Memoir: Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well

As William Zinsser says in his 2006 essay in The American Scholar on “How to Write a Memoir,” “writers are the custodians of memory,” and we well know George Santayana’s exhortation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Our memoirists fill an important role for us by engaging memory, challenging it and wrestling it into a manageable page-sized version that can be shared and whose lessons can be partaken of by readers. It’s a publishing mission well worth remembering.