Good food for thought about why to write and how to read memoirs from the New Yorker's review of "Memoir: A History" featuring Freud, St. Augustine, Rousseau and other hoidy toidy references you'd expect from the NYer.

They don't mention that right now it's next to impossible to sell a memoir in a publishing market that insiders are calling 'brutal'. Or that in the post-Kiss & Running With Scissors environment, you either need to be pretty famous or have a giant meat hook to hang your book on.

But they do offer a bonus podcast about phony memoirs and the enduring popularity of the form.