Reading Memoirs of Childhood: Childhood1 by Leo Tolstoy translated by Michael Scammell.  Modern Library, New York, NY, 2002 W, or The Memory of Childhood2 by Georges Perec translated by David Bellos David R. Godine, Boston, MA, 1988 Rue Ordener, Rue Labat3 by Sarah Kofman translated by  Ann Smock University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, and London, 1996 Childhood4 by Nathalie Sarraute translated by  Barbara Wright George Braziller, New York, NY, 1984

Memoirs of childhood are a distinct literary genre, a form of autobiography. Autobiography requires readers to accept the convention that, in some way, the text describes aspects of the author's life. Once upon a time, autobiography (e.g. St Augustine's or Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions) was supposed to be veridical - telling the story of a person's life. But French literary critics of the past four decades have been contending that (disempowered) writers need to subvert traditional expectations of autobiography. If, as some argue, traditional fiction and autobiography are dead, then they must be radically reinvented. Fiction requires new forms, new names - the ‘nouveau roman’ - as does autobiography - the ‘nouvelle autobiographie’, ‘autofiction’, ‘self-writing’, ‘life writing’. Writers of fiction and of autobiography will engage their readers in unexpected and disconcerting ways. Literary devices will keep readers from easily being able to believe and follow an author's account. It becomes difficult to determine how to connect author and narrator.

Memoirists can refuse to provide a chronology of their lives, contending that, as they create, they are only now capturing their own previously