I’m reading a memoir I’ll be reviewing shortly – a book by a well-known author who led an interesting life, creatively and sexually, in New York in the 1960s and ’70s. I’m enjoying the book, but I’m not a reader of contemporary memoir, and I’m struck by the difference between this book and what I know as autobiography.

The only contemporary memoir I read before this one was James Salter’s Burning the Days, which was excellent. The other memoirs I know of are those whose authors were subsequently exposed as liars. And I never read them.

I have glanced through, on a dozen occasions, books of collected essays by fiction writers – efforts at cultural intellectualism to break the monotony (theirs and ours) of novel-writing, and found them to be hit or miss.

There have been a few observations and rants in this column about the novel’s irrelevance and the rise of nonfiction. Reading the book I am now, I can see what makes people so suspicious about these claims.

What I know as autobiography began with The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate. I had never in my life considered nonfiction before buying this book, because I felt – I presumed – that fiction was a more worthy literary art form.

When I refer to things like courageous writing, I’m not referring to confessional or gossipy memoirs, or light recollections of an interesting period of one’s life: I’m talking about the best essays in Lopate’s anthology (note: avoid the last few). If you know somebody who wants to write, buy them this book for Christmas.