What makes memoirs tick? How is it that one memoir moves us more than another? How revealing is a memoir of the author as well as of the "characters"? How do memoirists draw us into the eventfullness of their inner lives? How do their personal trajectories say something about their social milieu?
We omit political memoirs. We treat writers who, famous or not, focus on their personal lives—their intimate and their professional relationships and, especially, the linkages between the two. For all their diversity, the memoirs selected here have a common thread: how adventitious happenings shape lives into something like a coherent venture.
In a nutshell, the rationale of this SDG is comparison-and-contrast. We are less concerned with singular, recurrent themes. We are on the lookout for divergent stories and sensibilities, and for the mix of rawness and artfulness, that the best of the genre draws forth. We do not reach for an over-arching perspective.
1. Maya Angelou [1951 -2014], I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Chapters 1 - 19.
2. Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Chapters 20 - 36.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896 – 1940], The Crack-Up (Penguin, 1965), 54 pp. The book includes "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (pp. 9 - 19), "My Lost City" (pp. 20 - 31) "Ring" (pp. 32 - 38), "The Crack-Up" (pp. 39 - 56), and "Early Success," (pp. 57 - 63).
4. Jill Ker Conway [1934 - 2018], The Road from Coorain. Conway grew up on a sheep farm in Australia and finally became President of Smith College. Chapters 1 - 5.
5. Conway, The Road from Coorain, Chapter 6 – 9.
6. Philip Roth [1933 - 2018], Patrimony: A True Story (1991), pp. 3 -110. This account of the aging and final illness of Roth's father won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
7. Roth, Patrimony, pp. 111 - 240.
8. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates [1975 - ], Between the World and Me (2015), pp. 3 - 176. Written in the form of letters to his teenage son, this memoir of growing up in West Baltimore, education at Howard University and beyond, is a follow-up to The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and the Unlikely Road to Manhood (2005), Part I, pp. 1-71.
9. Coates. Between the World and Me, Part II, pp. 72-152.
10. Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2010) pp. 1- 110.
11. Judt, The Memory Chalet, pp. 111-226
12. James Baldwin [1924 – 1987], Notes Of A Native Son (1955).
13. Eve Babitz [1943-], Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977), records her "life-long love affair with the cultural milieu of Los Angeles." Gossip and creativity on steroids. pp. 3-90.
14. Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A., pp. 91-178.
See the list of readings, with full bibliography, under weekly topics above.