The Memoir Problem

André Aciman. Out of Egypt: A Memoir. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 352 pp. $15.00.

Carlos Eire. Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. New York: Free Press, 2003. 400 pp. $14.00.

Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Dutton, 1989. 288 pp. $15.00.

Sherwin B. Nuland. Lost in America: A Journey With My Father. New York: Knopf, 2003. 224 pp. $24.00.

Richard Pipes. Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 290 pp. $30.00 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).

Robert B. Stepto. Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. New York: Beacon, 1998. 224 pp. $14.00.

There is a popular old song that includes the line, "Everyone's doing it," which could be applied to the publication boom in memoirs today. From Paris Hilton to the Clintons (Hillary and Bill), from Henry Kissinger to Bob Dylan, the memoir has become the contemporary genre of choice. And since even doctors, dogs, and historians have gotten in on the act, it would be easy to make light of the contemporary publishing fad as a scribble in the winds of fashion. Indeed, a recent article in the New York Times has done just this, complaining that the democratization of the genre has provided almost every American with the publishing equivalent of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes.¹

The memoir boom has now vibrated in our collective consciousness for well over a decade, and it presents the historian with a special challenge. Unlike literary critics and theorists whose object is to interrogate memoirs as a specialized form of text, historians are accustomed to viewing the memoir as a source.² Indeed, for historians the memoir is an important historical tool, and for social historians especially, it provides the appealing voice too often otherwise missing as we try to reconstruct the lives of ordinary people. Given the often trivial form that it can take and the temptation to dismiss is as a fad, I hope to use the following essay to rescue the memoir and to present its current popularity as a useful, even essential form of writing in our time. I will also suggest something about the memoir as a teaching tool.

The following inquiry into a select number of memoirs sets out to return the memoir to a position of historical seriousness and to argue that its contemporary popularity is in the deepest sense an expression of the widespread engagement with history in the contemporary world. I will suggest that the appeal of the memoir is related to a growing sense of the speed of change and the declining importance of distance on our planet. Indeed, it may be appropriate to ascribe the proliferation of serious memoirs today to a new consciousness of the contingency of time on our shrinking planet as "globalization" threatens an older sense of time and change. This new emphasis on capturing time through print is perhaps also a sensibility created by a pervasive sense of the unpredictability of the self as we are caught up in this new world.

So many of the memoirs I have examined show this deep commitment to capturing the passage of time that it may be possible to conclude that memoir writing today provides insights into how history is experienced today. Like all forms of writing, memoirs are deeply implicated in complex issues of representation, and most of these writers use their reflections to deal with and overcome issues related to the authenticity of the self today. The "memoir problem" is thus widely and significantly inscribed in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century culture, in its literature, its social developments, and in how we seek to express and define the self in the contemporary world.

At the same time, we should not exaggerate the contemporary quality of this publishing phenomenon or its meaning. John Hodgson, for example, noted in 1993 that, "the last fifty years or so have witnessed...