A memoir is literary nakedness.

I started reading my dear friend Tom Lysaght's new book The Inner Atlas, a collection of stories, essays, and reflections that serve as a memoir. One of his opening chapters delves into the distinction between autobiography and memoir:

"As a literary genre, the confessional memoir is a manner of truth telling—its primary impulse being to set the record straight, to bear witness—and to be reliable. The narrator's truth may be subjective, but the reader believes that the author is being honest. Unlike the autobiography, which usually recounts the external details and doings of the author, the memoir has a specific focus, exploring one condensed aspect of the author's inner life. It is usually presented as a story with a dramatic arc. Thus, like a script, it has an inciting incident (a beginning), a pivotal climax or turning point (a middle), and a resolution (an end). Time does not just run out—as it often does in an autobiography, which usually covers the entire lifetime or "professions" of its subject. In the autobiography, the author may reveal certain intimate or hidden details of his or her life, but usually spends more time "professing" whom the writer perceives or presumes his or herself to be. A persona rather than an authentic self is thus often presented to the reader.

In contrast to an autobiography's public presentation of one's self "image," the confessional memoir dramatizes the long, winding road to self-knowledge. Oftentimes, it portrays how such self-recognition leads to a transcendental, visionary experience and/or new awareness of self (beyond that of ego or persona). Ram Dass (formerly Professor Richard Alpert of Harvard University) does so in just thirty-five pages in the opening section of his best-selling memoir, Be Here Now. In William Wordsworth's case, his re-birth was midwifed by the poet's experience of nature (as portrayed, for example, in his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey). In his memoir, Confessions, St. Augustine attributes his transcendent re-birth into heightened awareness to his transformative experience of Jesus Christ (as distinct from mere belief in Jesus Christ)."

Memoir as a literary device, when executed authentically, is a most vulnerable act. You publish yourself—your blemishes, your confessions, the real stories of your life. A memoir mirrors our memories—non-linear, fragmented histories that, together, form the larger arc of who we are.

The memoir is confession, as Tom points out. It is declaring, "This is who I am." It puts the author at risk of rejection, ridicule, and judgment. It is in that nakedness that its power lies.

Here's my invitation: reflect on your life and ask yourself, What would I write in my memoir? What feelings arise when you think about exposing your most vulnerable moments? What memories would you share as the authentic you, not the one that would make you look best?

Observe the feelings. Pay particular attention to the uncomfortable ones. You may find that those are the most vulnerable memories worth sharing. They may be the ones that make you most human.

The full chapter "Memoir vs Autobiography" from Tom Lysaght's The Inner Atlas:

"Similar to the prefixes "pro" and "con," the words "profession" and "confession" are opposites; however, they are the flip sides of one coin. "To confess" originally meant "to acknowledge." It was a frank admittance of having done something wrong, regretful, or deficient. A confession, then, is an intimate bearing witness to one's imperfect self with an implied resolution for improvement. "To profess," on the other hand, meant "to declare publicly" one's aspirational self (I'm a lawyer; I'm a mother; I'm a Christian). A profession, therefore, is a public pronouncement of a social persona—of a role, and as such, may include embellishment, evasion, or camouflage. Therein, lies the chief distinction between memoir and autobiography.

As a literary genre, the confessional memoir is a manner of truth telling—its primary impulse being to set the record straight, to bear witness—and to be reliable. The narrator's truth may be subjective, but the reader believes that the author is being honest. Unlike the autobiography, which usually recounts the external details and doings of the author, the memoir has a specific focus, exploring one condensed aspect of the author's inner life. It is usually presented as a story with a dramatic arc. Thus, like a script, it has an inciting incident (a beginning), a pivotal climax or turning point (a middle), and a resolution (an end). Time does not just run out—as it often does in an autobiography, which usually covers the entire lifetime or "professions" of its subject. In the autobiography, the author may reveal certain intimate or hidden details of his or her life, but usually spends more time "professing" whom the writer perceives or presumes his or herself to be. A persona rather than an authentic self is thus often presented to the reader.

