The proliferation of memoirs in recent years may say something about our culture’s shifting attitudes toward the personal, but, if so, the message is a contradictory one. In our post-1960s style of open-mindedness, we tend to dig into the most private corners of our own and others’ lives as we simultaneously shrink back with squeamishness at much of what we find. Take, for example, Thomas Beller’s manner of regarding the twenty memoirs, including one of his own, collected in his anthology, Personals. The complete title of the anthology is Personals: dreams and nightmares from the lives of 20 young writers. Yet in Beller’s preface, he consistently refers to the memoir genre as the “personal essay,” a more dignified and certainly less sensationalist locution than his title evokes. Beller’s indecisiveness about how to view his material reflects something of our shared discomfort with how to regard the intimate details of a life.

With one or two exceptions, the memoirs in Beller’s collection are not particularly sensational. Most of the twenty-something authors—fiction writers and poets—either live in New York or have spent a significant amount of time there. Between the chic bars of the East Village and their three- or four-story walk-ups, the singles life that they recount comes to feel drearily familiar. One of the stronger pieces in the collection makes a geographic departure. The writer Quang Bao fled Vietnam with his family at the age of six and was raised in Sugarland, Texas, where he went about the disorienting business of fitting into a foreign culture. His memoir, “Fortune Trails,” centers on accompanying his mother when he was sixteen to visit a fortuneteller in order to seek advice on the family’s business.

Unlike some of these memoirists, Bao does not strain to garner epiphanies from his experiences, nor does he rely on tragedy to create pathos. His understated approach allows his insights to stand out in greater relief. Ultimately, Bao’s sense of the comic and his leisurely, almost whimsical pacing result in a quiet meditation on the course of his childhood. His eye for character and anecdote is displayed in these two well-packed sentences: “My mother’s superstitions depended on her mood. To the horror of her two sisters, she once bought a bouquet of an even number of white flowers, which to most Asians symbolizes death, and arranged them in a vase in the middle of the dining room table for her wedding anniversary, an event she did not want to celebrate that year.”

At its best, a memoir can exhibit many of the qualities of good fiction, especially climactic development and narrative energy. Seemingly the most direct of literary forms, the memoir may nevertheless create its own built-in suspense concerning the way things will turn out and who does what to whom and why. No easy task, as this becomes a matter of thoughtfully re-imagining experience, and then conveying these re-imaginings in correspondingly well-crafted language.

Certainly the form has been drawing practitioners, with countless memoirs inundating the publishing world in recent years, taking child and drug abuse, the dysfunctional family, and crippling illnesses as subjects. The range in quality has been vast. Many are thin and unsatisfying. Their authors seem drawn to personal exploration without granting the requisite attention to the artistry involved in producing such writings. Short on wisdom and skill, many young memoirists rely on flamboyant content or tone to carry their projects along.

Looking at “12th, Between A and B,” the opening memoir in Personals, we catch a glimpse of the effects of writing about a too-hastily-reflected-on personal experience. Strawberry Saroyan approaches her struggle to lose her virginity with a mixture of glib seriousness and comedy. Given her invitation to so private a viewing, we hope for more insight, or more engaging art, than she finally gives us. Saroyan begins with the boldly wry comment that “It’s hard to say when my virginity became something that I wanted to lose.” From here we might expect a comic inquiry, probably detailed with anecdote and reflection, about Saroyan’s difficulties. What she provides is a somewhat rambling overview of her life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, skirting any deeper contemplation. Does her difficulty with sex have to do with her relationship with her father? Saroyan mentions this possibility, but quickly glosses over it before anything much is arrived at. Does it have to do with her residing in Manhattan, a city “that moves at the speed of panic,” encouraging, as she describes them, many empty attractions? Saroyan and her dates all seem to speak “the language of fantasy,” yet somehow never have sufficient imagination to make the love act a satisfying reality.

In the end, she leaves New York and at a party in the Hollywood Hills has her first sexual encounter with a married man, a relationship that only briefly endures. During their last evening together, Saroyan is struck by a sadness over the limits, the finally less-than-fulfilling quality, of this first important liaison. Her wistful sorrow invites our sympathy, yet because her treatment of her lover’s married status is so casually matter-of-fact, we can’t help but find ourselves perplexedly asking of Saroyan: What did you expect?

In too many of the Personals memoirs we are left wondering what the authors really want to convey. In “3cc cp,” Scott Heim writes about his desire for excitement growing up in Kansas. So bored was Heim, and so inherently drawn to the extreme, that he became transfixed by the real-life account of the Kansas rapist and murderer Bob Berdella. One of Berdella’s victims escaped to tell his tale, an event that stirred Heim’s longing for a similar experience. Becoming a prostitute in his search for high-risk adventure, Heim fortunately quit the trade after his first violent encounter. His tale, though admittedly disturbing, causes us to feel more sadly confused than anything else. Can the relentlessly flat plains of Kansas alone cause such despondent behavior? Surely something is missing from the story.

It is probably no coincidence that some of the most successful pieces have set fairly confined, modest aims for themselves, and treat less intrinsically charged material: Heather Chase’s “Motion Sickness,” Barton Biggs’s “The Heat,” and Jennifer Farber’s “Window Shopping for a Life.” Within similar constraints, Bliss Broyard manages in the both playful and somber “My Father’s Daughter” to explore her relationship with her father. Broyard’s deft use of indirection as she explores the nature of their bond— both what it meant while he was living and what it means since his death—allows her to look at this familiar experience with a fresh eye. Drawn to a “particular type of older man,” Broyard reveals that she seeks out the companionship of men who were also close to her own father, men who had known him well throughout much of his life and hers. But romantic interludes, refreshingly, are not what Broyard is after. Rather, she seeks in these men both paternal companionship and a more specific form of mirroring. Through long conversations and time spent with these men, Broyard attempts to see herself in their eyes, thereby continuing to receive affirmation, a reflected image of herself, as her father’s daughter.

What is striking about this piece is Broyard’s almost casual imparting of insight into her own behavior and the meaning it has for her. Avoiding both melodrama and cliché, she nevertheless manages a fine elegiac tone at key moments. During her closing reflections, Broyard remembers her father’s raucous style of learning “the new music” and all “the new dances” from her, a memory that affirms his enduring presence: “I can still hear his encouragement as he followed along behind me. With my eyes closed, in the quiet of my dark bedroom, his hoots rise out of the silence.”

In general, the relative youth of these writers probably accounts for some of their difficulties. Greater experience, both in living and working on their craft—whether it be fiction or poetry—would undoubtedly assist them in portraying the most challenging of all characters, that of the self. Maturity might also lessen self-consciousness in regard to expressions of feeling that seem particularly associated with Nineties culture, and also, mistakenly, with New York literary sophistication. Too often these writers seem so bent on eschewing sentimentality that they end up squelching all sentiment.