Women's Autobiography in Contemporary Egypt: Challenging the Constitution of Gender "...who can doubt the memoir is here to stay -- if not forever, then for a good long while?" With these words James Atlas ended his article Confessing for Voyeurs:The Age of The Literary Memoir Is Now published in the New York Times in 1996. This was the case not only in American Literature but also to a great extent in Arabic and particularly Egyptian Literature. One of the interesting features of the nineties of the last century is the appearance of a powerful stream of autobiographical narratives by young Egyptian women novelists like Miral Altahawi's The Blue Eggplant, Mai Altemisani's Heliopolis and Sahar Almougi's Daria to name a few. This paper explores the origin and the historical development of autobiography in the tradition of Arabic literature relating them to the contemporary scene. This paper also poses the question of why and how these young women writers write their autobiographies bearing in mind all the assumptions about gender, traditions and truth. These writings are the way for them to try to understand how their identities are formed, marginalized and oppressed. They realize how important memory and history can be for the understanding of the present and the future. They want not only to know but to remember who they are and what they want. What is more important about the act of writing an autobiography is that not only it defines identity but it creates and shapes identity and moves it from the margin to the center through enabling it writer to resist being voiceless. In this case these autobiographical memories are not only part of their writers' personal individual narratives that gives value to their personal experiences but of the collective narrative of their societies. Thus, memories serve personal and social purposes as well since personal and social narratives are inevitably interconnected.