Lewis said he saw the value in retelling the story of the civil rights movement as, essentially, an illustrated collection of memoirs because of the format's accessibility to audiences of different ages.
Valerie Sayers, in her review of Mom & Me & Mom in The Washington Post, calls Angelou's books memoirs because of their limited focus, but praises her for describing what it was like to grow up Black in "Jim Crow America".
But I would not have written it in a memoir because some of the people are friends and I would want to protect them, and I would also have to ask whether I have the moral right to tell their story, especially to portray them saying what they said in a closed room, words they did not intend to have the world hear.
Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own pratfalls in the form of memoir because they need to believe that all of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether is was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something.
Every 16-year-old girl needs to read King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes's punk coming-of-age memoir, because lurking in every teenage girl's breast is the beating, bloody heart of a rebel, waiting to make her own choices.
Free on bond but about to be imprisoned forever, he's in need of a ghostwriter to concoct his memoir because he's in need of the publisher's money.
"It's safe to say once a person has tried to take his life, the chances increase that he will try again," says Edward M. Hallowell, Massachusetts-based psychiatrist and author of the memoir Because I Come From a Crazy Family: The Making of a Psychiatrist.
Fact: I recently threw out 501 finished pages of a new memoir because its "truth" was off — not the facts or actual events, but their synthesis, their cant.
It's a heady antidote to memoir, because it requires a higher form of courage than delving into one's own known troubles.
