You might call it a Frankenstein genre – two quite different literary genres stitched together and brought to life. For the moment, I am calling it the scimoir. The rare science memoir can be found tucked away in the Science section, in Memoir or Biography, even sometimes in Health, Psychology, or Self Help. It defies categorization, flummoxing librarians and booksellers alike. Science and memoir, memoir and science. It just doesn’t seem right.

At first glance the two genres seem incompatible. Science is the study of the immutable and absolute while memoir is the most personal and subjective of all genres. Yet somehow they can go together, and when done well, they resonate with honesty and relevance. They tame each other. Memoir reminds us that the whirring mechanics of science play out on the scale of our individual lives, while science reminds us that the memoirists’ struggles and stories reflect something of the universal. Moreover, the drama of memoir adds the narrative kick that science writing so desperately needs. It’s a match made in genre heaven.

Why am I waxing poetic about a literary genre? I suppose because I recently discovered that I’m drawn to this combination, both as a blogger and as a reader. The majority of my posts are amalgamations of personal experience and scientific theory. This was never my intent; somehow the combination fell out of my interests and whatever spark motivated me to write about a given topic. I’ve also discovered that I’ve read and enjoyed a number of scimoirs, even though I didn’t consciously seek them out and scimoirs are none too common.

In point of fact, I shouldn’t be surprised that book-length scimoirs are relatively rare. To write a compelling one, an author generally has to be a scientist or science writer who has also personally experienced something dramatic that is relevant to the topic. You might be both a leading researcher and lifelong sufferer of a particular illness, like Kay Redfield Jamison in An Unquiet Mind. You might be the researcher behind an infamous experiment, like Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect. Or you might be able to approach the topic through your experience with ailing relatives. In Mapping Fate, Alice Wexler wrote about her mother’s battle with Huntington’s disease and her sister’s scientific quest to isolate the culprit gene. In Acquainted with the Night, the science writer Paul Raeburn documented his children’s struggles with mental illness in the context of the current state of juvenile psychiatric knowledge and treatment.

I am on a quest to identify other books in this wonderful Franken-genre and I need your help. Here are the other scimoirs I can think of that I’ve already read (aside from those listed above): My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, The Double Helix by James Watson, A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky, and several of Oliver Sacks’s books. I’ve come across a few more that I plan to read: Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by Marc Lewis, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, and What Mad Pursuit by Francis Crick.

Please let me know what other scimoirs you’ve read, want to read, or simply know are out there. And do share any other ideas for naming the genre. Scimoir sounds like a half-android, half-alien monster, and who wants to cuddle up with that?

______

Photo credit: Karoly Czifra