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In Walter Kirn’s article about writing his new memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (Doubleday), he critiques critiques memoirs as self-help books disguised as memoir. “I review books as a day job,” Kirn says, “and through the years I’ve come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of [...]

I’ve puzzled over memoir ever since, when my youngest went to kindergarten, my mother asked me if I was “going back to work.” When I told her I was going to write fulltime, her eyes welled with tears. “You aren’t going to write autobiography, are you?” she almost begged.
You would think I’d had a horrible [...]