WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MEMOIR (OR MEMOIRS) AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?
I am often asked, What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography? As Marc Pachter, leader of the Washington Biography Group, puts it, an autobiography is a complete lifeoften but not always moving in a line from birth to famewhich may or may not be the author’s inward journey. As Judith Barrington (Writing the Memoir)puts it, “An autobiography is the story of a life: the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life.” Publishers increasingly call autobiographies memoirs (plural). A memoir (singular) is not the larger story of a life (from birth to death), but may be a slice of that life, the shaping of a single piece of experience, a crystallized version of I remember. In the view of William Zinsser, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner of his or her life that was unusually vivid or intensechildhood, for instanceor that was framed by unique events. By narrowi
