Memoir writing workshops are sprouting like magic mushrooms. Thanks to books by celebrities from Prince Harry to Paris Hilton, there’s a popular, but questionable, idea that such works are therapeutic for the writer and helpful for the reader.

How do the current crop of memoirs score? Do they deliver the insights and wisdom promised? Alas, the answer is generally “no”. Too often, they are exercises in blind egotism and self-delusion, “like selfies, in this modern age”, as journalist Janet Albrechtsen wrote. Novelist Paul Theroux describes today’s memoirs as mostly “witless, self-serving, unrevealing portraiture”.