The Memoir/Novel Debate, Revisited (in 2003)

Just revisited an essay by Katie Roiphe from three years ago which contains some interesting musings on the recent novel/memoir brouhaha.  Roiphe begins with the debate over the possibility that Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved contains autobiographical elements, and discusses the history of this in literature.  She goes on to make a series of points that seem ever-so-slightly more relevant now:

Now it seems an actual confusion between the writer's life and the book has become more and more widespread. ...  It may be that the profusion of memoirs in the late 1990s has caused reviewers to forget that there are books out there that aren't memoirs. But if a writer chooses to call her book fiction, surely the distinction should be honored. The genre does not exist as a convenient shelving system for bookstores: It means that the words on the page are, by the writer's own admission, at least part fantasy.