Auntie Mame's book was long, but . . .

For all of Auntie Mame's talk about her book, I'd never read a word of Buffalo Gal, subtitled The Personal History of a Modern George Sand, nor had anyone else. But around November a thick bundle of manuscript arrived. . . . No one could deny that Auntie Mame's was a big book. It ran just shy of nine hundred typewritten pages, but no matter how much you loved her you could never say it was good. Although Auntie Mame was a fascinating talker, knew a lot of interesting people, and had excellent taste in her own reading, her prose style was that of a gifted amateur—a bit too florid, a bit too irresponsible, and often unconsciously funny. She had also been too scrupulous a reporter and told much more than was absolutely necessary about some of her dearest friends. 

Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), p. 100 (orig. pub. 1955)

Frank McCourt's Six-Word Memoir

The
miserable
childhood
leads
to
royalties.

Frank McCourt, in Rachel Fershleiser & Larry Smith eds., It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure from SMITH Magazine (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p. 44

Family memoirs pierce parents' silence

And as I wrote my first nonfiction portrait of [my mother]—"Growing Up Fashionable," which was published in The New Yorker and is now diffused throughout several passages of this book—I realized why so many writers have turned to the family memoir and seen it as an essential part of their oeuvre: whether we are Colette, Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Angelou, or Harold Nicolson, the process of piercing our parents' silence, of unraveling the webs of deceits that they spun about their true selves, and often ours, is not only a way of bringing our beloved dead back to life: it can also offer us a greater measure of retrospective clarity, of self-knowledge, than any other literary form.

Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 2

Lopate ♥ confessional writing

As for the influence of psychotherapy on my writing, I would say that it has confirmed and deepened tendencies already inside me. From adolescence on, I was attracted to the confessional mode in literature and, with it, the whole dynamic of confidingness, rationalization, unreliable narration, and self-aggrandizement versus self-disgust. I ate up Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Gide's The Immoralist and his autobiographical writings, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s Confessions, Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno, DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Celine’s oeuvre, Henry Miller’s, Kerouac’s. . . . I eagerly read the work of the so-called ‘confessional poets,’ such as Berryman, Plath, Sexton, Lowell, and disagreed with their detractors who found something unclean about their self-revealing verse, just as, some decades later, I could not agree with critics who lambasted the memoir genre for being too narcissistically self-indulgent. It seems to me that if anything, what is wrong with many memoirs and autobiographical poems is that they are not confessional enough. They do not go far enough. I am endlessly interested in the wormy little thoughts and regrets and excuses that people have for their behavior. "Confessional" is a descriptive, not derogatory, term in my eyes. (My first novel was called Confessions of Summer.) It was inevitable that I should be drawn to the personal essay, the form with which I am now most identified, because of its conversational and confessional attributes. So, too, psychotherapy, which gives one the chance to confess and converse at the same time. 

Phillip Lopate, “Couch Potato: My Life in Therapy,” in Jason Shinder, ed., Tales from the Couch: Writers on Therapy (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), essay at 75-87, quotation at 85. (Ellipsis in original)