At some point in the writing process, a writer of autobiographical nonfiction comes to a fork in the road. Will this stuff of the life become memoir, or essay? My suspicion is that this usually happens fairly early in the process, and, having taken the step in one direction, the writer then knows what to expect—either a meandering foray into the past, or a purposeful trek aimed at the future. Sometimes the nature of the material dictates one direction or the other, but it's more likely that the deciding factor lies in the writer's idiosyncratic preference.

The memoirist is interested in the essence of the experience on its own terms: the sensory details, the flavor of the conversation, the scene reenacted. The trajectory of memoir is a slow accumulation; the successive scenes take on weight and significance as we begin to gain perspective on the whole. Often, it feels as though we are keeping exact pace with the author, gaining insight as the memories unfold.

The essayist, on the other hand, seems almost from the outset to have sensed the need to connect the life with another, more universal, issue, setting the specificities of the personal smack in the middle of abstract idea. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, but the essay—even a personal essay—is always also about something else, something to which personal experience is merely a vehicle, providing the experiential authority through which the writer can perceive what's at stake. The arc of the essay is much shorter, and however it digresses, its arrows are definitely aimed at what it's making of the world.

In other words, the moment of the essay is the present; the moment of the memoir is the past.

Of course, most books blend the two in a variety of ways. Mary Karr's The Liars' Club is clearly memoir, but it raises the ante on the issue of truth and the consequences of deception. Mark Spragg's Where Rivers Change Direction is a collection of discrete essays, but taken together, they chronicle not only his own coming of age but that of the American west. Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, for all its elegant essayistic tendencies, is more of a memoir, trying to resurrect the past in order to make a sense of it, and its culminating insight on the limits of love is never stated by Maclean, but felt in the reader. Richard Rodriguez's Brown, for all its memoiristic moves, is more one long essay in which autobiography merely serves to illustrate and illuminate Rodriguez's commentary on the nature of race in the United States.

The current trend, even in the essay, has been toward autobiography, and there may be an incipient backlash brewing, as witnessed in "Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the Memoir" by David Lazar in Pleiades. He states, "Perhaps we need a separate camp, of destructive nonfiction, a wider, wilder, grayer zone, in which the essay and other fugitive forms, known and as yet undiscovered, can ply their wayward trades, following those occasional desires into open forms which . . . challenge facets of the imagination beyond the complacencies of memory's narratives." Both memoir and essay must negotiate between the subjective and the objective, but in differing proportions, and with differing intents. At its best, memoir can give us the feel of another life. Essays give us the feel of another mind.