Historians love diaries and journals from the past; not necessarily for their reliability but for the “color” they present to the present day writer’s attempts to create a past he can never really know but about which he is trying to write. The memoirist has a bit easier time of it since he is writing about a more contemporary period: his own. While they both want to make sense of the past, the historian must put absolute verifiable veracity at the top of his list of authorial attributes. Writers who keep a personal journal or diary are usually accumulating this “atmosphere” on their life & times for their own use as future memoirists.

Memoirists assemble these jottings, notes, thoughts, observations and other impressions about themselves, their friends and the world and events affecting them- they hope- even to the point that what, at the time, seems frivolous or immaterial will become meaningful and significant when rediscovered years later.

However, while the historian concerns himself with the “fact” of the truth, the memoirist looks for the “greater” truth hidden behind the truths of the facts. And, as we shall see –There is more “interpretation” in the greater truth to the memoirist (with the vagaries that word implies) than the subjective truth of a single fact (without a context) to the historian.