Blake Morrison on the Crisis of Memoir Truth
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Blake Morrison argues memoir has shifted from "a geriatric, self-satisfied genre" of politicians and generals to "nobody memoirs" open to anyone with a story, with candour as the defining demand.
- Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) opens with an explicit first-person passage that Morrison says would have been "hard to imagine" being published 30 years earlier, exemplifying the new confessional mode.
- Frank memoir writing is not new, the piece notes — Thomas Blackburn's A Clip of Steel and J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself were published over half a century ago with startling sexual explicitness.
- Morrison cites alternatives to first-person confession: bell hooks uses "she" and "we" in Bone Black, Salman Rushdie used "he" in Joseph Anton, and JM Coetzee wrote his childhood memoirs in the third person to create critical distance from the self.
- The Raynor Winn / The Salt Path scandal is flagged as a cautionary case: questions over omitted alleged embezzlement, the severity of husband Moth's corticobasal degeneration, and Winn's claim the book was her debut despite a prior pseudonym publication.
- Substack is competing with published memoir, with Morrison quoting Naomi Alderman saying the platform "unlocked" writing she "basically didn't know I had in me" through its paid-subscriber intimacy.
- Nonfiction sales slumped last year, Morrison warns, and if readers conclude memoirs cannot be trusted, the genre itself suffers — a risk underscored by the Kate Clanchy apology and ongoing backlash to perceived "racist, classist and ableist tropes" in her school-teaching memoir.
Why it matters: Morrison is making a two-part argument with material stakes for writers and publishers: the memoir genre is more democratic and more candid than ever, but the Winn scandal shows that omission or fabrication can destroy credibility — and with nonfiction sales already slumping, publishers cannot afford more high-profile authenticity failures while Substack siphons readers away from full-length memoir.
