SOURCE: Wolff, Tobias, and Elizabeth Glass. “Mastering the Memoir: Tobias Wolff.” Writer's Digest (July 1997): 25-7.

In the following interview, Wolff discusses This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, explaining his opinions on the differences between literary memoir and autobiography.

Although the “literary memoir” has been around for decades, Tobias Wolff helped pioneer its current incarnation as a genre that's reaching a wide audience among today's readers. Wolff's seminal work, This Boy's Life, is often pointed to as the first literary memoir that employed aspects of creative nonfiction—recreated dialogue, a fictive-narrative structure, use of scenes instead of mere retelling—to add excitement and meaning to a traditional essay structure.

His 1994 memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and This Boy's Life was made into a movie in 1993. Wolff's achievements extend into other fields: His short-story collections include The Night in Question, Back in...