Why are memoirs so darn appealing? On my last trip to the library — I have time for such things, now that I’m a freelancer again — I picked up one book after another by or about familiar writers, finally limiting myself to four.

Sadly, “Looking for Anne of Green Gables,” the one that seemed most promising given my girlhood love for L.M. Montgomery’s stories about the fiery red-haired orphan, disappointed; Irene Gammel’s bio was a non-starter. But I quickly devoured the memoirs by Joe Queenan and Gustavo Arellano, plugging away at “Closing Time” even when the going got rough. Both had the benefit of covering familiar regions — Philadelphia for “Closing Time,” and Orange County for Arellano’s book of the same name — but that wasn’t the sole source of their appeal, any more than my familiarity with their work was.

I’m not the first to note the appeal of memoirs — part of the reason publishers keep getting in trouble with falsification is that they and/or writers retrofit fiction into the form — but haven’t quite figured out their mass appeal. I’m a journalist and have always loved literary essayists, so memoirs are a natural for me. But what about everyone else? Can we blame blogging for opening the floodgates to personal experience, or is blogging an extension of the same hunger that draws people to memoirs? Is this new — some consequence of our fractured communities — or an evolution? Did newspapers used to fill this niche? I’m sure others have expounded on this before.

But really, what is it about memoirs?