More often, 'memoirs' (always preceded by a possessive pronoun: 'my memoirs,' 'his memoirs') were a kind of scrapbook in which pieces of a life were pasted. These famous person memoirs rarely stuck to one theme or selected out one aspect of a life to explore in depth, as the memoir does. The term memoirs was used to describe something closer to autobiography than the essay-like literary memoir. "Like many people today, I confused 'the memoir' with 'memoirs.' It was easy to do back then, when the literary memoir was not basking in the popularity it currently enjoys. Stick to the facts." (Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everybody else, in part a comic figure. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. The Golden Rule isn't much use in memoir. Be harder on yourself than you are on others. "Here are some basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist: (William Zinsser, "Introduction." Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events." We like to think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. If a writer seriously embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along many associations with quests of their own. Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. "A good memoir requires two elements-one of art, the other of craft. "nce you begin to write the true story of your life in a form that anyone would possibly want to read, you start to make compromises with the truth.".
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