The Memoir-in-Essays

On the overlapping subgenres of narrative nonfiction & 3 recently published hybrid favorites

I go through phases with nonfiction. Last year, especially last summer, I found myself suddenly reaching for narrative books on science, history, and psychology. I read my way through a number of memoirs¹ and essay collections—which offered meditations on love and family, hard-hitting personal essays about nature and sustainability, and craft advice from novelists I admire. In the first half of this year, on the other hand, just over 1 in 10 books I’ve read have been nonfiction (compared to last year’s 1 in 5).²

I’ve always been curious about personal nonfiction, perhaps since the lines between subgenres can seem so fluid. I’ve written about autofiction previously, but what is it that distinguishes memoir from personal essay? I came across a really great article about this question in nonfiction lit mag Hippocampus³ where writer Suzanne Farrell Smith elaborates on four points, which I’ve abbreviated here:

1. Focus on Self vs. Focus on Relating: The memoirist focuses on the self and what has changed over time. The personal essayist focuses on the self, too, but seeks to relate. Where, in culture, place, and time, does her story fit in?

2. Memory Mining vs. Experiential Mining: The memoirist mines his mind, perhaps consults artifacts from his past. The personal essayist mines her memory, too, but also mines the landscape of her evolving life… [and] processes in-the-moment interactions.

3. Voices vs. Voice: Memoir contains multiple voices, including the voices of the past and present self. In personal essay… [t]he narrator is a current version of the author who opines, worries, delights, fears.

4. Past Sense vs. Present Sense: Memoir conveys a sense of the past… The author has emerged and looks back to articulate meaning. In personal essay, there’s a sense things aren’t buttoned up… Personal essay feels open, like a thought experiment.

With Farrell Smith having made the differences between memoir and personal essay clear—why don’t we blur the lines again and consider the genre of memoir-in-essay? In a LitHub article from a few years ago—pulled from an issue of Creative Nonfiction—writer and teacher Beth Kephart describes memoirs-in-essays as “true story in which all the unnecessary things are absent” and “self-contained pieces to present a sustaining view of the life lived.” The essays in a memoir-in-essays, rather than those in a collection, provide a tangible sense of continuity and growth, as if they are “somehow aware of one another, looking back over their own shoulders, or arcing ahead, or pausing to remember what has or has not yet been said, has or has not yet been felt.”

This week’s newsletter features three of my favorite (relatively) recent memoirs-in-essays (in part, probably, to try and re-inspire myself to lean toward some nonfiction in the second half of the year—we’ll see).

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Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon, 2022)

Although I’m starting out of the gates with a book that isn’t a clear memoir-in-essays, I think it’s an incredible example of how innovate memoir can be, and how it can take on “hybrid” forms. Margo Jefferson won a Pulitzer for her criticism in the 90s, then won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Negroland in 2016. Constructing a Nervous System is her most recent book-length work (and winner of the 2023 Folio Prize). Billed as a memoir, Jefferson herself has called it a “temperamental autobiography.”

The book features words from Jefferson’s “alter egos,” including parents and grandparents, jazz musicians, an Olympic runner, a ballerina, and so many more—stars and artists alike. We’re in Toni Morrison’s literature and the Apollo and Ella Fitzgerald’s life and lyrics. There’s talk of Josephine Baker and Ike and Tina Turner and Willa Cather, George Eliot, and W.E.B Du Bois. Author Saidiya Hartman, in her back-cover blurb, calls Constructing a Nervous System “a startling and digressive form of auto-analysis” and “a serial meditation on the cultural icons key to Jefferson’s psychic and intellectual formation.” I really enjoyed this one—equal parts challenging and joyful, intellectual and imaginative.

Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy who Grew from It by Greg Marshall (Abrams Press, 2023)

This is a book that made me laugh out loud and made me cry; it’s smart, awkward, sexy, and sometimes shocking. Greg Marshall grew up thinking he had “tight tendons.” But when he aged out of his parents’ insurance in his mid-20s and started the process of getting on his own, he didn’t expect to be flagged or rejected or to run into so many complications—and he had no idea why. He started asking questions and discovered he’d been living his whole life with cerebral palsy, only his parents had intentionally kept the diagnosis from him. Marshall’s memoir is about coming out as gay, but then coming out again as disabled. It’s a family portrait that features a cast of sitcom-worthy siblings, a (feisty, loudmouth) mother⁴ going through chemo, and a dad dealing with ALS.

