SOURCE: "Woe Is Me: Rewards and Perils of Memoirs," in The New York Times, October 21, 1997, p. E8.

[In the following essay, Kakutani remarks on the process of memoir-writing, asserting that "the current memoir craze … has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one," and analyzes two collections: Laurie Stone's Close to the Bone and Kathryn Rhett's Survival Stories.]

In her 1995 memoir Dreaming, Carolyn See described her father and stepmother's participation in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: "Those people in A.A. in the late 40's and early 50's can be said to have reinvented American narrative style," she wrote. "All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for a great pitch."

Although the last few years have witnessed the publication of memoirs like Mary Karr's Liars' Club and Andr...