Second Paul Guest’s *One More Theory About Happiness *.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir, by Mark Vonnegut is excellent (link goes to Goodreads review).
Also, the poet Mark Doty’s Dog Years: a Memoir is beautifully written. Definitely for dog lovers, but as much about Doty’s own life and losses. God, that sounds depressing – and a few chapters really are – but it’s also funny and engaging. Among the best books I’ve read this year.
Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is beautifully written and uniquely structured.
Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest is a great exercise in literary and political namedropping and all around bitchiness, and Vidal also discusses the difference between autobiography and memoirs in it. Essentially, memoir is more a narrative and recollections while autobiography is more formal and requires more factchecking, or memoirs are more subjective and autobio more objective. He wrote a follow-up called Point to Point Navigation but that one I haven’t read (it’s much thinner and covers the late 60s to the early 21st century), and in a unique move also inserted himself into one of his novels, The Golden Age, in the then present when Peter Sanford, a fictional character he’d covered in several books beginning with Washington D.C., drops in to visit him and his partner Howard (since deceased) in Italy for the Millennium.
Another interesting case of a person revising their memoirs is Loretta Lynn. She wrote Coal Miner’s Daughter which became a huge bestseller and major motion picture and all, but a few years ago she released a second memoir, Still Woman Enough, that chronicles the years since the early 1980s (the time period by CMD) but also retells some of the same stories with a “now the whole truth can be told” addendum, particularly with regard to her husband Doo, who died in the interim. He was apparently more of a full fledged wife beater than she let on when he was alive, and she also talks more about things he and others could have been prosecuted for or otherwise wouldn’t have wanted known when still alive.
Saul Bellow’s widow finished his memoirs after he died; I haven’t read them but it might be interesting to see if you can tell where she took over. She also said one of her main reasons for doing so was so that their daughter (born when Bellow was 84) would better understand who her father was when she’s older.
Yes, great book.
Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller. Memoir of a white woman’s childhood in then Rhodesia. Her parents were white farmers, at the time of the civil war. It’s at variously moving, funny, then horrifying. Excellent writing.
Her Last Death, Susanna Sonnenberg. Sonnenberg’s mother was a divorced, rich New York socialite who was probably untreated bipolar. The mother lied pathologically, was addicted to Demerol, snorted mountains of cocaine, and was obsessed with sex. She introduced Susanna to cocaine at 12, and gave her a warped understanding of sex. Susanna describes living with those demons, but eventually getting past them. As a memoir of a tragic youth, I thought it vastly better than Wall’s The Glass Castle, which I did not find credible. Excellent writing.
http://www.amazon.com/Her-Last-Death-Susanna-Sonnenberg/dp/B002PJ4I5W/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I don’t know if they would qualify as memoirs, but Art Spiegelman’sMAUSbooks are to date the only graphic novels to win a Pulitzer. The book is about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, but personally I’d count it as a memoir because it also has a lot to do with Art’s own life and the process of interviewing his father. For those who haven’t read it, one of the interesting facets is that his father is one of the most unlikeable and bigoted old men you’ll ever meet and also (even by his second wife and son’s words) a walking negative Jewish stereotype (one memorable scene is when he tries to take an open box of cereal back to the grocery store for a refund), yet he survived an ordeal so horrible that you want to like him.
I wasn’t aware of this one’s existence. I really liked Eden Express, which I’d recommend as a memoir of mental illness, the 60s counter culture, and the dynamics of having an iconic father (one dealing with sudden fame and fortune when his son was a teenager). I know Mark V. became a pediatrician; did he have any other psychotic episodes after the one when he was young?
Wait, what? Is this actually available? I know his selected letters have been published, but I didn’t realize there’s been anything like a memoir (aside from the Jerusalem book and It All Adds Up, both published when he was still alive).
Yes, none as dramatic as in Eden Express, but he struggles with mental illness and alcoholism throughout his life and was hospitalized more than once. Like I said in my GR review, I think the two books should be slip-cased and read together. I didn’t think this book was as a masterpiece, like Eden Express, but it’s very much worth reading. Mark Vonnegut is caustic and funny and smart and – though he’s got it pretty much under control with medication – still intermittently a bit nuts. Come to think of it, he’d make a great Doper. 
I was thinking of recommending the Maus books too actually but wasn’t sure if they’d qualify either. I think you’re right to include them and they really are great.
It does have boring sections (the laborious description of their house in Florence springs to mind), but as a memoir it stands out for allowing a great insight into the author’s thought processes. I find it fascinating and, for the most part, a good read. But I’m also a ridiculously huge fan of Twain’s work.
At the same time, I wouldn’t necessarily assign it in a memoir-writing class. Its style is too out-there for people trying to learn the craft for the first time. However, the editors’ descriptions of Twain’s struggles figuring out how to write an autobiography are incredibly insightful, especially his concerns over how to tell the “whole truth.” In fact, the editorial material, which takes up a good portion of volume one, is arguably more entertaining than the actual autobiography
Paine’s edition is tainted by many questions about how much Paine changed, censored,clarified, and otherwise screwed around with Twain’s words. For a more “traditional” version of Twain’s autobiography than the “complete” one, I’d recommend Charles Neider’s version, which stays fairly true to Twain’s original words while rearranging the chapters into a chronological life story (and, of course, excising reams of “boring” chapters).