Many of the book’s essays were published in an array of outlets before being compiled in the book—yet they take readers through Greg’s adolescence and new adulthood and into his thirties with cohesive wit, humor, and lightheartedness amid hardship. I love this quote from an interview he gave in 2017:

“Creative nonfiction is the art form of choice for the underdog. Only convicts and middle children have any business doing it, those of us with holes in our hearts and chips on our shoulders who can’t tell a good bar story to save our lives.”

The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays by Athena Dixon (Tin House, 2023)

I stopped by a favorite Chelsea bookstore when I was back in New York for a weekend last November and picked up The Loneliness Files when I caught Hanif Abdurraqib’s praise on its cover. The essays in Dixon’s memoir are about the ways communal loneliness infiltrates modern life. In its first pages, she sets the tone with the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died in front of her television and was discovered there on her couch three years later. The book is divided into three parts. The essays in the first are loosely about true crime. In the second, they’re about various media and aspects of pop culture. The third part is where I feel Dixon finds her footing in a stunning way; these essays are about themes of home, family, and isolation.

“My loneliness is not groundbreaking, though. And it is not tragic. It just is. Nothing more and nothing less. I don’t expect it to be important to anyone else, but I write about it anyway. I turn it over like something precious in my hands—carefully as it floats across my fingers so I can see the details of it. Where dust and dirt and grit hide—the things that irritate and choke me when I breathe too deeply.”

Dixon is a poet, essayist, editor, and chapbook author, and the myriad facets of her experience come through in her prose. The Loneliness Files is experimental and lyrical; it’s well-researched yet heartbreakingly personal, urgent and reflective, dismal and also, eventually, hopeful. And Naomi Elias’ piece in the feminist review LIBER explores how the effect of Dixon’s intense intimacy, brilliantly, “is tender rather than voyeuristic.”

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Thanks so much for reading and subscribing—and for your patience with a short delay! A few deadlines all happened to land on this past week for me (I’ll have a couple links to share soon!), which warranted an extra day for the newsletter. In early August, you’ll be seeing a piece about “Primary Sources” in your inbox.

If you’re looking for more…

• I recommend checking into whether your local library hosts a summer book sale! Biggest and best book-buying events of the season, and for a good cause—I’ve stopped by two so far this summer and am excited to have another on the lineup for next weekend.

• I’ve been tuned into the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, which came out last week (ft. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend in first!). I’ve loved the discussion surrounding the list, people’s responses and critiques, as much as the list itself. What does “best” mean? Where are the works in translation? The millennial authors? I feel like some of these discrepancies were remedied in the list the NYT published subsequently, based off readers’ votes rather than those of the original 503 writers and critics. Just for fun—I’ve read 32 books off the readers’ list and these off the original best books list:

  

1. 5 stars to Chanel Miller’s Know My Name and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died!

2. I’ve read 6 nonfiction books so far this year: 3 works of memoir / autofiction (Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, and Thomas Gardner—whose book I mention in my newsletter Bookshelf Tarot), 2 essay collections (Ann Patchett and Elif Batuman), and an “adventure biography” (David Grann).

3. An incredibly talented friend of mine published a very moving personal essay in Hippocampus last year, which I still find myself thinking of often.

4. Two quotes from an excerpt of Leg you can read on LitHub:

“You can’t call your book Leg,” my mom told me when I brought up the idea… “Who would want to read a book called Leg?” “I would,” said my mom’s partner, Alice. “I think it sounds intriguing.” She was drawing what looked like vaginas in the surf with her big toe, calmly avoiding scuttling crabs that left my little sister Mona and me squealing.

“You know what’s a great story? It’s a Wonderful Life.” I was almost positive my mom had never sat through It’s a Wonderful Life—she hates black-and-white movies—but I let her continue for argument’s sake. “Why don’t people tell stories like that anymore? It’s a Wonderful Leg. That’s what you should call your book. It’s a Wonderful Leg and There’s Absolutely Nothing Wrong with It and My Mother Did the Best She Could in Spite of Having Cancer and Five Kids and a Husband Who Died of Fucking ALS.”