Memoir has become, in the words of NYT columnist Randy Cohen, a kind of literary kudzu: persistent, pervasive and enveloping. And like all parasites, it survives—and thrives—on the lifeblood of its host, which is in this case the poor beleaguered novel. We are living—and reading in—an age when the currency of the novel has been devalued, and made, if not worthless, then certainly small change.

And what a lot of memoirs there have been of late. It used to be that memoirs were the province of those who had lived extraordinary lives and reached a ripe old age from which to reflect back on them. Now, memoirs are written by the young, the brash, and the clueless; there are memoirs about every possible subject or experience: unhappy childhoods, depression, mental illness, marriage, divorce, infertility, infidelity, parenthood, and bereavement to name just a few. Add to these the can’t-churn-‘em-out-fast-enough memoirs about addiction—to drugs, alcohol, sex or any combination thereof—that are crowding the shelves. “Read me!” they cry. “My story is the most heartbreaking/inspiring/gut-wrenching/horrific. And guess what? Every single word of it is true!”

But according to Picasso, art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. And that is precisely what novels, especially the greatest novels, do. Our belief in their characters, our willingness to immerse ourselves in their lives, our emotional investment in what happens to them all conspire to create a truth greater than one comprised of only the facts. Yet somehow the memoir craze has obscured this little miracle, and as a result, the novel has been demoted, and seems to have become slightly second-class in the minds of too many readers.
Case in point: in her 1997 memoir, “The Kiss,” Kathryn Harrison documents an incestuous relationship she had with her father. Harrison’s writing is stunning and unflinching: she is willing look into the heart of every darkness and claim it as her own. Memorable scenes abound: here she is as a child, prying open the sealed eyelids of newborn kittens whose eyes then become infected from the invasion; now she is a teenager splayed on an examining table as her hymen is medically broken by a gynecologist with her mother looking on; now as a young woman imploring her father to release her from their unholy union. The book, harrowing and pitiless, deserved both its critical acclaim and its commercial success. But six years earlier, Harrison had published ”Thicker Than Water,” a novel that mined the same material. In fact, each of the scenes I mentioned above—the kittens, the medical defloration, the conversation with the father—are all present in that book as well. My point in mentioning this is not to discredit Harrison, who has every right to use her raw material in whatever way she sees fit, but to underscore the difference in public response. The acuity of the observations, the seamlessness of the writing, the relentlessness of the vision are qualities shared by both books. But while the novel received some good reviews and a cursory pat on the head, the memoir shot up to the bestseller list.

Another recent and cringe-worthy example is that of Herman Rosenblat, author of “Angel at The Fence.” Rosenblat, who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, claimed that he was saved by the bravery and kindness of a young girl who threw him apples over the fence; years later he met his savior and married her. But upon closer examination, it turned out that this heartwarming tale was almost one hundred percent pure invention. According to historical experts, the layout of the camps would have made such a meeting impossible and the camp’s fence was in any case too high to permit such contact; no other witnesses ever saw or heard about the girl; Rosenblat’s timeline was faulty. Despite Rosenblat’s palliative assurances that he “…wanted to bring happiness to people,” and “…to make good in this world,” his story was discredited and the book hastily aborted. Rosenblat’s name can be added a rapidly growing list of literary fabricators that includes James Frey and Margaret Selzer, both of who fibbed with monumental brio and moxie. But in all the ensuing finger pointing and name calling (schadenfreud devotees no doubt still savor the image of Frey, sitting shame-faced and mute, while Oprah excoriated him on national TV), there’s been very little asked about why these authors might have chosen to lie. Rumor had it that Frey initially tried to shop his manuscript as a novel but someone (editor? agent?) recommended that he call it a memoir instead. Memoir was what sold, he was advised. Memoir was king. This hardly exonerates Frey, but it does place his actions in some kind of context.

In their effort to claim our attention, far too many memoirs suffer from overkill; they tell too much, leaving no hint of mystery whatsoever. If the novel is the slightly elusive dinner party guest who charms and intrigues for the twenty or so minutes that you engage, then memoir is the drunken boor who corners you for two hours at that same party while you search, desperately, for an exit. But given the way memoir is currently lauded, in the marketplace and just about everywhere else, it’s easy to understand why so many writers are eager to jump on board, and even to lie, big time, to claim their very own ticket to ride.

Granted, all memoirs are not created equal. In addition to Harrison’s wrenching book, there are superlative memoirs by Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff; both of these authors—a poet and a fiction writer respectively—bring the discipline of their craft to the hard task of ordering their experience. Nabokov’s “Speak Memory” is an elegiac musing not only on a life, but also on an entire way of life that has vanished. But in memoirs like the wildly acclaimed “The Glass Castle” content clearly trumps form: the particulars of Walls’s stunningly dysfunctional family are so bizarre that they obscure the never more than pedestrian writing, the uneventful pacing. In terms of the craft, memoirs are somehow held to a lesser standard, a regrettable degradation that seems to go hand in hand with their inflated status. The higher the form is held in esteem, the less its individual practitioners are held accountable.

So why, then, has the memoir gained its present ascendancy? Why is what’s literally true seen as more worthy than what’s metaphorically true, in a deeper and more lasting way? Are memoirs the symptom or the cause of this literary inversion? Does the current appetite for memoir stem from the same greedy hunger that yearns for the fat and marrow of reality TV, and the endless loop of breathless, celebrity-crazed blather issuing forth from television/internet/tabloids? Or does our increasingly fragmented understanding of the world and our own puzzling place in it render us avid for anything that we can document as unequivocal and true? Is there a certain smugness at work, as if reading about the train wrecks of other lives can offer a sense of superiority about our own?

I’ve asked the questions but I don’t have the answers. Instead, I have the ardent wish that memoir will assume its rightful role—as an important vehicle for story telling, but not one that undermines or obscures the legitimate authority of the novel. Maybe then our memoirists will be less compelled to invent and embroider the details of their lives. Instead, they’ll leave that to the nimble-fingered novelists, spinning their fantastic yarns, weaving their most inauthentic truths.