The "Memoir-Novel"

The memoir never strayed that far from fiction--in form and, notoriously, sometimes in content, too. At the height of the memoir boom, the highest praise you could lavish on a work of autobiographical nonfiction was that it "read like a novel." Life, after all, is mostly uneventful; even the crises that we experience now and then are often random, inexplicable. That inexplicability is precisely what makes us want our lives to have "meaning" in the same way works of art and literature have "meaning"--meaning derived from structure, pattern, order. It's no accident that the greatest memorists, from St. Augustine to Vladimir Nabokov, were also serious students of literature…As such, these writers knew how to give the random stuff of life a pleasing literary shape.

Daniel Mendelsohn