Whenever you listen to Terry Gross on NPR , you'll hear her say: "Next on Fresh Air, such-and-such a celebrity will join us to talk about her (or his) new memoir." A memoir, it seems, is a very specific genre. Instead of waiting, like Benjamin Franklin or Henry Adams, to write a full autobiography or a Bildungsroman -like narrative (I have in mind here The Education of Henry Adams ), people today write memoir after memoir: the memoir of the first ten years of my life; the memoir of the "lost years"; the memoir of last week. Tolstoy with his grandchildren circa 1909 This is not entirely new, of course. In his autobiographical trilogy Leo Tolstoy highlighted first Childhood , then Boyhood , then Youth (1852-56). And here, I suppose, I am approaching my subject: the mixing of fact and fiction. Tolstoy named the hero of his book "Nikolenka," little Nikolai -- not Lyovushka. So while he was basing some of the events, and certainly many of the e...
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