Margo Jefferson’s memoir, “Negroland,” possesses a refrain, a series of sentences that are repeated, as if out of a Duke Ellington composition, so the author can hang onto them and so can we.

“I think it’s too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself,” Ms. Jefferson comments. “You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.”

This refrain, which appears three times in “Negroland,” performs several duties. It suggests the author’s unease with the lurid state of the American memoir.

It reminds you that you’re reading a critic — Ms. Jefferson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her book reviews in The New York Times — who didn’t pander to her audience and won’t begin to do so now. (Her tenure at the paper was mostly before mine, by the way, and I have not met her.)