“Although we are told often enough that we live in an age of memoir, memoirists are not the only culprits of the personal, now or historically. Lyric poetry, especially in our time, is often explicitly autobiographical. And some of the most compelling fiction in our literature turns instinctively to faux memoir for its narrative mode, adopting the first person voice for wholly invented lives.”

– from “First Person Singular,” the Introduction to One Blood: The Narrative Impulse (AQR, 2000)