In contrast to an autobiography's public presentation of one's self "image," the confessional memoir dramatizes the long, winding road to self-knowledge. Oftentimes, it portrays how such self-recognition leads to a transcendental, visionary experience and/or new awareness of self (beyond that of ego or persona). Ram Dass (formerly Professor Richard Alpert of Harvard University) does so in just thirty-five pages in the opening section of his best-selling memoir, Be Here Now. In William Wordsworth's case, his re-birth was midwifed by the poet's experience of nature (as portrayed, for example, in his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey). In his memoir, Confessions, St. Augustine attributes his transcendent re-birth into heightened awareness to his transformative experience of Jesus Christ (as distinct from mere belief in Jesus Christ).

Augustine (A.D. 354-430) lived until the age of seventy-five but wrote his memoir at the age of forty-three. Consequently, his Confessions is not an autobiography. It is a memoir focused on dramatizing Augustine’s realization that he did not have a soul, but rather, had a body and was a soul. His Confessions—arguably the first Western memoir—intimately "confesses" how Augustine awakened to the recognition that his core identity was spiritual—not material, biological, psychological, or professional.

The early, Roman-influenced Christian era, like almost any era, had many people "professing" who they were. These self-identifications were usually materially based aspects of one's outer life (economic, biological, nationalistic, cultural, occupational). The modern trend of identity politics is similarly plagued by materialistic self-identification (by gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.). Augustine wished to explode this practice of people "professing" who they are (often in a self-serving, and usually in a limiting, political or merely material manner). He wished rather to "confess" how his ignorance of his true spiritual self had led him to wander into a wilderness of oblivion and error, where he was enslaved by ego (admiration, recognition, status) and by sexual and other physical appetites. "Oh Lord, make me chaste," he at first prayed. "But not yet." Indeed, "one of the most notable features of the Confessions," writes Stacy Magedanz:

and one that has fascinated—or perhaps titillated—readers through the centuries is Augustine's honesty about his sexual career. Augustine makes clear that he was no angel: As a young man, he was sexually active, and later, he lived openly with a concubine who bore him a son. As Augustine describes himself, he was a slave to his sexual impulses. Augustine's sexual impulses were clearly a source of intense emotional pain for him, and this fact alone may account for the emphasis he places on his sexual sins... Reader response to this candor has varied over the centuries...

Some readers, no doubt, considered Augustine’s honesty about his impulses to be an inappropriate tell-all of private matters that should not be made public. However, the instructive lesson of a saint's or a sage's life is the story of his or her transformation, not the idealized icon of them crowned with a halo or laurel wreath. By putting a person on a hero’s pedestal, we distance ourselves from both the person and the disciplined process of that person's struggle to rise above "being" to "becoming" his/her truer self. Seeing someone in the clouds can be as fruitless as seeing someone as a lowly sinner. Whereas hagiography romanticizes its subject, a tell-all testimony of one's sins humiliates and abases a person. Neither genre of writing is serviceable. Idealization stymies imitation by others, while confession of sins to others (in print or in person) hardly guarantees forgiveness—human or divine.

However, as a chronicle of self-examination and self-actualization, the confessional memoir can model the contemplative act of bringing oneself to account. Augustine’s Confessions dramatizes a spiritual journey of becoming. "Confession can mean admitting one's sins," points out Magedanz, which Augustine does with gusto, confessing not only his ambition and his lust but also his intellectual pride... But confession also means Augustine's detailed account of how he arrived at his knowledge of God. Finally, confession means a statement of praise, and in the Confessions, Augustine constantly gives praise to the God who mercifully directed his path... In essence, the Confessions is one long prayer.

As such, Augustine's memoir can be seen as a pilgrimage through the labyrinth of life's blind alleys and bottlenecks to the core of our common humanity as spiritual works in progress. Thus, with the first Western memoir, Augustine sets an exemplary model for the memoir as a spiritual quest. In doing so, he encourages the reader to bring his or her own self to account. By portraying his own evolution beyond the material and biological self-definitions that have constrained human potential and divided people for centuries, Augustine dramatizes the alchemy of spiritual transformation from human being to human becoming—the better angel of his nature."