A Golden Age for Memoir

How Publishing’s Recent Reckoning Is Ushering in a New Era for the Genre

We are in the midst of a seismic shift in the genre of memoir. I’m just off the heels of a class I taught with Linda Joy Myers (National Association of Memoir Writers) that we called The Evolution of Memoir, designed to track some of the many books whose structures and forms are changing how we think about the genre.

I’m a structure wonk. I love patterns and formulas in text. As a reader I’m always more satisfied when a book has a container or an organizing principle that holds the story, its themes, its takeaways. I fell in love with memoir during my nine-year tenure at Seal Press, where I edited some 25-30 memoirs a year, and read countless more. That was 2004-2012, and the memoirists on my radar were largely white and female, reflecting the demographic we mostly published. When Seal published writers of color, it was in anthologies, for which the press was well-known, with books like Listen Up!, Colonize This!, and Homelands, to name just a few.

With my current (evolved) worldview and understanding, I see how writers of color during those years were relegated to anthologies where white authors got free reign to have their fuller stories out in the world.* This isn’t to dismiss those anthologies, which were important and groundbreaking, but rather to acknowledge how long overdue this moment in publishing is, where historically marginalized voices are being much more widely published, and why I credit the influx of diverse voices (writers of color, international writers, LGBTQ+ writers) for pushing memoir to change, grow, and expand.

Convention is complicated when it comes to book publishing because its very definition speaks to standards, which are important. But “the way things have always been done” also fosters limitation, exclusion, and rejection. Convention in Western storytelling has centered a dominant worldview (white, straight, largely male) for as long as modern publishing has existed, and I can’t think of a stronger convention to give evidence to that than the narrative arc, whose formula is well-known to anyone who writes: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. The hero’s journey follows this arc with a few deviations, and it’s the most classic storyline of all times, not because it’s the best way to tell a story, but because it’s the most accepted and celebrated way to tell a story.

In her book, Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison’s entire premise is a consideration of what’s beyond the narrative arc. She urges us to see other patterns, noting, “I’m bothered again and again that so many smart young writers feel obliged to follow [the narrative arc]. It wasn’t a given as Western fiction crawled to life . . .” She also writes that other cultures “evolved fiction differently.” Chinese fiction, for instance, emphasizes lyricism. “It relies on pattern, repetition, and rhythm,” Alison writes.

Recently, on my podcast Write-minded, Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro spoke more broadly about the importance of honoring non-Western storytelling traditions, and their recent collection, Letters to a Writer of Color, shares personal experiences of the ways in which writers of color have felt and been hemmed in by the conventions of MFA programs and traditional publishing. The collection’s writers grapple with experiences of putting their work in the world, including feeling pressured to write for white audiences by changing their stories, their characters, or their language, and the limiting and frustrating expectations that their work or their characters be representative of an entire complex community or country.

As these pressures crumble, largely due to a reckoning within the publishing industry around how very white-dominated it’s been for . . . ever, we are witnessing something akin to a full-bloom moment for memoir. Publishing is in a moment where editors are far less likely to reject out of hand a book for its difference; where in fact its difference, once a liability, makes a project more likely to get a first look.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s recent memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, shows us an example of how one author’s South American sensibility collides with the genre of memoir to beautiful effect. Her work has been heralded as magical, surreal, and ethereal. She’s been resistant to the idea that her memoir is magical realism. Rojas Contreras has said, “For me, magical realism is just realism.” Rojas Contreras’s memoir is a lighthouse for other writers who want to traverse time and space and dreams and generations in their books, too.

Other writers who are stretching the genre include Ocean Vuong, whose book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a genre-bending tour de force. It’s a novel, and yet . . . it’s so memoiresque in form and execution that Linda Joy and I included it in our Evolution of Memoir course. Then you have writers like Kiese Laymon (Heavy) and Imani Perry (Breathe) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) who show us how a book holds together when written to another—Laymon to his mother, Perry to her sons, Coates to his son—as witness. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is like nothing I’ve ever read, a literary masterpiece whose structure is kaleidoscopic, sweeping in its voice and point of view and technique.

Now, some caveats, because of course memoir has always been experimental, and there are plenty of writers who’ve broken convention prior to this golden moment. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is dear to many writers’ hearts, and might be considered a precursor to Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for its genre-bending and blending artfulness. The great Abigail Thomas (Still Life at Eighty, What Comes Next and How to Like It) has always been a gleeful rule-bender, someone who’s long insisted that the linear form is binding. After all, memory is not linear. Maggie Nelson (Bluets, The Red Parts), a literary goddess, has done things with memoir that defy and delight.

Teaching The Evolution of Memoir drove home for me the extent to which writers—not limited to those in the margins—are breaking down the walls of convention. Writers are itching for new and exciting ways to tell stories, and there are countless role models to turn to. So first thing’s first: read. Second thing’s second: know what the conventions are. The writers I most admire aren’t blowing up the genre. They’re not breaking it. They’re adding to it, bending it, and blending it—bringing from other genres, writing powerful scenes that might be as short as a few hundred words; using repetitive elements, lists, and images, and experimenting with point of view, second and third person, and allowing for more musing over direct plotting.  

If you’re witnessing and enjoying this (r)evolution in memoir as much as I am, let me know the books that have opened your heart and your mind in recent years. I stopped my memoir-in-progress after reading Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful and threw away 30,000 words because I so loved her poetic and fragmentary approach and wanted to give my memoir a different form. I was similarly influenced by Machado’s In the Dream House, though I don’t deign for a moment to be able to approximate her skill. Mostly, these are two writers who’ve pushed me to be a better writer. Have you changed your story or your structure or your style based on someone you read? I’d love to know the books or a book you’ve read lately that are expanding your literary horizons.

Meanwhile, the lesson here is to write freely, write with abandon, write with the kind of glee that can only be found when you’re not feeling bound by “how things have always been.”

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* It’s important to note renowned women memoirists of color whose work has been a beacon then and now, including and certainly not limited to: Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942), Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969), Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976), Audre Lorde (Zami, 1982), bell hooks (Bone Black, 1996). Also, there were women memoirists of color whose books made waves during my time in traditional publishing, like Margaret Cho’s I’m the One That I Want (2002), Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2004), and Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise (2010). But when considered against how many white memoirists were having their works published at the time, the gap is cataclysmic.