Word: memoirs
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BLAME IT ALL ON JEAN-JACQUES Rousseau, whose Confessions shocked 18th century France with its author's admissions of sexual masochism and other private deviancies. The great philosopher didn't just help start the French Revolution with his writings; he ushered in a publishing genre--the confessional memoir. More than 200 years later the literary form is thriving. Not just the celebrity memoir in which show-biz and sports icons "tell all" about the pain behind the fame. More recently has come a flood of what might be called just-plain-folks memoirs--intensely personal yet highly literary accounts...
...MEMOIR CAN BE A DANGEROUS literary form, especially when it is the work of a gifted writer embarked on a voyage to discover some elusive personal truth. In Heart: A Memoir (Warner Books; 323 pages; $22.95), Lance Morrow, a writer and essayist for TIME since 1965, does not shrink from the realization that the surest path toward self-discovery is self-disclosure. In an effort to heal body and spirit following a second coronary-bypass operation at the relatively young age of 52, he was determined to seek out the sources of the internalized anger that had twice threatened...
...precisely because of these uncensored recollections and the insights they arouse that the memoir of an honest man often reveals more than the author intends or recognizes. Morrow's luminous study of self, spurred by a medical crisis, strikes an unexpectedly universal chord. Every man is Everyman, and so the author deals not only with the inner torment of Lance Morrow but also with that...
Vidal is a first-rate essayist, one of America's finest, though a rather more pedestrian novelist and playwright. His memoir lacks the sharp, confident voice of his essays, while the characters, like those in his novels and plays, often come across as wooden and two dimensional. He complains over and over to the reader of his frayed memory, his disinclination to look backward, his lack of a diary (he relies altogether too much on other people's memoirs instead). As a result, Palimpsest has a kind of haphazard feel, with the present frequently intruding upon the past...
...referencing goes to Bret Easton Ellis, whose famously lazy prose has made him the Danny Bonaduce of letters. In the hands of British writer Nick Hornby, though, the affectation is used to excellent effect. Hornby, 38, is worshipped in Britain for his 1992 book, Fever Pitch, a humorous memoir about his life as a soccer fan. In this first novel, High Fidelity (Riverhead Books; $21.95; 323 pages), he demonstrates his enviable talent for lucid, laconic writing...