The Phenomenon of Memoir

Francine Prose wrote a lovely description of memoir in the New York Times in 2005. As an introduction to a review for Jeanette Walls' Glass Castle, she explores the difficulty of balancing sympathy and realism in depictions of what amount to the villians in many true stories.  Prose is a readable as the book she recommends;

EMOIRS are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner. What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch.