Casey Anthony?
Historically, memoir has been defined as a subcategory of autobiography. While the art of memoir is nonfiction and written from the first-person point of view (much like autobiography), memoir is differentiated in form from autobiography. Rather than summarizing a life in whole, the memoir offers a much more narrow form. An autobiography tells the story of a life, while memoir tells a story from a life. Memoir is more about what can be gleaned from a few years or a moment in the life of the author, than from the author's life as a whole. In his own memoir Palimpsest: A Memoir, the author Gore Vidal writes about the first 40 years of his life. In narrative, he gave a personal definition of the art of memoir. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."[1]
The term memoirs has often been used to describe works that are more properly defined as autobiography, than the literary memoir. Memoir has been used interchangeably with autobiography or "memoirs", generally referred to in the possessive, "my memoirs" or "his memoirs", which were much like a collection of different memories from the author's life and thrown together.[2] Katharine Hepburn's book, Me: Stories of My Life, has often been referred to as Hepburn's memoirs. Hepburn herself warns the reader that the book fails to follow a pattern common with the memoir. She refers to the book as "stories of [her] life. And when I say stories I'm afraid I mean flashes—this—that—no no the other thing."[3]
Early memoirs[edit]
Memoir has been written since