For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we’re looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.

FICTION

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon
Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore.

“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert clan tries to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that’s also fundamentally generous and human.

“John Henry Days” by Colson Whitehead
A hack journalist gets hired by a travel Web site to write up a festival celebrating the folk hero John Henry. This brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age collides with the mythic dignity of America’s past. The fact that both the hero and the freelancer are black only complicates and enriches this novel’s wit.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem
A boy named Dylan comes of age in a bohemian household as one of the few white kids in 1970s Brooklyn. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era’s soul soundtrack, this is a bruised paean to the author’s hometown, a meditation on American boyhood and a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
Capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original, this is a classic historical novel — only the history it’s based on is (almost) entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. With Austenian elegance and glorious imagery, Clarke describes the professional rivalry between the two eponymous master magicians; the result is nothing less than pure sorcery.

“Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link
It’s almost impossible to choose between this collection and Link’s galvanizing 2001 debut, “Stranger Things Happen.” Her exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of, from pop culture to fairy tales. Some of these pieces are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kath, a seemingly ordinary British girl, goes to a special boarding school where she and her friends are groomed for a special fate while enjoying and suffering the loves and betrayals that come to young people everywhere. This odd, heartbreaking novel unfurls age-old conundrums about what it means to be a person; about the grievous sin of treating anyone, however unexceptional, as the means to an end; and about the unfathomable future that awaits each and every one of us.

“Veronica” by Mary Gaitskill
A model with a fluorescent, dirty past winds up as a nobody with hepatitis who cleans offices for cash and dwells on her memories of an unlikely friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. There’s nothing feel-good about “Veronica,” but this novel is so alive, so streaked with colors and spiked with sharp edges, that reading it is almost a tactile experience. It’s a perfect, slicing portrait of a sad, once-beautiful woman who doesn’t want — or deserve — our pity, but who ultimately earns our compassion.

“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith
Conservative black Brits of Caribbean descent move in down the street from a leftish, mixed-race family in an East Coast college town. In Smith’s hands the classic fodder of academic satire becomes miraculously endearing and sympathetic, a tale of two families that explodes with vitality, curiosity, enthusiasm and love for human beings and the perplexing situations they get into.

“A Person of Interest” by Susan Choi
In this Hitchcockian tale, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, “A Person of Interest” eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.

NONFICTION

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
Even if you haven’t read Eggers’ memoir about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, you’ve felt its effect. An entire literary generation fell under the spell of Eggers’ playful, ingenious, self-reflective style (and that was only the beginning of a brilliant career as an author, editor, teacher, collaborator and all-around impresario). Often mischaracterized as merely “ironic,” that voice found a fresh, exhilarating way to approach life’s devastating truths without succumbing to knee-jerk pathos or solemnity.

“The Battle for God” by Karen Armstrong
A year before Muslim extremists brutally invaded the awareness of every Westerner, Armstrong, a former nun, published this essential, lucid consideration of the fundamentalist mind-set and its roots. During a decade when the conversation about religion has degenerated into pointless duels between screeching polemicists, she has brought a measured, open-minded wisdom to questions of faith and its place in the modern world.

“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich
At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America’s working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don’t. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable.

“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” by George Packer
A political liberal covering the Iraq war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. The result of his reporting is among the most measured, thoughtful and self-examining of the many books on the conflict, taking in not only the theorists who justified it, but also inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of the war will find it here.

“The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″ by Lawrence Wright
Six years after Sept. 11, Wright produced the definitive account of the terrorist attacks and how they happened, from the fanatics who conceived and orchestrated the plot to the intelligence agencies that failed to anticipate and thwart it. He developed an expertise on the subject so deep that in time those same agencies tried to utilize him as a source and even tapped his phones. Yet for all the knowledge that went into “The Looming Tower,” it reads as sleekly and compellingly as a top-notch thriller.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a South American grass that can currently be found in every processed food: King Corn. From the scientist who transformed the world by synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer to a calculation of just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel), there’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of this hugely influential exploration of what we eat.

“Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel
This graphic memoir is an investigation of Bechdel’s childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house that her father obsessively restored and maintained. After she came out of the closet to her parents at 19, her mom delivered a return whammy: Bechdel’s father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including teenage boys. Not long after, he died under ambiguous circumstances. Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; “Fun Home” shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.

