Summer Reading.

The memoir, always vulnerable to a gut-punch (too self-indulgent, too self-absorbed), has taken some extra licks lately. The James Frey fray, in particular, has occasioned much schaden-freudery in literary and not-so-literary circles, as the not-so-bad-as-he'd-like-to-be author of A Million Little Pieces has been outed as a fictionist, more wild in fantasy than in the life he alleged to be his own.

When a novel is bad, we toss it aside and search for another. But a bad memoir seems to call the whole genre into question, as if autobiography were, by definition, a doubtful enterprise. It is soggy with ethical ambiguity--what life, turned into "story," also remains resolutely "nonfiction"? And while we're at it, what exactly is "nonfiction"? As someone once said, memoir is really nonpoetry.

Yet the first-person voice has a valor--by turns tender and brash--that captivates. And it's that clarion voice that tells the truth, conveying not simply a story but a mind trying to make sense of experience. The best memoirs--I want to say the most honorable ones--are really extended personal essays, books that attempt to sort out the lost loves of history, place, and childhood from the honest, if mystified, remove of a pondering adulthood.

Lynn Freed's collection of personal essays, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home (Harcourt, $22, 256 pp.), is the best book about becoming and being a writer to appear in too long. It's also hilarious--when it isn't being tartly wise and heart-breakingly vivid about her South African girlhood. In fact, that is one of Freed's greatest gifts--the ability to be irreverent in our tediously pious times, without becoming either brittle or arch. Her humor turns on a dime into serious insight. And nobody has written as fearlessly (or mordantly) about the teaching of creative writing in American universities, a cultural subset that requires her acute eye. Nor has anyone made the writing life the adventure she does in these trenchant pieces that form a memoir of a life immersed in literature. Freed writes like an angel--a devilishly smart one.

One of the oddities of a good autobiography is that its success is often predicated on its ability to use the self not as a subject but as an instrument to illuminate the greater world. Where would our sense of life in the Stalinist Soviet Union be without the valiant memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned? How could white America begin to understand black America without The Autobiography of Malcolm X? We count such personal books as history, and we need them as cultural guides.

This is strikingly so for more recent memoirs that have emerged from the AIDS pandemic. Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart (Scribner, $16.95, 240 pp.) is a powerful testament to love (the book follows the illness and death of his partner Larry Rose), but it is also a fascinating story of his Kentucky boyhood in a big Catholic family. Their property abutted Gethsemani monastery, Thomas Merton's Trappist community, whose monks Johnson's family befriended. Larry Rose, on the other hand, was the beloved only child of Holocaust survivors making a modest good life in sunny Southern California. Any such memoir is also bound to be a coming-out story, but Johnson's book transcends even that cultural inevitability. His is, among other things, a classic American story of the kid from the sticks with dreams of the great world and great accomplishments (like Lynn Freed's, his is a writer's story). And finally it is an elegy and a pledge to the future, as the best memoirs must be.

It is significant that the word contemporary literary culture has instinctively chosen for such coming-of-age books is "memoir" and not "autobiography." In spite of all the wrist-slapping about the egotism of writing about oneself, these books are not "self-life writing" (autobiography) but really attempts to capture the truth of memory, its bewitching vivacity caught in the web of time past. So that finally memoir is attached more profoundly to history than it is to psychology. We see this especially in books that come from experiences of "radical suffering," as Terrence Des Pres in The Survivor described memoirs of the Holocaust and the Gulag.

This is true for all those magnetized by history, maybe especially those who have no story of their own but feel the traces in their family, almost in their genetic code. Annette Kobak's memoir, Joe's War: My Father Decoded (Vintage, $16, 464 pp.) is a mesmerizing account of an English daughter's determined sleuthing of her father's Mitteleuropa past through the cauldron of midcentury European history. The personal story is a page-turner, but at least as compelling is Kobak's exacting research and re-creation of political history. This is memoir at its finest, in the service of understanding, the small lens of self and family opening brilliantly to the elusive lost world of our common history.

Patricia Hampl's new book, Blue Arabesque: In Search of the Sublime, will be published by Harcourt this fall.