The problem with this before-and-after portrait of changing literary times is that it’s way too simple, as Ben Yagoda demonstrates in his learned and witty new book, “Memoir: a History.’’ Yes, we are beset by a plague of autobiographies, including a good many purportedly by dogs. And yes, novels like “A Fan’s Notes’’ and “The Bell Jar’’ would likely be published as nonfiction today, albeit without disturbing their relationship to the facts. But go back far enough and you’ll discover that things haven’t changed as much as you might think.
Memoirs are nearly as old as writing, and sensational disclosures have been a feature of them since at least the fifth century, when St. Augustine let it all hang out in his pathbreaking “Confessions,’’ which recounts his famous pragmatic plea to God: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his own “Confessions,’’ reported in the 18th century on his embarrassing lifelong desire to be spanked by women.
Confessions of sin were a standard feature in spiritual autobiographies, which typically ended with redemption in Christ. But by the first half of the 19th century there were plenty of memoirs by secular rogues as well. One study of bibliographies for the period found that while the leading occupational category for American memoirists was clergy/religious; the second was criminal/deviant, accounting for a quarter of published autobiographies.
As the pace of memoirs picked up in the 19th and 20th centuries, so did complaints that publishers were producing too many of them. Nor was trauma or seniority any longer a prerequisite.
Scandals over bogus memoirs are nothing new either. Just as controversy erupted when it was shown that some of the horrors described by Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu in her 1983 memoir apparently didn’t happen, so too did controversy arise before the Civil War when the occasional slave-memoir turned out to have been cooked up by abolitionists.
