Memoirs and More Memoirs

In the last decade, publishers have brought a plethora of memoirs to the reading public, but as New York Times critic William Grimes asks, “We all have a life. Must we all write about it?”

Here’s his analysis, which includes authors from the sublime to the ridiculous to the ordinary, with subject matter from the traumatic-memory memoir, to the vanished-era memoir to the sexual-exploit memoir.