In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians.

They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating gray area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts. And whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story—while also telling us true.

"Reading each of these superb and provocative essays, readers understand history in the memoir and memoir in the history.

What all the writers recognize is that they and their disciplines all deal with the vagaries of memory and how humans construct meaning in the present through memory, however expressed. A superb book. Highly recommended." —Choice