Tangled up with Memoir

Judith Shulevitz reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History in this week's New York Times Book Review, and I read, with fascination, lines such as these:

Yagoda uses the words 'memoir' and 'autobiography' interchangeably. But they are not the same thing; practitioners know this.

If the flux of life conforms so readily to the constraints of convention, and conventions come and go, then how do you draw a line between truth and art? The last time I checked, truth wasn't boxed in by convention.

... maybe what makes a memoir edifying is not truthfulness but the memoirist's ability to justify a life appealingly. In the five memoirs I have written I don't ever recall working toward or away from a justifying impulse. I recall wanting to understand, wanting to reach out, wanting to write my life in a manner that opened doors for readers, set them thinking about their own journeys, their own choices. The memoirs that I love to read do the same thing. Is, to use our Penn class examples, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family a justification? Is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? If so, what are they justifying?

Truth is the least of memoir, he suggests, though truth can't be dispensed with. (There's that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. Is it all about persuasion, then? I'm wagering that the best of memoir aspires to something greater, something more.

I respond here to a review, of course. Ben Yagoda is a terrific writer; I need to read this book for myself.