People have urges to share pieces of themselves. They write about their ideas, feelings, and thoughts. Sometimes, they even focus on their lives and their reality. Then they share life stories.
Memoirs are a way to share, but I now believe these are like a realistic novel. Thoughts and feelings make the text subjective. They reject the supposed non-fiction of the text. An example is Half a Life. Darin Strauss kept recalling more and more about the incident as we moved through the text and I strongly doubt his repressed memories were resurfacing.
Essays, on the other hand, are harder to define. They are largely influenced by opinion and fact, or as Wikipedia would define them, "essays are a piece of writing often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. " As usual, Wikipedia did some messy work for me. But lets focus on the last sentence. The term short story stands out. An essay, just like a memoir, can be a short story. They can also be "observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author." I think Strauss's memoir is a recollection of his thoughts.
How do memoirs and essays relate to postcards stories? They condense tales into a format where people don't get bored. The writer's record only the most impacting recollections of ideas. These ideas have to be most appealing in order to keep the reader in rapt attention. This is a result of living in a world where people want everything now. Oh brave new world.
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