingston's well known book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is an example of the genre which mixes factual material with fictional material as it tells the author's story and the story of her family.

Famous authors of memoirs (listed alphabetically)

• Martin Amis
• Giacomo Casanova
• Bill Clinton
• Frank Conroy
• Roger Caron
• Isak Dinesen
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Ulysses S. Grant
• Basil Liddell Hart
• Fanny Hill by John Cleland
• Maxine Hong Kingston
• Miklos Horthy
• Primo Levi
• Frank McCourt
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Richard Nixon
• Irene Gut Opdyke
• George Orwell
• Sylvia Plath
• Pyrrhus of Epirus (On the Art of War)
• Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon
• Siegfried Sassoon
• David Sedaris
• Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich)
• Władysław Szpilman (The Pianist)
• Leon Trotsky
• Elie Wiesel
• Tobias Wolff
• Paramahansa Yogananda

See also

• List of political memoirs
• MemoryWiki, a wiki collecting memories

books by genre | Literary genres

Memoiren | Memorias | Mémoires | יומן זיכרונות | Pamiętnik | Memoarer | memórias