That may be, in which case, I suppose we should house these memoirs, my own included, on the self-help shelf. But that seems a little too easy. The illness memoir, after all, is not a prescription but a description, offered not to cure but to accompany. Furthermore, shelving the whole lot of us in the self-help section would remove us from public discourse, and, if anything, the illness memoir as a social phenomenon is worthy of public discourse. No author authors alone.
Every text is a joint construction of meaning.
Let me begin by saying that in every age there has been a prevailing explanatory grid that the myriad writers of that time have used to frame or explain their lives. The 17th-century spiritual autobiography is a perfect example of this. So is the 1960s political memoir or the 1970s feminist memoir. This is the story we, as humans, tell ourselves over and over again, and an illness memoir, if it is done deeply, will put its own signature on this transcendent tale, and will be, thus, transcendent. It is a mistake, therefore, to dismiss illness memoirs out of hand.