Loving these interviews, but, as primarily a memoirist, I can't help noticing a couple of recent disparaging comments about my preferred genre. In this interview, we've got the following comments from Daniel Falatko ( Daniel Falatko ): "I don’t think I could ever be egotistical enough to fuck with straight memoire."

Or: "Reality is a construct of a dull mind, and only the dullest of novels stick to base reality and truth." Memoir would be that kind of novel, you might say.

And two interviews before this one, we get the following from Timothy Atkinson : "with fiction it’s much more acceptable to pursue questions that you never find answers to than it is in non-fiction, where most writers are just trying to persuade or show off, like schmucks."

People disparage something if they've had blah experiences with it. If they've read five mediocre books of a particular genre, if they've had five bad plates of Spanish food, if they've seen five boring performances of ballet, well then they assume the whole genre / cuisine / branch of dance is lame.

Read "A False Spring" by Pat Jordan, or "A Childhood" by Harry Crews, or "Burning the Days" by James Salter, or "The Boy Kings of Texas" by Diego Martinez, or "The Factory of Light" by Michael Jacobs, just to name a few.

Perhaps Falatko is TOO egotistical to write memoir, in other words perhaps he's incapable of distinguishing the dull from the dynamic in his own life. Certainly many misguided memoirs suffer from this.

Or, to respond to Atkinson, the point of great memoir is precisely to address the ultimately unanswerable question: what was the point of my life (or some period of my life)? The best memoirs don't give patte answers. Read, for example, The Summing Up, by Somerset Maugham. It's the humblest, least schmuck-like book imaginable.

Perhaps Andrew Komarnyckyj should interview a memoirist.