The Obsession With Memoirs

Posted on April 24, 2008

Everyone is writing a memoir these days, it seems. Memoirs top bestseller lists and editors are still buying them. But why are they so popular?

Why such popularity? Patsy Vigderman, a professor at Ohio's Kenyon College, believes there are parallels between the memoir's popularity and the rise of reality TV. "For some reason, people right now are gripped by the idea that [it's better if] it's really true," she says. "Memoirs are a form of self-display."

She doesn't think much of the majority of memoirs published nowadays, the survival stories trumpeted by Graham. She used to teach a course in memoir and autobiography, but has changed her focus to "fiction and other hybrid forms," asking her students to look at writing that crosses borders, she says. "To be able to turn your life into something as fiction is a very different project than simply telling your story," she says.

However, Simmons says that great writing, on its own, isn't a selling point for publishers. "You can sell a good story, but you can't sell great writing," he says. "It's the kiss of death to put the label 'literary' on something." Shields says it's a basic human fantasy to want to leave a piece of yourself behind after you go, though he's suspect of its value.

"Every person hopes to be remembered after death. To artists, it's a fantasy ... a transcendence of death," he says. "But now it seems like vanity." Shakespeare, he observes, may live on in his plays, but almost 400 years after his passing, he remains dead, buried -- and unaware of his fame. But Vigderman, though expressing concern about the "appeal to prurience" innate in a pop memoir, has a kinder view. After all, she says, a curiosity about our fellow human beings is as old as mankind itself.

She quotes another writer gone since the 17th century, the Japanese poet Basho, to stress her point. "It is deep autumn," Basho wrote. "My neighbor/How does he live, I wonder.

With so many memoirs turning out to be frauds, it's difficult to know if one is really reading someone's memoirs or if one is really reading a novel. We love both fiction and nonfiction. We become quite grumpy, however, when we have been reading what we were told was nonfiction only to have it turn out that the story was fiction all along.

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