Little Failure, Great Success: The Writer’s Memoir as A Fail-Safe Genre

The surge of writers’ memoirs has resurrected the figure of the author after he had been declared dead by decades of postmodernism. This article argues that the memoir’s proneness to tackle failure reflects a wider literary anxiety. However, as fiction gradually contaminates the memoir form, the narrative of the self radically mutates, which informs the way failure is dealt with. Kept at a distance by an excessive use of comedy, failure seems bound to remain a fiction.