2025 is turning out to be one of the worst years in my life as a reader, for two reasons. One is that I find it harder and harder to find novels that interest me, of any type. The other is that since Trump’s election, I’m spending at least two hours a day reading the press and interacting on Bluesky. No fiction story can compete with living history right now (for future reference, I’m writing in the middle of a general economic world collapse caused by Trump’s imposition of a system of absurd tariffs that, to begin with, will ruin many US citizens).
For a few years now, I’m finding myself reading more and more memoirs and autobiographies, perhaps because at this point I can’t abide made-up stories and I need to connect with the real-life experiences of other human beings. The current year is no exception. Of the thirteen books I have read so far (about half my habitual rate…), six are novels and seven non-fiction, of which five are autobiography: Alexei Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir (trad Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel); Shari Franke & Carolyn Ryder’s The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom; Orlando Whitfield’s All that Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art; Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 and Edward Zwick’s Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood. Not all are great, but all have lots to teach and more depth than many novels that pass today for masterpieces.
I’ve been thinking of teaching non-fiction for a few years now, and the chance has finally come up for 2025-26. This year I have already included non-fiction among the books that students had to read in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (1990-2023), one volume in the set of four books each student had to review (see their joint volume https://ddd.uab.cat/record/307453). I personally prefer narrative non-fiction, that is to say, journalistic reportage that narrates a story, or that reports research. I found, however, that students had a harder time reading that type of book, which is usually long (around 400 pages) and full of details, as if the writer (usually a journalist) was unable to let go of the knowledge assembled painstakingly during research. Teaching should not be selfish, in the sense that one should not impose on students personal preferences, and I have decided to leave narrative non-fiction for my research (I’ve been planning a book for a while). In view of the experience in Contemporary Anglophone Literature, then, I have decided to focus on memoirs and autobiographies.
I took a course as a doctoral student focused on autobiographies, memoirs and other texts, such as letters and diaries. I recall reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, though possibly the course included some other texts. I must have spent 25 years reading no other memoirs or autobiographies, as I didn’t particularly enjoy the course, and I identified, in an awfully ageist manner, reading that kind of book with being middle-aged or older. My teacher was very conservative, and we missed the exciting new wave of memoirs and autobiographies that flourished in the 1990s and that has kept the flow going since then.
I learned from Dr. Usandizaga, that was her name, that whereas the Catholic tradition does not encourage believers to write, the Protestant tradition does. The Puritans, in particular, were fond of using diaries and journals as a tool to examine one’s relationship with God and one’s sinning conscience. Whereas in Catholicism we suspect anyone who wishes to share their life in public of being arrogant and conceited, in Protestantism sharing the story of one’s life is not as suspect. Initially, the narrated lives were supposed to be exemplary or outstanding one way or another, but little by little the market opened up to just about anyone who had something to narrate. And then came a deluge.
Proof of that deluge is that I had a very hard time finding a course on memoirs and autobiographies as literary texts, though I found very many courses teaching how to write them, some offered by universities and others by writers (mostly of middling credentials). Prof. Simon Cooke, of Edinburgh University, taught in 2019-20, a postgraduate course called Modern and Contemporary Memoir (see http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/19-20/dpt/cxenli11237.htm), with the following weekly sessions:
1 Introduction: Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past (1939).
2 Modernist experiment: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
3 Émigré memoir: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951/1966).
4 Race and the politics of memoir: Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945).
5 Biomythography: Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982).
6 Witness and testimony: Primo Levi, If This Is A Man (1958).
7 Family history: Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (1982)
8 Nature: Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (2012).
9 ‘Misery memoir’ and the ethics of elegy: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).
