![]() 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. In his book Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda sketches a family tree pinning Walden as a precursor to the modern success of spiritual and schtick lit memoirs like Eat, Pray, Love and Gretchen Ruben’s The Happiness Project, as well as the long literary tradition of My year of memoirs that gave us Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical. ![]() 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. 20 Best-Selling Memoir Books of All Time Greenlights Born A Crime Born a Crime The Storyteller Tuesdays with Morrie Pachinko AUTOGRAPHED by Min Jin Lee I. ![]() 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. It’s a deep meditation on something like growing up poor, or having a debilitating mental illness, or living in a racist America. Memoirs are structured differently from formal autobiographies which tend to encompass the writers entire life span, focusing on the development of his/her personality. In a devastatingly timely memoir, Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong writes about grieving the death of her cousin who passed away from glioblastoma and how she's applying the lessons he taught. 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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