Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir

Memoir is a popular genre these days. Really, this comes as no surprise; after all, everyone has a story to tell, or so many writing instructors assert, and we (Americans, at least) are highly self-absorbed.

Memoir: "2 a : a narrative composed from personal experience b : AUTOBIOGRAPHY ... c : BIOGRAPHY 3 a : an account of something noteworthy" (Webster's Collegiate, 11th ed.).

Having a story to tell is one thing; telling it is another; telling it in a way that enagages an audience is something else again. "Having" a story implies ownership; I don't know about anyone else, but prior to writing a story down, the only stories I am willing to lay claim to are those that involve only me. Other players involve other perspectives, and a story involving just myself, although absolutely captivating to myself, will unlikely engage much of an audience. So, if audience is an issue, then the trick is in the telling.

Again, that slippery term, "genre." John Dryden, in the late seventeenth century, asserted biography as " 'the history of particular men's lives.' " M.H. Abrams elaborates, saying the term "now connotes a relatively full account of a particular person's life ...[that] attempts to set forth character, temperment, and milieu, as well as the subject's activities and experiences." Autobiography, according to Abrams, is "a biography written by the subject about himself or herself," distinguished from memoir, where "the emphasis is not on the author's developing self but on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed" (22).

These definitions seem relatively straightforward to me, although the distinction between autobiography and memoir seems forced. How does an author write about one's "developing self" without referencing "the people and events that the author has known or witnessed"? And if an author tells a story about "the people and events" that he or she has "known or witnessed," then who does the story belong to? There is a dangerous line here, between the author's involvement in his or her own narrative, and the people and events the author interacts with. Does the author have a story without these people and events? Again, in a story involving multiple players, ownership exists in the telling, but telling alone does not an owner make.