“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman
How would the earth be changed if the human race simply and suddenly vanished? Weisman uses this startlingly elementary question and its fascinating answer to suggest just how artificial our grip on the planet has become. Within days, subway tunnels would flood and collapse, subdivisions would be shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing; it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power — picturing a much healthier planet and considering a less drastic way to get there.

“Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them, and the stories behind them, as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. “Bonnie and Clyde,” for example, embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism, and “The Graduate” spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. This is criticism at its best, well- and widely informed, with an enlightening fact, anecdote and insight on virtually every page.

“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our culture’s lasting and seemingly all-pervasive fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero is one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard, who inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale uses the mystery to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday family life concealed behind the most respectable facades.

The truth is, there’s enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year’s Booker Prize short list was so good, it’s tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we’ve kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book,” but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.

Behind all the more ephemeral trends — vampires, Swedish mysteries, etc. — most readers still seek the same thing in great fiction: a sojourn, however brief, into another world and into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Here’s our list of five books that made that happen in 2009.

“The Children’s Book” by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children’s novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt’s themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold — just right.

“Await Your Reply: A Novel” by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters — a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood — all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you’re foolish enough to throw it away?

“Chronic City” by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem’s near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they — what all of us — yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: “Chronic City” is the real thing.
READ SALON’S INTERVIEW

“Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories” by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures — Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from “Born Free,” a Sharon Stone impersonator — and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet’s vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth’s denizens. “Love in Infant Monkeys” is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.

“The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature’s most venerable genres — the ghost story — into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In “The Little Stranger,” Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local “old family” as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house’s aristocratic residents. What — or, rather, who — is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, “The Little Stranger” is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.
READ SALON’S REVIEW

Beginning on Dec. 14, look for the resurrection of one of our readers’ favorite features, What to Read, in a new format. Every Monday, I’ll present a book selected from an assortment of related new titles, tell you why I found this book exceptional and, when warranted, explain why others didn’t make the cut. What to Read will regularly recommend a book we think you’ll really love.

How will this be different from a traditional book review? Let me list the ways.

It’s no secret that the book review is an endangered species in American journalism. Industry-wide changes are behind a lot of this, but reviews themselves had become the dowdy wallflowers of newspapers and magazines long before the current crisis set in. Several factors have contributed to making book reviews a lot less stimulating than they ought to be.

First, there’s the traditional assignment process, something most readers know little about. Typically, a book review editor decides which forthcoming titles sound promising and tries to match each one with a reviewer who might have something interesting to say about it. Editors rarely have time to read the books themselves, so this involves a lot of guesswork. Yet even when the editor finds a title noteworthy, there’s no guarantee the reviewer will. The No.1 reason why so many book reviews come across as colorless is that they were written by people who aren’t especially inspired by their subjects.

Were the reviewer to pick the book in advance, there’s still no guarantee he’d produce an honest assessment. Perhaps he loved most of the author’s previous work and now that he’s finally got the chance to publicly sing her praises, he’s unwilling to admit that the new book isn’t among her best. Reviewers who are authors themselves can be hesitant to criticize because they know all too well how much work has gone into the thing and how badly negative reviews can sting. Often enough, a merely mediocre title gets covered (instead of passed over) simply because the editor and reviewer have already invested so much of their time in the review and have a slot to fill.

What to Read, by contrast, recognizes that most readers want to hear about the books that excite reviewers’ genuine enthusiasm, even if the reviewers have to wade through a lot of unexciting and downright disappointing titles to get to them. If I can’t find a book that’s worth your time (and mine) in a given week, I’ll say so.

Passionate reviews, while more fun to read, can still be unhelpful to readers when they know nothing about the person raving. Is she a sucker for coming-of-age stories or uncomfortable with pointed satire? Does he want every novelist to write like Hemingway or detest any touch of the surreal? As with movie critics, it helps to have a sense of the reviewer’s tastes, but that’s hard to come by when a publication’s reviews are written by an ever-changing cast of freelancers. I can’t promise you’ll always agree with me, but over time, you’ll have a better sense of how my preferences stack up against your own.

Lastly, book review sections rarely take into account the wide variety of our reading diets. We may be up for a challenging literary novel like Roberto Bolaño’s “2666″ every so often, yet blanch at an unending stream of the same. After tackling a serious doorstop we’re more likely in the mood for hard-boiled crime fiction or a breezy memoir. On any given day, we may want science fiction to expand our horizons or a quietly devastating short story collection to break our hearts. A novel that transports you to another world isn’t much good when at the moment what you really crave is meaty nonfiction that will teach you more about this one. Most readers’ shelves are a mix of the serious and the fun, Doris Lessing and J.K. Rowling, Saul Bellow and Elmore Leonard, Tracy Kidder and David Sedaris. I’ll be considering all sorts of good books, without respect to arbitrary genre distinctions.

