I have just posted an overview of the reviews of histories, biographies and memoirs written for the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge in the first seven weeks of 2013 which you can find here. Overwhelmingly the reviewers preferred to read memoirs over biographies and histories. Why is this? On the Australian Women Writers’ website I have posed some questions about memoirs which I hope will stimulate comments and reveal why this genre is so popular.
Of course there are many more readers and reviewers out there who read histories and biographies written by Australian women. Are you one of them? If so I encourage you to participate in the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge this year so that other readers can hear about the great histories and biographies written by Australian women. You don’t even need to have a blog. You can easily open a free Goodreads account and post your reviews there. Click here to find out more about the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge and sign up.
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I love memoirs because they so honestly occupy the contested ground between fact and fiction; between memory and history. Sometimes their authors discuss how they negotiate that tension which I negotiate as an historian. And they tell me what I want to know most about other times and places. Not national or global stories but those of individuals that tell not only what happened but how an author experienced and thought about what happened. Some of the best use the experience of writing a memoir to reassess their lives and tell us how they felt about something in the past and how they view it now.
Reading this I felt a shard of truth that rendered any response I tried to compose sound trite. Thankyou Marilyn.