Interrogating the memoir A Contrary review by David M. Smith 
 Memoir: A History Ben Yagoda Riverhead Books 2009 Buy this book> What distinguishes the memoir from its fictional cousin – the novel narrated in a retrospective, first person voice? After all, as Ben Yagoda reminds us in Memoir: A History, James Frey’s famous fraud A Million Little Pieces was originally pitched as what it essentially was: a work of fiction. The fact that it was bought up and marketed as a memoir, without anyone much noticing at first, should perhaps give us pause. Are we so easily duped? What is the status, then, of these works called memoirs? Yagoda takes a stab at the question on the very first page of his History, defining memoir or autobiography as “a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author's life” (emphasis mine). Is this where the proper definition of the memoir resides, in the sphere of understanding? I should think not, when we interrogate what this understanding really consists in. Take, for instance, The Diary of Anne Frank, which Yagoda calls “the most remarkable case of dramatic irony—a situation in which an audience or readers know information that a character does not—in the history of the printed word.” On this reading, the audience's understanding can either be or not be such-and-such; it is like a switch thrown on and off. We come no closer in our pursuit of what makes the memoir uniquely what it is, or what it has been. Unfortunately, Yagoda’s entire History hinges on this mysterious convergence of the understanding between author, publisher, and reader, and proceeds on the basis of unexplained “trends.” “Something was in the air,” he writes. “How else to explain the popularity of the dad memoir (…)? Similarly, it would be hard to come up with a reason for the sudden explosion in autobiographies about autistic spectrum disorders. It just seemed to happen (…).” Of course, if your starting point is some mysterious convergence of minds, then what follows is that apparently inexplicable “something in the air.” Yagoda informs us that “a historical frame of mind is helpful (…) in corralling the tens of thousands of autobiographies that have been written since the dawn of time into a manageable, useful, and readable narrative.” But in order to pull off a convincing history, the historian has to draw some thread of necessity through the events described, something more tangible than what takes place on the plane of the mental. Without that, the book amounts to little more than a compendium of thinly connected trivia. In the end, Memoir: A History is a silly and uninteresting book, and its laundry list of works does little to illuminate the author’s central question of how “memoir has become the central form of the culture.” For a fuller development of that question, alas, we must look elsewhere for a truly worthy history. In the meantime, we might well simply turn to the memoirs themselves. David M. Smith is an American writer living in Norway. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/159448886XReviews_2010.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/159448886Xshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1

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