Memoirs, which Williams consistently refers to as a "thing," moves back and forth between the near and distant past, between the struggle for success and the struggle to retrieve it. Quite legitimately, Williams may be capsulizing, rarefying facts to manageable size and form, presenting the essence rather than the graph of actuality. The author's life, as he sees it, is made accessible through the medium of written expression; we do not come to see what it is like to be Tennessee Williams, but what it is like to see Tennessee Williams more or less as he is willing to be seen. But no matter how faithful to events a writer may wish to be, memoirs are a compromise; they exist as aesthetic works apart from fact as surely as they may represent an attempt to unite objective and subjective impulses in literary form, and Memoirs exists, unassailable, immune to charges of faulty, truncated, or manufactured memory….
What is most remarkable about Memoirs is its frankness, especially related to sexuality, and, paradoxically, its guarded tone.
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