[Below, Moore expresses apprehension over the current popularity of memoir-writing but concludes, "Despite the excesses, I still feel that this has been a good thing, because those who resent it most are usually the most powerful." She also remarks on three publications, Sally Friedman's Swimming the Channel, Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, and Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica.]

The subject that obsesses us at the end of this long century is subjectivity itself. "How was it for me?" we continually ask ourselves. Such navel-gazing could be attributed to the fragmentation of modern life, the end of ideology, the collapse of the grand narratives or any postmodern, premillennial panic that you care to theorise. We cannot know or be certain of anything outside ourselves; it is all just too confusing. As the grand narratives shatter into millions of smaller ones, all crying "me, me, me", myriad voices whisper: "I may not be a novelist but I know what I'm like."

This belief in the subject as the only viable subject, the self as both author and authored, is not a purely literary phenomenon. Television likes authored documentaries in which quirky presenters give their entirely personal views. The art world likes self-revelatory bad girls such as Tracy Emin and Sam Taylor Wood; newspapers are brimming with the "new solipsists" who write of nothing but themselves, or just of nothing; music loves its self-made stars such as Liam Gallagher, who acted like a pop star long before he ever was one. We are in thrall to "attitude," whatever that means.

It is possible to read all this as incredibly liberating, allowing a plurality of voices that have not been heard before. Or it is possible to see it as the symptom of a supreme crisis of confidence in which no one can speak for anyone outside themselves, in which everyone emotes but no one thinks any more.

The memoir is hardly a new form, but at the moment it seems as though everyone who has had any experience of anything from cutting their toenails to giving birth feels compelled to write one. There is an element of undergoing therapy in public in much of what is published. These are the true self-help books. In the age of Oprah we know that speaking up, spitting it out, will help us "come to terms" with our pasts. But there is also the voyeuristic thrill of watching others who not only wash their dirty linen in public but also point out filthy stains of particular interest. A psycho-babbling culture, combined with media intrusion, has made a mockery of the old divide between private and public.

Despite the excesses, I still feel that this has been a good thing, because those who resent it most are usually the most powerful—and power rests, as we know, on a ruthless separation of the personal from the political. Whether this always makes for good writing is another issue. I have read too many dire feminist novels involving incest or eating disorders in my time and I think that much of this stuff would be better left unpublished. Writing it down may well do the author good but inflicting it upon others is an act of sadism by committed masochists. Anyway, these days the people making money out of rewriting their pasts are the boys, who just seem so much jollier than we do, perhaps because they get a round of applause for merely admitting that they have emotions at all.

So I wasn't overjoyed at the prospect of reading a bunch of memoirs by women. Sally Friedman's Swimming the Channel is subtitled "a memoir of love and loss." What memoir isn't about these things, one wonders? Friedman is an obsessive long-distance swimmer, a bit of a loner who falls head over heels in love with Paul and marries him. He encourages her to swim the Channel but is killed a few days before they are due to make the trip. This is a book about the two loves of her life, swimming and her late husband, and I suppose eventually it is about grieving and that horrible word "healing." It is as brave, honest and painful as these things are meant to be, but for me strangely unmoving, probably because I share neither of her obsessions—swimming or her husband. That may seem unkindly subjective, but the thing about the laying bare of personal pain is that you have to like or want to connect with the person displaying their life before you.

This was also part of my difficulty with Kathryn Harrison's book The Kiss, which is an easier book to admire than to like. It is the beautifully written tale of the affair Harrison had with her father when she was 20. Never feeling good enough for her narcissistic mother, she ends up seduced by her monstrous father. With chilling intensity she describes how the destruction of his internal barriers destroyed hers, and how the affair was a way of trying to penetrate her mother by using her father. In the jargon Harrison is the victim, yet there is something about this memoir that suggests a need to exonerate herself. Is she not culpable? Does an unhappy childhood or even the obvious psychoanalytic interpretation excuse what she has done? Does the quality of her writing cover up the narcissism she has inherited from both parents?

Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica shows precisely what can be done with the form in the hands of a writer who is more interested in the world than in herself. Exploring her genuinely horrific childhood and the strangeness of Antarctica, Diski, an immensely cool writer, unravels both with superb understatement. Her seeking of oblivion, a denial of self, means that she has the writerly ability to distance herself from her own pain so that even in her darkest hours she can be wry. If for a true solipsist others exist only as an idea, Diski is no such creature. In writing about herself she is writing of many other lives, too. She trusts neither experience nor memory to reveal the whole truth. As she says: "There are infinite ways of telling the truth, including fiction. There are infinite ways of evading the truth, including non-fiction."

In between the mountains of self-obsession and self-deception that pass for heavily marketed "honesty" these days, that finally might be as much as we can ever know about ourselves, or anyone else for that matter.