![]() Others, like Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling, let people into the inner worlds of celebrities - they’re just like us! Each is deeply influential in their own way. A memoir is defined as any book that comes from a collection of memories, from the French mémoire. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, and the best poetry collections of the decade, and we have now reached the fourth list in our series: the best memoirs published in English between 20 (not for nothing: 2015 was a very good year for memoirs). Books like Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert inspire people to follow in the author’s footsteps of discovery. Many of these memoirs were turned into movies and became cultural icons. There are vital historical texts, like The Diary of Anne Frank, or Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, that are almost memoir but not quite - the pieces of a diary and the stories of someone else, respectively. The craft has evolved over time, with famous writers being the only ones in the space early on, like Ernest Hemingway writing about his life in Paris in A Moveable Feast, or the poet Mary Karr recalling her childhood with an alcoholic parent in The Liars’ Club. Here, we dig into some of the most influential memoirs of all time. Memoirs are structured differently from formal autobiographies which tend to encompass the writers entire life span, focusing on the development of his/her personality. It’s a deep meditation on something like growing up poor, or having a debilitating mental illness, or living in a racist America. Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war, an intimate lens on the century’s bloodiest conflict, and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom. A memoir is the story of a specific time or theme or experience of a person’s life. ![]() It’s not a biography - the story of a person’s life told by someone else - or an autobiography - a person telling their own life story.
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