What to Read will always aspire to do what the best criticism should: steer readers toward books they might enjoy and help them enlarge their understanding of whatever they read. I also hope that it will come to serve as a version of that fabled font of reliable tips, word of mouth — that is, the advice and opinions of a knowledgeable friend, in this case a friend who spends way too much of her time reading new books. By sharing more of the process of deciding which titles to spotlight, I aim to give you a better, fuller picture of my own criteria and tastes. And while the old Latin saying assures us that there’s no disputing of the latter, I hope to learn more about yours, too.

As Yagoda entertainingly demonstrates, none of the criticisms and debates about today’s memoirs are unprecedented. From the very beginning (if by the beginning you mean the “Confessions” of St. Augustine and “The Life of Benvenuto Cellini,” written in the 5th and 16th centuries, respectively), autobiography has been subject to attacks on its appropriateness and veracity. There was no blogosphere to accuse Cellini of being way too self-absorbed, or to fact-check the full extent of St. Augustine’s chastity, however, and by now their books are wrapped in the distinguished mantle of history. If you think that today’s memoirs are the last word in TMI, then consider the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most influential autobiographer of all time, who treated his shocked 18th-century readers to descriptions of his masturbatory practices and professions of his desire to be sexually dominated by “an imperious woman.”

And then there are the frauds. Yagoda notes that earlier generations of readers did not make the same distinction between fiction and nonfiction that we do now, but by the 19th century, they cared enough to object when someone presented himself as former captive of a Native American tribe, an escaped slave, or a sailor who survived a shipwreck off the coast of Africa when he was, in fact, not. The more polemically charged an autobiographical claim — the testimony of former slaves relating the abuse they suffered while in bondage, for example — the more likely it was to be challenged by political opponents (and defended by supporters). As controversial contemporary memoirists like Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu demonstrate, an autobiographer can expect rigorous scrutiny from those who don’t like what she has to say — as well as a lot of slack from those who do.

“All autobiographies are lies,” said George Bernard Shaw, and Yagoda concurs, to a degree. Pointing out that most of us can’t recall the exact words of conversations we had yesterday, let alone those of many years past, he writes, “all memoirs that contain dialogue — which is to say all recent and current memoirs — are inaccurate.” Nevertheless, this does not make them utterly false. Ideally, “the dialogue in a memoir is the author’s best-faith representation of what the people who were present could have/would have/might have said.” Complicating the matter is the growing body of evidence that even when people are trying their damnedest to recount the precise details of some recent experience — when they’re, say, testifying under oath in court — they get a lot of stuff wrong, often in a way that suits their own desires and needs. Unreliable and revisionist, memory, as Yagoda puts it, “is itself a creative writer.”

“Memoir: A History” offers a pleasant tour through the various manifestations of the form, with Yagoda pointing out landmarks and dropping the occasional witticism or pithy insight. Over there are the memoirs of religious faith and conversion — a major category — and over here are the sensational death-row confessions by criminals looking to parlay their notoriety into one final payday. Eighteenth-century women of easy virtue wrote titillating accounts of their lives and loves, an especially profitable enterprise if you charge former clients to have their names kept out of it. There was a brief vogue in the 19th century for anti-Catholic “exposés” of convent life, supposedly written by former nuns. There were the travel and adventure memoirs of the early 1900s, written by people like T.E. Lawrence, and, long before Studs Terkel, a spate of first-person oral histories recorded by journalists and relating the stories of ordinary citizens and workers. A particular breed of “light autobiography,” humorous and nostalgic depictions of American family life, flourished in the mid-20th century, but nowadays hardly anyone reads such titles as “The Egg & I,” “Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “My Sister Eileen.” (Although the branch library of my childhood was full of these books, and I loved them.)

