Is it feeling increasingly difficult to contain your memoir project to one genre? Can you not help but reach for cultural criticism and historical citations, or are you a journalist struggling to suppress the urge to report out certain aspects of your book? It sounds like you've got a hybrid, or blended, memoir on your hands.
If you are unsure, a very incomplete list of recent hybrid memoir and essay include: Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, Joseph Osmundson's Virology, Melissa Febos' Abandon Me and Girlhood, Lilly Dancyger's Negative Space, Elissa Washuta's White Magic, Margo Jefferson's Negroland, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Marcos Gonsalez's Pedro's Theory — we will discuss some of these (and others!) in class