Many memoirs by young writers about their even younger selves have been best sellers in recent years, including Alexandra Fuller’s “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” and Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”

No less satisfying, though, have been autobiographical works by much older writers. Roger Angell, sportswriter and former fiction editor for The New Yorker, published “Let Me Finish,” a collection of essays about his early life, when he was 86. At 91, Diana Athill wrote “Somewhere Towards the End,” an account of the regrets, reconsiderations, and limitations that accrue to the elderly. At 73, Philip Roth produced “Everyman,” a novel in which a narrator, closely resembling Roth, tells the story of his life largely through his illnesses and injuries.