MEMOIR IS THE COYEST of literary loves. It comes on as more honest than fiction and more open than poetry, but at heart it’s as angled and cropped as a Grindr pic. Not flattering necessarily—the urge to confess is as likely predicated on a sense of sin as a need to boast, and castigation is the desired outcome as often as absolution—but always self-serving. It’s simultaneously a calculated, often brutal act of excision and a carefully staged magnification. On one hand the sculpture winnowed from stone; on the other a splinter of life invested with outsize significance, like the thorn in the fable about the elephant and the mouse. A thorn’s a tiny thing compared to an elephant, but when it’s in exactly the right (or wrong) spot it becomes your whole life, your whole universe even. “How small the cosmos,” Nabokov declares at the beginning of Speak, Memory, “how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!” A profoundly humanist sentiment, but only if your notion of the human discounts civilizations, the species, in favor of individuals. [...]