10 Travel / Memoir / History: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (1995/1998).
This is indeed a very beautiful course, but mine will operate quite differently. My focus, as usual in my elective subjects (I forgot to say this is an elective), will be the 21st century. As I did in Contemporary Anglophone Literature, I will assign four different books to each student, and they will have to write reviews (800-1000 words) to be gathered in an e-book. I will split the sessions into two 40-minute halves, with the first one devoted to lectures (I’ll teach them the basics of the genre and a history), and the second to interacting with their peers. I believe this method worked well in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Besides, since this is a second-semester subject, most students, if not all, will have already taken Contemporary and will be familiar with my teaching style.
Now, since I came across so many courses on writing memoirs and autobiographies, I have decided to use the course to initiate students into that kind of writing. I have some experience, since I asked for personal essays to be published in the e-books Addictive and Wonderful: The Experience of Reading the Harry Potter Series (2014), Gender and Feminism: The Students’ View (2015) and Gender and Feminism: The Students’ View, Vol 2 (2018). To be on the safe side, I have asked our degree coordinator for his opinion of my idea (he likes it!) and I have also contacted half a dozen fourth-year students whose opinion I value highly. One of them has already replied, encouraging me but also advising me to discuss the matter with students, as some might be uncomfortable if forced to write a personal essay for assessment. I see the point but, actually, the essays in my three previous edited volumes were not assessed for the final mark. They were work the students agreed to write.
Assessment, then, will be based on the four reviews of the books assigned, and I will have to negotiate the matter of the personal essay. Thinking of the very successful Harry Potter volume, I think I’ll ask for a brief memoir about reading and books.
Talking about these plans with my sister-in-law, who is a keen reader, she told me that memoirs and autobiographies are not appealing to her because she sees them as ego trips based on name-dropping. She is right to accuse those genres of these faults and, certainly, the worst kind of memoir and autobiography is flawed in that way. The better kind offers solid writing and a candid approach to life, including quintessential questions about its meaning. In that sense, one of the best titles (though not quite one of the best autobiographies) is The Meaning of Mariah Carey. All memoirs and autobiographies could be called The Meaning of…, followed by the person’s name.
Apart from the objections my sister-in-law raised, memoirs and autobiographies have a low reputation as literature because they are very often written by ghost writers, acknowledged or not, and we, literary critics, do not generally respect this kind of collaboration. Soon, of course, will have even worse kinds, when people use AI to shape their life writings (and all those expensive courses lose their clients…). As a reader, I understand that few non professional writers have the talent to pen alone, with no editor or ghost writer, a solid text, but it may happen. As a literary critic, I believe that if a text is good, meaning you would recommend students to read it and write about it to being with, I don’t much care if it is a collaboration, as long as this is made explicit.
Perhaps I should have started with this, but, in principle an autobiography covers a person’s whole life, whereas a memoir refers to a particular episode. There is, anyway, much confusion, for the plural ‘memoirs’ may be in practice a synonym with autobiography. The point is that in both cases writer and protagonist are the same persons, whereas in biographies they are not, even though now it’s common to group the three genres under the label ‘life writing’. Confusingly, there is something called autofiction, which used to be called autobiographical fiction, and that is also very popular right now, especially among novelists with little ability to imagine life beyond their experience (an autofictional novelist is for me an oxymoron).
I would never write my memoirs, being a very private person (raised, besides, in a Catholic country), and because of this I’m fascinated by people’s willingness to share their lives, often to very intimate details. My teacher, Dr. Usandizaga, used to say in the course I have mentioned, that everyone goes more or less through the same stages and so there is nothing 100% private. I see her point, but I totally disagree. I think that the whole point of memoirs and autobiographies is to underline that even though life here on planet Earth is generally the same for all human beings, each person’s experiences are different, even when talking about the same stages. Memoirs and autobiographies have, additionally, the function of telling readers they are not alone. Some experiences are singular but readers can find in them, or in less singular ones, comfort and company. I, for instance, find those in the memoirs by women who declassed themselves through studying despite being raised by awful fathers. I don’t have the courage to tell that story but I’m happy others have done so, and it helps me much.
I’m very excited to have the chance to teach 21st memoirs and autobiographies and, hopefully, the students will respond to my glee!