on Jane Friedman site:

Before I was a memoirist, instructor and editor, I was a fiction writer with absolutely no desire whatsoever to write a memoir. Many reasons kept me away. First, I didn’t see a need to revisit the facts of my confusing and difficult childhood and preferred to mask my unresolved experiences in the fiction I wrote. Second were the slew of negative biases about memoir that had somehow seeped into my subconscious from our culture before I had ever studied or read the genre deeply.

I mistakenly believed memoir was whiny and navel gazey, that it had no plot, and I was certain that no one would care about my story; others had lived through far worse. But then, six weeks into an MFA fiction program at Pacific University, I struggled to find new ideas and material that interested me. So, with my program director’s blessing I jumped the tracks and joined the nonfiction cohort. Yet even then I resisted memoir, preferring instead to think of myself as a personal essay writer. Because, as I actually said to a classmate, “memoir seems too easy.” I could not have been more wrong.