"What are you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay…" these lines, the beginning of a child’s Easter poem, start I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first, and most enduring, of Maya Angelou’s six-volume autobiography. Angelou, who died today at the age of 86, did in fact come to stay, and stay she did, changing the face of memoir during her extraordinary eight decades on the planet.

By the time she started writing Caged Bird, at the age of forty, Angelou had already lived many lifetimes. After a teen pregnancy, she became the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco, then followed that, naturally, by touring Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess. She recorded an album as "Miss Calypso," joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild, and appeared in an off-Broadway production of a Genet play. Over the course of her life she would work with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, teach in Africa, and deliver President Clinton’s Inaugural Address in addition to writing several more books. President Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom in 2010. But it was Caged Bird that remains Angelou’s best-loved, and most-influential book. Its success is all the more extraordinary considering that at the time it was published, stories of black women’s experiences were hardly considered best-seller material, especially not if they involved rape, incest, and abuse. Even less likely if they happened to be true.

Caged Bird tells the story of young Marguerite (called Maya) and her younger brother Bailey, who are sent to the small, racially divided town of Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother when their parents are no longer able to care for them. In Stamps, Maya experiences prejudice and is ostracized by the white community. Later, she is raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and when she testifies against him, he is killed by her uncles. Terrified that her words were responsible for her rapist’s death, Maya stops speaking for several years. When she does find her voice again, she uses it to empower herself and tell the truth of her experience.

Today, it is difficult to imagine how groundbreaking the book was when it was published in 1969. Autobiographies were generally not considered to have literary merit, and memoirs were mostly the province of public figures who recounted important events from their past. To tell her story, Angelou borrowed fictional techniques like metaphor, dialogue, richly-developed characters, and a narrative that jumps around in time, telling the story from both young and adult Maya’s perspective, causing some critics to describe the book as autobiographical fiction. While acknowledging that she used poetic license in her evocation and arrangement of events, Angelou claimed the book was simply autobiography, and honest to her experience.

It is hard to imagine a Mary Karr, a Jeanette Walls, or a Frank McCourt without Maya Angelou. Her lyric, impressionistic rendition of the past and the way memory works has come to define the prevailing voice of contemporary memoir, and Maya, as a character, in Caged Bird, is recognizable in any story of a child triumphing over abuse and deprivation. Some critics suggest that Angelou’s subsequent works have never been judged independent of the success of her first book; it is an achievement that dwarfs her later literary efforts. Whether this is accurate or not, it should not diminish the achievement of this genre-defining work. The book contains the answer to the question it asks: what are you looking at me for? For a model of how to tell the story of a life.