The Art of Time in Memoir

“Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times,” Birkerts writes. But what makes one memoir memorable and another self-serving? What determines the difference between graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure? Birkerts argues that the memoirist’s strategies for presenting the subjective experience of time reveal the power and resonance of the writer’s life. By examining memoirs such as Virginia Woolf’s unfinished A Sketch of the Past, and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist’s essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, how the work stirs to life our own sense of past and present.

Praise for Sven Birkerts:

“To read Birkerts is to hear (and enjoy hearing) the voice of literary conscience.” —Seamus Heaney

“Expansive and eclectic and laserous and lucid and impassioned and heartlessly smart. Birkerts is the most interesting and persuasive critic in the U.S. today.” —David Foster Wallace