Memoir, that landscape bordered by memory and imagination, has become the signature genre of our age. In I COULD TELL YOU STORIES: SOJOURNS IN THE LAND OF MEMORY, Patricia Hampl moves back and forth between a series of story-like recollections and essays in which she considers how she has been "enchanted or bedeviled" by autobiographical writing-her own and that of others.

Subjects engaging Hampl's attention are her family's response to her personal writing; a secret that an old Czech émigré tries to confide in her; reflections on reading Whitman during the Vietnam War; the ethics of writing about family and friends, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. "A writer is first and last a reader," she says, and makes it clear that, for her, reading is a passion not a pastime.
The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!"-a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception and to history itself.