As a longtime teacher of memoir writing who closely observes trends in the genre, I’ve recently been thinking of an episode involving a student I worked with in the late 2010s. “F.” had studied with me over several years. At one point, she took a long absence, confiding in me that she’d unearthed some childhood trauma and was taking the time to address it. Eventually, she sent me an essay she’d written during her leave. In it, F. described herself as a child in the care of indifferent adults who had been coerced into sexual acts with persons known to her. The essay contained disturbing details, cutting dialogue, and careful scene work. Overall, it was gripping, horrific — a good story, in narrative terms.

But I didn’t believe it at all. At most, I’d give it a 2% chance of being true.

I didn’t believe this student’s story was true because I’d read it before. A year or two earlier, a student in a workshop — a class in which F. was also enrolled — had written a nearly identical account of her own childhood assault. Her story was profoundly disturbing, a difficult story to get out of my mind. I wasn’t surprised it had affected F. in that way, too. But this was bizarre: F. had coopted her classmate’s story, one she knew I’d read, and claimed it as her own.

Why had F. handed in something so obviously dishonest? She must have known I’d spot the overlay. Could it be possible, as it seemed, that F. genuinely believed her own version of events was true?

F.’s story rose to the front of my mind when I learned of the scandal unfolding around Amy Griffin’s The Tell, a memoir of sexual assault the author allegedly suffered at the hands of a middle-school teacher, published in March 2025 and exposed as likely untrue in September. Griffin discovered her abuse as recovered memory during therapy involving the hallucinogen MDMA (the active chemical in ecstasy aka Molly). Her riveting, ghostwritten account was the first book ever to be simultaneously chosen by the book clubs run by Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush. Her accused abuser — a teacher at her small middle school in Amarillo, Texas — is identifiable to those in the know; the impact on this person, and if justice will be served and how, remains unknown.

In my 25 years in the field, I have read and critiqued a sobering number of autobiographical accounts of sexual assault and abuse. This is the price of admission into the world of memoir, the genre of intimacy, where readers come to bear witness to the inner lives of others. And I consider the confessional memoir to be a particular art, one that occupies an almost sacred realm of personal candor and vulnerability. However, this and another recent high-profile publishing catastrophes suggests that as far as the market allows, the trauma genre has betrayed memoir’s original virtues. The genre attempts to be both authentic personal account and inspirational guide, but a formulaic turn has meant it winds up being neither.

First, in September, came All The Way to the River, the solipsistic train-wreck from Elizabeth Gilbert — the same Elizabeth Gilbert whose Eat, Pray, Love reformulated the genre of personal discovery. In her latest book, Gilbert falls in love with her friend Rayya upon learning of Rayya’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Gilbert assists Rayya in active and severe drug addiction, pays for her dying friend’s cocaine, and even shoots it into her neck (to be helpful!). At a low point, she plots to literally murder the friend, all described with scanty insight or accountability.

Next came the exposé on The Tell. At first, I presumed Amy Griffin would reveal herself to be just another grifter, joining the ranks of fabulist memoirists like James Frey, JT Leroy, and Somaly Mam. But then I read the book, and suspected that, like my student F., Griffin thought that her story was true. She needed it to be true. And a lot of other people, from Griffin’s editorial team, to the ghostwriter she’d hired, to celebrity endorsers including Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Reese Witherspoon needed — or at least wanted — it to be true, impelling them to overlook the glaring red flags.

The real scandal of The Tell was that no one helped Griffin get to the bottom of the story before she published a memoir destined to be exposed. What does it mean to get to the bottom of things?

I once had a student who wrote a terribly sad essay about what a failure she was as a daughter. She constantly let her mother down, stayed out drinking and doing coke with her work friends, came home wrecked, barked in response to her mother’s concerns for her, and hated herself as her mother slunk away. Why was she such a bad daughter, so mean and heartless towards her mother who loved her?

“The real scandal … was that no one helped Griffin get to the bottom of the story before she published a memoir destined to be exposed.”

It would have been simple enough to workshop this essay as a general query into common mother-daughter tensions — but something felt off. The evidence of this writer as a “bad daughter” who had caused her mother so much pain was not sufficient to justify such intense self-hatred. And why was she out drinking until 4 a.m. every night, so intent upon self-destruction? The writer said she didn’t know.

I asked where the father was during this time; he’d appeared briefly in the story and then disappeared. “Oh, he kind of abandoned us,” she said casually. “I mean, he was an addict, so it wasn’t really his fault, but he wound up incarcerated for a while, and basically wasn’t around.”

This, as we say in workshop, was “a thread to pull.” More discussion revealed that while her father’s addiction was wreaking havoc on the family unit, her mother hadn’t acted. She’d pretended that nothing was happening. Sort of like she was doing now with her daughter, despite her daughter’s escalating self-destruction, her obvious cries for help.

Eventually, we arrived at the bottom of things — the part the writer didn’t want to know. She was not really a terrible daughter who let her mother down. She was the one who had been let down, egregiously, by her parents. Now this writer had to reckon with the complexity of loving her parents while also acknowledging how deeply they had failed her. This was the bottom of the story. But confronting the real story comes with hard, unpleasant work. There is a reason we avoid such work by constructing narrative roads around them, stories that are easier to live with.

Unfortunately, sometimes the stories that are easier to live with sell better, too. In my years as a memoir writer and teacher of memoir, I have wrangled with the impact of an author’s “likeability” on the nonfiction form, and watched the victimhood narrative rise to dominate the genre as a secure and, therefore, attractive path toward likeability.