With the 1960s, this brief sunny interlude of what Yagoda calls “normative memoirs” ended in a blaze of fiery truth-telling, led by African-Americans, whose literature is founded in the urgent need to testify to the reality of black lives. Yagoda persuasively argues that there’s a line of direct descent from, say, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” to “Girl, Interrupted” and the hundreds of memoirs about child abuse, incest, mental illness, addiction, cancer and other traumas that began to appear in the 1980s. The political imperative to “speak truth to power” segued into a widespread belief in the healthful effects of defying decorum to talk freely about what were once private horrors. (Interestingly, Yagoda notes that the “extreme misery memoir” is now even more popular in the U.K. than in the U.S., “a particular and somewhat alarming British taste, like Marmite or mushy peas.”)

For the most part, it’s hard to quarrel with “Memoir: A History,” but Yagoda does manage to slip a little controversy bait into an otherwise reasonable book. Behind much of the current kvetching about the memoir boom lies the impulse to protect the artistic supremacy of the novel. So when Yagoda writes,”fiction has become a bit like painting in the age of photography — a novelty item that has its place in the Booker Prize/Whitney Museum high culture and in the genre-fiction/black velvet-Elvis low but is oddly absent in the middle range,” he’s inviting trouble and knows it.

It’s true that material that writers would once have worked into fiction — classic autobiographical first novels like “The Bell Jar” or James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” for example — will now more likely be presented as memoir. But whether such novels once occupied the whole extent of the middlebrow fictional spectrum between, say, a Booker Prize winner like Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” and a Tom Clancy thriller is debatable. Besides, “Atonement” was as successful as any memoir (and more successful than most). “The Lovely Bones” sold as well as “Eat Pray Love,” and probably to the same readers. Yagoda’s statement about memoir usurping the novel is the sort of thing people worried about the future of literary fiction seize upon in their frequent moments of hysteria, but — like a lot of the dicey memoirs he writes about — it has a tenuous connection to actual fact.

More truly provocative is Yagoda’s assertion that the rise of memoir shows how “authorship has been democratized”; everyone has a story to tell and who better to tell it than the one who lived it? We put less faith in expertise and objectivity, and more in what’s spoken “straight from the heart.” Furthermore the authenticity of a first-person account of a true story will, in many readers’ minds, make up for a lack of the literary finesse required in fiction. James Frey could not find a publisher for the preening, bombastic “A Million Little Pieces” when he first attempted to sell it as a novel; marketed as a memoir, it was a hit, and continued to sell well even after he was publicly disgraced for making up many of the book’s more melodramatic events.

In any given year since the blossoming of mass literacy in the 19th century, the selection of new books on the market consists of a handful of excellent works, a more sizable swath of total dreck and an ocean of the merely OK. For the past century and a half, the vast majority of merely OK authors have written novels, on the understanding that this is what serious writers ought to do. Readers liked the results more or less depending on the subject matter or style, but in general there was not a lot to distinguish these novels from each other, and in a few years they were utterly forgotten. This is the fiction that could now be losing ground to the memoir.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? As Yagoda writes, the memoir has an advantage over the novel in that “it is easier to do fairly well.” For mediocre writers, it is indeed a godsend, offering them not only a greater chance of publication but also a greater likelihood of producing a decent book. Yagoda calls this “a net plus for the cause of writing.” The one thing the memoir does lack is the literary novel’s aura of art, but a lot of the people now writing popular memoirs wouldn’t have been able to produce great novels anyway, and might have broken their hearts trying. Now, at least, they have a chance of winning some readers. Still, there’s a sense that the bar has been ignominiously lowered.

The celebrated Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon spoke for the uneasiness caused by this state of affairs when, earlier this year, he told BookForum, “I hate confessional memoirs … Literature, to my mind, starts from some sort of personal space — and then it has to go beyond that. Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that’s meaningful beyond yourself. And because it’s transformed at some point, it stops being about you. The person in my fiction is not my life, so we can talk about it. If it were my life, what would you have to say about it? Memoir is not subject to interpretation. That is antithetical to literature. Confessional space is solipsistic: I’m the only one there, you don’t get to enter.”

In fact, the opposite is the case. It’s precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed — solipsistic — to many readers, who usually don’t feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive. Who was to blame for the author’s divorce? Was he justified in his rejection of 12-step programs? Was her mother bipolar, and how might her life have been different if she had been medicated? People who have read the same memoir can talk about this stuff for hours. The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist’s imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.

Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It’s not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote — otherwise, millions of people wouldn’t be discussing the entirely fictional characters on “Lost” or “Mad Men” around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions — TV shows and children’s books — have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it — of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud — and chances are that sooner or later we’ll get bored of it, too.