Introduction

Abstract

In American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing (1994), Robert F. Sayre notes that the kind of autobiographical text written, published, and read by different generations of Americans gives audiences a great deal of information about that generation’s particular experiences, values, and fears. Asserting that more than simply the content of these self-reflexive texts change, he notes that their forms, conventions, and audiences also shift in order to reflect changes in societal values (9). Margaretta Jolly echoes Sayre’s assertions as she claims that life writing presents the “self-image of a culture” (“The Exile” 496); Leigh Gilmore posits memoir as “the genre in the skittish period around the turn of the millennium” (Limits of Autobiography 1, emphasis original); and James Atlas asserts in “The Age of the Literary Memoir is Now” (1996) that, “if the moment of inception is hard to locate, the triumph of memoir is now established fact” (25). Over the last few decades, American book critics, scholars, and publishers alike observed that the genre of memoir was becoming more and more prevalent, and they quickly termed this trend the “memoir boom” or, as Michiko Kakutani called it, “the memoir craze” (cited in Eakin 19). In his examination of the cultural history of memoir, Memoir: A History (2009), Ben Yagoda further notes that memoir sales increased by more than a staggering 400% from 2004–8 alone (7).KeywordsEmphasis OriginalHistorical MomentSerial CultureSoap OperaNarrative TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.