Alexis de Tocqueville called ours “a nation full of memorials.” He said this just fifty-five years after America was founded, a decade before the Civil War had started, and over a century before the Second World War had given the nation, in some people’s minds, an excuse to memorialize not only its war veterans but even those who had simply lived during wars. Nevertheless, de Tocqueville had already seen enough of America by then to be able to foresee its peculiar present—a time when the number of gravestones commemorating America’s dead citizens—according to a recent study by the United States Geological Survey—actually outnumbers its dead citizens by about four hundred thousand. De Tocqueville foresaw our 106,937 square miles of cemeteries, our 79,893 square miles of national monuments, and our 75,381 listings on the National Register of Historic Places. He foresaw the more than two million individual war memorials we would build to commemorate the nine wars America would fight. And he probably could have also seen on the blank nineteenth-century American horizon—squinting, if on a clear day—all our highway dedication plaques, and all our high school honor rolls, and our handmade wooden roadside crosses, our certificates of appreciation, our certificates of participation, our memorial park benches, memorial park trees, memorial garden plots, memorial theater seats, memorial office buildings, memorial conference rooms, memorial college dorms, memorial scholarships, memorial football fields, memorial football field scoreboards; all those bricks inscribed with people’s names to help raise money to pave things; all those books in all those libraries with dedication placards; all those stars whose naming rights we have purchased for our lovers, pets, dead children, and selves from the Ministry of Federal Star Registration, International Real Estate Star Corporation, Interstellar Sightings, Inc., and the Universal Star Market, four of more than a dozen Web-based American companies whose combined revenues over the past five years have totaled over $225 million for the naming rights to an estimated three million stars, even though only six thousand stars are visible in the evening sky, and even though none of these companies actually has the authority to grant such naming rights, according to the International Astronomical Union, which does. “Add up all the memorials we’ve got in this country,” Bill Andrews, president of the American Institute of Commemorative Art, recently told me, “and I would bet we already have enough commemorated objects in the United States to dedicate one of them to every American who’s ever lived, plus every American who’s currently living, as well as five or so generations’ worth of Americans yet unborn.”

And then there are our memoirs.

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According to literary scholars, we’ve been writing memoirs longer than we’ve been writing anything else....