The Work of Memoir
The Work of Memoir
This chapter explores why we read memoir differently from fiction. While the memoir and the novel may mirror each other in form, in force they may be quite different. Among the things memoir can do that fiction cannot is to immortalize—or at least memorialize—actual people. Seeking to immortalize oneself is not necessarily a noble motive; hence the redundancy of the celebrity memoir. But conferring a kind of immortality on a partner, parent, child, or friend in memoir can be an act of real generosity. At its best, life writing does not register preexisting selfhood, but rather somehow creates it. This inverts the intuitive idea that one lives one's life, then simply writes it down. Instead, in writing one's life one may bring a new self into being. If this is true, then in reading life narrative, we witness self-invention.
Keywords: memories, life writing, fiction, novels, selfhood, self-invention
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