Up From Brownsville: Alfred Kazin: Life and Work

If memoirs are always full of lies—and they always are—the measure of a good memoirist is how well she tricks us. Of course, all texts are slippery; it would be foolish to suggest that memoirists are amoral or immoral or evil. Often as not these “liars” shape their tales to drive home some larger point, deploying dubious strategies of “self-examination” to get at some greater meaning.

In some cases the greater meaning amounts to an aesthetic or political idea considered valuable by a group to which the memoirist belongs. Many examples of this can be found in the long tradition of the African-American memoir. On the contemporary scene, Maya Angelou has produced several separate accounts of her life; the progenitors of h...