Writing it up, writing it down

The current trend in autobiography that is making ours an age of memoir has long historical roots. The trend presents a potential difficulty for contemporary literature as writers increasingly turn from the writing of fiction to the writing of memoir; we risk, as Milan Kundera puts it, "an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding" in this proliferation of voices competing for a limited audience of readers. This essay presents no solutions to that potentiality but it does explore some of the motives for autobiography.