What’s the difference between autobiography and memoir? I got to thinking after wrapping up this issue’s Picks, which include Dorothy Cotton’s If Your Back’s Not Bent: How the Civil Rights Movement Gained Victory and Claude
Lanzmann’s The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir. SCLC insider Cotton, a long-time associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, relates her up-from-poverty life and ongoing civil rights efforts; Shoah director Lanzmann, a long-time associate of Sartre and de Beauvoir, has as lengthy and dramatic a tale to tell. But his work is billed as a memoir‚ something I tend to think of as slice-of-life meditative, not comprehensive. Since Lanzmann’s work is on my dying-to-read pile, I may get an answer to this question sooner than I think. In the meantime, thoughts welcome.
About Barbara Hoffert
We get this question all the time. And the way you have described memoir vs. biography is exactly how we do. Biography is a person’s life from point a to point b and tends to be comprehensive. A memoir can be a slice of that, and we feel it tends toward the introspective, meditative more so than the accomplishments and history content.
To me, memoir is a slice of a person’s life or a story that encompasses one dramatic aspect of his or her life (i.e., Alexandra Fuller’s “Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight”) versus autobiography, which is a more linear and comprehensive story of a person’s life starting from birth to present day (i.e., “The Autobiography of Malcolm-X”).