Great article by Daniel Mendelsohn

A small portion of a larger article written by Daniel Mendelsohn of The New Yorker, entitled, "The History of Memoirs." This article details the history of the memoir and why, in most cases, these "truths" writers claim to be telling aren't in fact truths at all. They are "a truth," but not "the truth." See the full article here:

Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once “confession” came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest—and, maybe worse, once “redemption” came to mean nothing more than the cozy acceptance offered by other people, many of whom might well share the same secret—it was but a short step to what the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent “memoir craze”:

“the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.”