ABSTRACT
Personal memoirs are an important resource for historians, the more frank the better, and people enjoy reading them. But memoir is an alien or at least uncomfortable approach for more formal kinds of topic writing, even within a series like Contesting Early Childhood. Memoir and autobiography are enterprises which rely on a kind of emotional truth or integrity. This may be important to understanding, but it is not a sufficient claim to truth. Writers often try to get round this by seeking collaboration, sending drafts to friends, checking out accounts with old acquaintances and, especially, looking to external documentary evidence of events. Any memoir is about self-revelation – as Jerome Bruner said, making oneself private and distinctive. Memoir, at best, offers a kind of grounding on the nature of progress, an insight into the provisionality of the present.
