Notes to Self

Memoir, Helena de Bres writes in Artful Truths, is “centrally valuable” as a window into the lives of others. “It’s memoir we go to, not journalism, or even biography, when we want to understand at a deep level what it was like, how it felt, to go through the sorts of experiences that make up the heart of human life.” The literary tradition of personal narration stretches back to the likes of Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Michel de Montaigne, but, as de Bres observes, there has been something of a memoir boom in recent years, with such notable examples as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In some ways, though, McCourt and Eggers are contemporary outliers, as the genre has also seen a sea change in authorship, “from mostly older White men to an increasingly young, female, non‑White and otherwise diverse set of writers.”

De Bres, who teaches at Wellesley College, in...