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The authors of self-exploratory memoirs tell stories and reshape experience, describe the characters and arrange the events of their lives. A memoir that focuses on another person must try to understand and explain the connection between author and subject. The autobiographical emphasis becomes difficult when the author portrays a parent who is a major literary figure. Such memoirs show the continuing struggle between a natural desire to venerate their famous parents and to reveal their all-too-human failings, to blame them for ruining their lives yet establish their independent values and separate identity. The children can both benefit from and be stifled by the overwhelming personality who dominates their lives. Memoir writers enjoy the advantages of their parents' culture, wealth, fame, prestige and influence, and exploit their well-known names in order to publish their works. But in contrast to the polite, hagiographic convention of Victorian memoirs, demolished by Lytton Strachey, these literary parricides justify their sensational assaults on their parents in the interest of truth.
The nine mostly American memoirs considered in this essay were published between 1971 and 2011 and form a new sub-genre. Many of the titles refer to their parents' character: Near the Magician (Edmund Wilson) and Papa (Ernest Hemingway), or their works: Discretions (Pound), Why Not Say What Happened? (Robert Lowell), Summer of Deliverance (James Dickey) and Searching for Mercy Street (Anne Sexton). Two-thirds of these parents were divorced, others had unhappy marriages. The best memoirs add valuable insiders' insights to those of the parents' unpublished letters and journals, the recollections of their friends and their biographers. They also influence the parents' posthumous reputations.