The airy, indeterminate genre of the memoir, the autobiographical exploration, has recently been realized primarily as a social novel. The individuals who wrote there showed how the subject struggled with adverse social circumstances – material and cultural poverty, violence, lovelessness – hardened itself and possibly asserted itself, developed and ultimately triumphed. Édouard Louis’ “Instructions for Becoming Another” (2022) is probably the best, the canonical example of this form of autobiographical writing for the time being.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: “The Chessboard” – Culture
