This part contains only structural spoilers for what is covered in certain chapters, no details.
I was (of course!) very sorry to hear (catching up on the podcast now that you're on recaps) that the forum is closing! I get it, too many people selling shoes (and I myself have a nice line of pumps that you might want to look into...) but still, it's too bad in my view.
But since you're staying open for a bit longer until we have Peace in our time, I'll throw up a few last notes. The first two are in general reaction to your chapters 4-5 series, plus the first (but only the first) of the recaps. (I am saving myself a #3 for after the next recap ep!)
The first thing I want to push back against is the idea that Peace is a memoir.
I grant you that in many ways in looks like a memoir: Weer is writing about his life. What else would you call it? But I submit that to think of it as a memoir is distorting to our view of it. I think it's like if you picked up Plato's Republic, saw that it was a bunch of characters with speech tags and decided it was a play: it would read very, very weirdly, for all its surface similarity.
Here's the thing. The memoir, as a form or genre or mode or whatever you want to call it, tends to look at it's subject's life: either their whole life, or some defined portion of it (people might write a memoir of their time in a particular job, or their childhood, or something similar). But Weer isn't doing that. He is dipping into his memories a lot. But he's not telling his story.
Think about the structure of the novel. (I made a similar point on the forum in an earlier post, so forgive me if I repeat a bit.) Chapter Two is all about his aunt's suitors. At best it might be said to be about a single summer he spent with his aunt. Which, if published as a separate piece (no pun intendend (well, maybe a little), as an essay, you might call that chapter a memoir of a particular summer... but even there it's too focused on this one, very odd, aspect. (Or if Aunt Olivia became really famous it might be his memoir of her, maybe.) And then Chapter 3 is all about a specific party, in particular stories told at it. And those two chapters make up almost half of the novel!
This is simply not what a memoir is nor how it works.
And all of this is aside from the lengthy sessions about his current life, the even-more dominant stories, and other oddities. Actually, I think one could call it a short story collection almost as well as a memoir: which is to say, it's really really not either, but there is a deceptive surface of each.
I think that in a first read one is supposed to think, originally, it is a memoir; but by the time one is in chapter two we realize it really isn't that at all.
So what is it? I will put that in part two, since it involves Spoilers.,