Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda
Riverhead Books; $25.95; 291 pages

Tobias Wolff once said that “memory has its own story to tell.” Apparently, memoir does too, and Ben Yagoda proves to be skillful ghost writer. In his history of the form, he traces its origins from Caesar’s Commentaries (circa 50 BCE) and Augustine’s Confessions (in the 5th century) to Malcolm X’s Autobiography and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss in the 20th century. In the chronological space between those four works, he describes the memoirs that have created the landscape of one of the most popular genres we now have.

In the 12th century Abelard wrote The Story of My Misfortune. The narrative concerns itself mostly with his ill-advised affair with the beautiful Heloise. Heloise’s uncles objected to the relationship and, in Abelard’s words, “cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.” Now I know why Abelard became a monk. And I forgive him for his painful syntax.

Benvenuto Cellini recounted his life story in the 16th century, and if future memoirists had taken his advice, the library shelves might not be sagging under the weight of contemporary memoirs. “No one should venture on such a splendid undertaking,” he said, “before he is over forty.” But, if they had followed his recommendation, we wouldn’t have Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Anne Frank’s Diary.

In the 17th century Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners fit perfectly into the spiritual landscape–Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers competing with Diggers, Seekers, and Ranters as if they had just traveled into the city from Motown and were looking for the way to American Bandstand. In the 18th century Rousseau produced The Confessions, a title which echoed Augustine but didn’t end up renouncing the flesh. Rather, the opposite. Rousseau admitted to a lifelong predilection for sado-masochism that began when he got sexually aroused when he was spanked by the minister’s wife. Who hasn’t, Jean-Jacques?

The Romantics, with their emphasis on the individual, opened the floodgates with Goethe, Wordsworth, and DeQuincy. In America, Franklin led to Crockett and Dana, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and a whole continent of others. The great ones keep coming in the land of the free–from Frank McCourt to Mary Karr.

Yagoda spends a good deal of time (perhaps too much) discussing the relationship between truth and memoir. He spends dozens of pages detailing the variety of hoax memoirs and fake autobiographies–all the usual suspects from Clifford Irving’s game with Howard Hughes to Forrest Carter’s lie titled The Education of Little Tree. Along the way, he details just about every other literary con game in the past few hundred years. And although Yagoda’s writing is clear and usually intelligent, he sometimes slips into the insipid: “The ascendance of memoir as a boffo category made it easy for publishers to spot prospective authors; the equation was: Compelling personal story equals potentially lucrative memoir. Some of these deals led to crummy and/or self-indulgent books. But a lot of them led to memorable and creditable ones, and that seems the important thing.” This sentence sounds like one edited by the Oracle at Delphi in consultation with Oprah.

Ben Yagoda

Yagoda does better chronicling the history of the form or talking about its true essence. “The act of writing an autobiography,” he says, “represents something very different from a neutral attempt to remember. Beneath the account of every incident, episode, or character is one’s interpretation of one’s life. Beneath that is the implied need to justify the whole enterprise of putting that life on paper, to show that in some way it makes a good and valuable story.” Ultimately, as Wolff said, memory has its own story to tell, and that’s the one we want to hear. In Henry Adams’ words, “The memory was all that mattered.” If we’re lucky, like Mark Twain, we can remember anything, “whether it happened or not.” And this, perhaps, is Yagoda’s sharpest insight in this detailed history, that all memoirs are acts of creative writing because memory itself is a creative writer, cobbling, re-arranging, and re-imagining the past.

Michael Pearson, author of Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx, teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.