Recently I've had occasion to think about memoirs, which have become, because of their ubiquity, something of a joke in the 21st century. (Part of the problem is that they're now frequently being written by people in their 20s and 30s.) Yet I've realized that some of my favorite books are memoirs: James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days, Evelyn Waugh's A Little Learning, Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, V.S. Pritchett's Midnight Oil, M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me, Kate Simon's A Wider World, Norman Lewis' Jackdaw Cake, James Salter's Burning the Days, Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs, Auberon Waugh's Will This Do?, Roy Blount Jr.'s Be Sweet, Martin Amis' Experience, Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation and the mother of all memoirs, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.
There, a little late, is your summer reading list. (Now I'm off to Toronto for a long weekend.)
