What is the Right Age for a Memoir?

When I founded Memoirs Unlimited in 1987, I built my portfolio one client at a time. Self-taught and -propelled, I took some years to draw a demographic conclusion: my typical client was eighty years old!

Until you hit eighty, I reasoned, you think you are going to live forever. But after eighty comes ninety and you think, what are the odds? If anyone has ever thought about writing down their life, an eightieth birthday is a good trigger.

That was the mid-1990s, about the time Mary Karr’s wonderful memoir The Liar’s Club became a best-seller and opened the publishing floodgates. Karr (pictured above) wrote her book about growing up in East Texas with alcoholic parents while still in her thirties. Today, every young writer north of twenty seems to have a memoir on their résumé.

What gives? Why suddenly all these youthful memoirs?

Let’s get real. Young memoirs are published by the gross these days because (a) we live in a culture that idolizes youth and (b) they sell, young memoirs. New York publishing does not let principle or propriety stand in the way of profit.

Still, the question can be asked: Is a twenty-something memoir even valid? In the New York Times Book Review this weekend, young memoirist Noelle Howey asks and answers. Her essay, “They’ve Said Too Much,” is pointed at young memoirists like herself who live to regret what they wrote. Howey’s book, Dress Codes, centered on her cross-dressing, transgendered father. The author had reason to regret the book:

Back then, I reveled in the act of telling the unexpurgated truth. I’d harbored the secret of my father’s gender identity throughout my teenage years. The moment I walked out of the closet, I eagerly climbed onto a soapbox. If a thought felt taboo or inappropriate, that meant it warranted—no, demanded—expression. So I shared how, at the age of 9, I made out with a neighborhood companion. How at 15, I implored my boyfriend to have sex. How I stole my mother’s lingerie, and wore it while humping a door frame.

Abashed, Howey writes, “Maybe there is a reason people used to write their memoirs in the autumn, as opposed to the spring, of their lives.”

Howey cites Kathryn Harrison’s regrets about The Kiss, in which Harrison details her incestuous relationship with her father; and Laurie Sandell’s feelings about The Impostor’s Daughter: 

Sandell says that she, too, has had the impulse to retroactively censor her memoir. In her mid-30s, she wrote [her] graphic nonfiction account of growing up with her con artist father. Recently, a friend’s teenage son opened up the book right to a page where Sandell depicted herself in the nude. Sandell cringed. “Sometimes I want to go back in time and draw a bikini on,” she says.

In the end, however, Howey defends her decision to write and publish a memoir at such a young age, and she stands up for her peers as well.

Despite these second thoughts and occasional regrets, I am still stubbornly proud of my memoir. I’m still glad I wrote it when I did—and my fellow younger memoirists concur. Here’s why: Whatever early memoirs lack in perspective, they make up in urgency, the sense that here is a story that must be told.

It “must be told,” the young memoirist’s story, as long as it sells. This is another thing you can say about New York publishing: it is fad-driven. The profitability of young memoirs will inevitably wane, a new rage will inflame young writers eager for fame and fortune, and the memoir will retreat to its accustomed season: autumn.

Because, to rephrase Howey, what the eighty-year-old lacks in urgency he or she makes up in perspective. If you look at the original meaning of memoir, it has everything to do with perspective and little to do with urgency.