Memoir

The memoir, once considered a marginal literary form, has emerged in the past decade as the signature genre of the age.

The triumph of memoir is now an established fact. Fiction isn’t delivering the news. Memoir is.

The contemporary memoir has reaffirmed the primacy of the first person voice in American imaginative writing.

Maybe a reader’s love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately.

More than a story, we want to hear a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear. Which is to say, to our heart.

from
I Could Tell You Stories
by Patricia Hampl

Sneak preview into my class tomorrow. I'm going to focus on memoir. Memoir used to be reserved for people at the end of their lives. A review. I was born and then...
Now people in their twenties are writing memoir. Blogs are a kind of memoir.
Memoir is delivering the news.

So get cracking! There are no rules. You can jump right into the middle of your life.