The subject of a memoir — who is also its narrator — must be sympathetic or otherwise compelling enough to spend many hours with, and the reader must also be rooting for her; by necessity, the memoirist shapes her persona to please the reader. This comes with compromise. Wild author Cheryl Strayed was hit on by men incessantly while solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail but was told by her editorial team to edit this out of her story; she didn’t want to risk looking full of herself. Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 book, The Kiss, kicked off the memoir craze with a specific warning to aspiring memoirists: yes, the public is dying to read the story of your sexual relationship with your father, but prepare for blowback if you leave room for the reader to judge you as complicit.

The market has responded to this demand with what I’ll call the uncomplicated redemption memoir: books wherein something so tragic has happened to the author that it precludes accountability for whatever desperate acts she might later commit — making her “likeable” no matter what she does, and allowing the reader to enjoy dramatic stories of desperate acts, situated within a tidy moral framework.

There’s a huge incentive to write such books. When a memoir hits the right note, the author is positioned for a rare pairing of social capital: unquestioned sympathy because of what she has endured, and professional elevation and admiration for her success. This is what Elizabeth Gilbert was banking on in All The Way to the River, which she frames as a victimhood memoir: a confession of her sex and love addiction. From a literary standpoint, All the Way to the River is a profound failure of the memoir genre, devoid of accountability, self-awareness, and interest in craft.

For some memoir readers, these failures don’t matter. Smart readers, friends I respect, including some who write nonfiction, tell me they like All the Way to the River because they believe it will “help a lot of people who struggle with sex and love addiction.” While this is a function of the genre for both writers and readers, and I am glad for those who might legitimately be comforted by Gilbert’s account, I don’t feel much optimism for the art of the memoir when we elevate such books.

The uncomplicated redemption narrative is also the container Amy Griffin chooses for The Tell, and it seemed a perfect fit. To Griffin, her recovered memories explained everything wrong with her life.

On the surface, Griffin seemed to have everything: she was raised by loving parents with strong Southern values, enjoyed status in her community, academic and athletic success, a happy marriage, children. She arrived in middle age with every brass ring, as well as some Olympic-level ones: she didn’t just marry a good man, but a billionaire; her Instagram feed is filled with celebrity associates and red carpets. Yet the book also reveals a woman filled with bottomless unhappiness.

In this position, a person starts to ask questions, such as Who even am I? and What’s my actual worth? Griffin pokes at this doubt gently in The Tell. However, these questions, if truly addressed, might threaten an ideological collapse and, in Griffin’s case, likely would require outright rejection of the rules she was raised on. This wasn’t something her mind was prepared to allow. Any seasoned teacher of memoir has observed the psychological self-defense maneuvers used to circumvent such issues many times before.

While struggling with this cognitive dissonance, Griffin decided to try assisted MDMA therapy, which has no known association with accessing repressed memories or hallucinatory reenactments of previous life events. Yet before the drug even kicked in, a vision appeared: a terrible assault she had suffered at the hands of a man she had trusted. This led to more visions of this man’s extreme violence against her.

She read it literally. She had found one concrete chain of events that would carry all the weight of her psychological unease — and wouldn’t that be a relief, to find the one thing that explains everything that is wrong with you? But I found it likely that these visions of assault were not literal memories, but symbolic representations of the double-bind faced by women determined to “win” at a patriarchal game that turns out to be rigged. If Griffin had pulled at this thread, she might have located a more complex explanation for her unease; but such a story is not likely to be embraced with the same enthusiasm as a clean redemption memoir. Such investigations would also likely cause pain in her familiar relationships, confusion about how to live without the framework she’d inhabited all her life; there are reasons our psychologies protect us from such awareness.

But the best memoirs are attempts to get to the bottom of things. As James Baldwin told an interviewer, “the whole point of writing nonfiction, for me, is to find out what I don’t want to know.” Amy Griffin, who hired a ghostwriter to compose the story of her memories of sexual abuse, did not share this aim. She declined the labors of writing, the humiliations of honest feedback, the pains of returning to the drawing board, and turned away from the deeper source of her pain. By falling back on the “rock-bottom-to-redemption” plot that dominated during the confessional memoir glut of the late Nineties, Elizabeth Gilbert also avoids the hard work of self-examination and hard writing — work that could have made her ordeal with Rayya insightful or revelatory.

Done right, a memoir is an excavation, a piecing together of all those things you don’t want to know. It isn’t likely to follow a connect-the-dots plot. It — and you — are not guaranteed to be likeable. And it won’t necessarily fit the best-seller mold. In my online writing communities, writers of sexual-assault or addiction stories are lamenting that books like Gilbert’s and Griffin’s get published, while their own, more truthful work is considered unworthy of publication.

Done right, and despite the emotional perils, a memoir can also change your life. I didn’t confront F. when she presented me with the uncanny account of her childhood abuse. In a workshop scenario, the line is especially blurry line between writing as art and writing in order to understand something about one’s life. F. wasn’t attempting to publish the story; she was clearly struggling to resolve some kind of legitimate trauma. I didn’t want to make it harder for her. Maybe, psychologically, writing this story helped her, even if it was ethically problematic to call it “nonfiction.” Now I wonder if I should have done more to push back on the story F. presented to me. F. wasn’t getting to the bottom of things — a betrayal of writer and readers that the genre needs to recover from.