Memoir Fetish (welcoming these new titles to my memoir library)

My appetite for books is insatiable, always, and when I teach, buying and reading memoir is a seamless compulsion.  Every student is on her own course.  Every young writer must be guided to just the right books at the right time.  To a memoir library already teeming, I this week add the following titles:

Devotion, Dani Shapiro

Mentor: A Memoir, Tom Grimes

How to Live:  Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (yes, this is a biography, but it is a biography of one of our most iconic early memoirists)

History of a Suicide, Jill Bialosky

The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (I need a new copy)

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf

House of Prayer No. 2:  A Writer's Journey Home, Mark Richard

Townie:  A Memoir, Andre Dubus III

Duke of Deception:  Memories of My Father, Geoffrey Wolff (hugely ashamed that I have not read this before)

Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman (classified as a novel, much like Dave Eggers classified his own memoirish story as a novel; my reflections on this book were posted two days ago)

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