"But enough about me, what do you think of my memoir?"

In the early fall of 1990, a New Yorker cartoon showed two men in hard hats chatting in a lumber yard. One says to the other, "Well, Al, the sixties was peace. The seventies was sex. The eighties was money. Maybe the nineties will be lumber." ¹ Throughout the nineties, like the hard hats, media pundits searched for the right way to characterize the decade. Presidentially speaking, if the eighties were Reagan and corporate greed, the nineties were Clinton, the stock market, and Internet mania. (Maybe Clinton IS Reagan, as The New York Times has recently speculated.) ² Of course, the Clinton era will go down in history not just for the halcyon days of an endlessly touted national prosperity and the birth of dot-com culture, but also for a paroxysm of personal exposure: making the private public to a degree startling even in a climate of over-the-top self-revelation. If Clinton's performances stood the feminist dictum of the personal being the political on its head, the impulse of ask and tell was in no way unique. And not being shocked was, well, very nineties.

In academia, going public as a private subject was equally in vogue as a kind of fin-de-siècle gasp of self-exploration, with roots, arguably, in an earlier feminist critique of universal values. Personal criticism and autobiographical acts--sometimes described by the neologism "autocritography"--flourished in the 1990s, only to be diagnosed at one point by a disgruntled self-designated feminist critic as the "nouveau solipsism." ³ Perhaps not surprisingly, the popularity of what was sometimes labeled confessional criticism was matched only by a high-minded resistance to it that often took the form of rather personalized attacks on its proponents. But on the more positive side, a shrewd critic of shifting academic trends has recently recast the vogue of personal criticism as the "new belletrism"--a mode of writing keyed to a "reconfiguration of audience and audience expectation." ⁴ On this reading, the new belletrism represents a "journalization of academic criticism" produced by a post-Theory generation of cultural critics (429). Moving along parallel tracks, the academic field of autobiography studies has generated a staggering amount of critical literature, including an MLA division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing, which in turn has resulted in a significant degree of legitimation in the university--albeit to mixed reviews: for some a cause of celebration, for others an occasion to mourn the loss of literary standards, critical objectivity, and philosophical rigor. Bellelettrism, of course, with its overtones of stylish self-indulgence, is a dubious distinction for this last group.

Since the accusation of "nouveau solipsism" was a poison arrow directed (though not solely) at me, I'd like to reopen the discussion starting from a pointedly different view of what's at stake in self-writing today. And here I'm going to move away from criticism produced for the academy to writing designed, like that of belletristic criticism, for a less specialized audience, that of memoir readers. At the risk of earning this charge of solipsism, not to say wound licking, I will refer briefly to my work on contemporary memoirs, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death. ⁵ It was the work on this (very nineties) book which convinced me that like personal criticism, the genre of the memoir is not about terminal "moi-ism," as it's been called, but rather a rendez-vous, as it were, with the other. (There would be an essay to be written here about the use of French terms--nouveau solipsism, bellelettrism, not to mention memoir itself--to cast opprobrium upon what appears to be an American emotional style of self-reference.) ⁶

In the memoirs I consider--Philip Roth's Patrimony, Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Susan Cheever's Home Before...