Every few months I read or hear of a fresh attack on the memoir. Very little excuse is needed to trigger the righteous indignation of a reviewer in the New York Times or another media outlet. A bad night’s sleep. Indigestion, perhaps. In 2009 a New York Times reviewer for the Sunday Book Review, Judith Shulevitz, observed that “the attack on memoir [is] now a regular editorial exercise [and] dates back to the advent of journalism itself” (November 20, 2009). Two years later, Neil Genzlinger launched his own editorial exercise of the type to which Shulevitz referred, a humorously bilious...

The first question we have to ask is this: aren’t all memoirs immersions? Isn’t that one of the criticisms of them? The answer is simple. I don’t mean immersion in the sense of yet deeper self-involvement. On the contrary, the immersion memoirist takes on some outward task or journey in order to put his/her life in perspective. As I mentioned in the introduction, the difference between immersion journalism and immersion memoir is that an immersion journalist is primarily interested in reporting on the world outside herself while using the self as the vehicle for that information. The opposite is true...

Memoir does not require the memoirist to venture outside into the world. There are plenty of memoirists who spend their days simply writing about the long-ago past. But most journalism requires a certain amount of immersion in the outside world, though I’ve heard about (but never encountered) journalists who sit by a pool all day in some exotic locale and leave the legwork to others while immersing themselves in the hot tub. Let’s be clear that for writers other than these mythic journalists, there’s a certain amount of immersion involved in simply chasing down a story, in interviewing the people...

Here’s a bold assertion: I’d like to claim Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, as the first immersion writer. The first travel writer, too, he was no armchair traveler, but a true globetrotter of the ancient world, roving far and wide in the fifth century BCE to collect stories of the various peoples of the known world. While little is known of his life, his reports on the cultures of the ancient world shimmer with his personality, with his opinions and beliefs, likes and dislikes. He doesn’t pretend to be objective but says, This is what I heard. This is...

Most writers I know live somewhere between dread and denial when it comes to legal matters and ethics. I’m no exception. With both Invented Eden and Do-Over, I worried throughout the writing process that someone might be angry with the results and sue me. Invented Eden was quite a public story, and the people whom I knew would be angry with the book were journalists and a couple of anthropologists.

I felt pretty sure that one of the journalists, a Filipino reporter based in Mindanao named Joey Lozano, had arranged the kidnapping of a rival group of reporters from Germany’s...

When I first considered writing a book about the Tasaday hoax controversy, I needed to write a proposal. By no means do all books, articles, or essays need proposals. As David Shields said to me not long ago, “Many of the books you and I love would have made no sense as a proposal.” And he’s certainly right. There are few if any editors who would have jumped at Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage before it was written. Now he’s well known enough that a proposal for this book might fly, but at the time it would have...

In the restaurant of the Presidente Hotel in Havana, Cuba, tourists from various countries mingle around the familiar breakfast buffet: meats and cheeses for the Europeans, a coffee machine for cafélatte, cappuccino, and espresso, a plate of guava, pineapple, and some kind of melon, a German guy sitting with a Havana Club T-shirt with the usual picture of Che emblazoned on it, a group of Russians by the pool to my left.

I’m here because I’m on a scouting trip for a workshop I’m going to be leading six months from now. Last week, I was in Poland attending the...