While time and distance can add depth to personal narratives, the assumption that the young memoirist is too naïve to know she must wait to tell her story excludes one key possibility: She is choosing to capture a story through the lens of youth. One fine example of this zoomed-in perspective is Dani Shapiro’s “Slow Motion,” a memoir about a tragic car accident that altered the author’s life when she was 23, written in the present tense. Shapiro didn’t need to wait to conjure up her mixed-up feelings; she can evoke her swerves from self-pity to grandiosity in the moment and without the intrusive interjections from an older and wiser self.

Young writers are not only primed to evoke emotions with vivid immediacy, they are also experts on the digital interfaces where so many rites of passage (first love, first heartbreak, first grief) now occur. I am writing for other millennials, who have grown up flirting through texts and breaking up over email. The seed of my memoir was an essay I wrote about mourning on Facebook, where memorial rituals are quickly evolving but without an etiquette rule book. After my ex died, I watched as everyone who’d ever loved him changed their profile pictures to one of them with him, and I realized that I had no pictures of the two of us together. Unable to participate, I felt invisible.

I read the essay at a reading series, and afterward, a young woman approached me. She told me she’d just lost her best friend and kept lurking on this dead girl’s Facebook page, unable to confess to anyone else the hours she spent there. We talked about the strangeness of mourning in our 20s and isolation of these online vigils.

In her memoir of her mother’s death, “The Long Goodbye,” Meghan O’Rourke describes grief as universal and also “exquisitely personal.” What’s changing in our lifetime is the landscape against which these universal yet personal experiences are played out, a realm so often described with fear or contempt. The critic Sven Birkerts and the psychologist Sherry Turkle have recently published books about how technology negatively impacts the way we interact and consume information. Their arguments take for granted “digital dualism,” a term coined by the social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, to describe the idea that what happens online isn’t “real life.” I wonder if the reason the young woman I met was only able to tell me about her obsession on Facebook is because she feared others might not validate her grief as genuine. The “deficit in perspective” Howey notices is real but perhaps it’s most prevalent in a generation that discounts the experiences of young writers and chooses to remain oblivious to the distinct digital society in which so many now come of age.