It’s Autobiographical

Memoir

A History
by Ben Yagoda
Riverhead, 304 pp., $25.95

Girding himself for a tough reelection battle looming in 1964, John F. Kennedy mused that, whether he would go on to serve two terms or only one, he would reach a peculiarly awkward age upon leaving the White House: too old to start a new career and too young to write his memoirs. He would face no such conundrum were he living now. In a day when Miley Cyrus can perpetrate an autobiography, a candid account of his own days, penned by a witty former president, especially one who seemed an avid student of history with a well-stocked mind and flair for taut phrasing, even a biased book dotted with a few planned or accidental flaws, would have been a bracing splash of water in a parched world.

Memoirs aren’t what they used to be. We still tend to think that one must have lived a life of some moment and longevity to justify writing it up for posterity, that memoirs flow from the fountain pen—we picture these people writing with pens, not iPads—of someone whose days have been more grand or more variegated than our own, someone who has lived a life, as one wit put it, “fit to be written.” But this picture is not entirely true. And as Ben Yagoda informs us in this cogent study of memoir-writing over the last few millennia, the good memoirs, the ones worth reading one generation after another with nourishment for each, have always been the exception. The average has been, back in those headier days as well as now, relentlessly average, and that average can go fairly low nowadays.