The proliferation of memoirs in recent years may say something about our culture’s shifting attitudes toward the personal, but, if so, the message is a contradictory one. In our post-1960s style of open-mindedness, we tend to dig into the most private corners of our own and others’ lives as we simultaneously shrink back with squeamishness at much of what we find. Take, for example, Thomas Beller’s manner of regarding the twenty memoirs, including one of his own, collected in his anthology, Personals. The complete title of the anthology is Personals: dreams and nightmares from the lives of 20 young writers. Yet in Beller’s preface, he consistently refers to the memoir genre as the “personal essay,” a more dignified and certainly less sensationalist locution than his title evokes. Beller’s indecisiveness about how to view his material reflects something of our shared discomfort with how to regard the intimate details of a life.

With one or two exceptions, the memoirs in Beller’s collection are not particularly sensational. Most of the twenty-something authors—fiction writers and poets—either live in New York or have spent a significant amount of time there. Between the chic bars of the East Village and their three- or four-story walk-ups, the singles life that they recount comes to feel drearily familiar. One of the stronger pieces in the collection makes a geographic departure. The writer Quang Bao fled Vietnam with his family at the age of six and was raised in Sugarland, Texas, where he went about