The one Turow recalls most vividly is the very first review of his first book, "One L," a law-school memoir.
My Friend Dahmer (Abrams, £16.99) by award-winning comic artist Derf Backderf is a high-school memoir detailing the early life of Dahmer, one of America's most repulsive murderers.
He is the author of Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (Random House 2011), which he wishes were described more often as the "Jesus' Son of cooking-school memoirs".
One answer lies in a less well-known but equally important countertradition, the dyslogistic school of memoir written by former officials who present themselves as disillusioned innocents.
"When I Was Cool," then, is a school-days memoir, although the education Kashner received in Boulder was an unconventional one.
Because of this, I confess, and because I am schooled in memoirs involving psychiatric hospitals, I almost immediately began trying to come up with a diagnosis for the apparent unreliability of this narrator: borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar type II, addictive personality disorder, mixed anxiety-depressive disorder and so on.
As a memoirist, Price is very much of the old school: he sees memoir as an opportunity to reflect on youth from the sometimes cruel, sometimes merciful, vantage point of age.
Ms. Tiel, whose stepfather was a high-level administrator with the I.R.S., had an "Ozzie and Harriet" childhood in Chevy Chase, Md. Her high-school yearbook, the memoir recounts, is filled with inscriptions from fellow cheerleaders promising to "see you in Paris where I'll buy your dresses".
Constantly traveling between vaudeville dates, June never attended school, but in her memoir "More Havoc" (Harper & Row, 1980) she recalled being taught to read by theater stagehands.
