Memoirs

Interesting article from USAtoday.com

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

In an age of reality TV and personal blogs, an older form of personal confession — the memoir — is booming.

As a percentage of books and in absolute numbers, more memoirs than ever are being published. They are outpacing even debut novels.

MORE: These authors survived, and lived to write about it

Michael Cader, who tracks book deals for his electronic newsletter, Publishers Lunch, counts 295 memoirs signed by publishers last year, compared with 227 debut novels and 214 memoirs in 2006.

Memoirs accounted for 12.5% of non-fiction deals, up from 10% in 2006 and 9% in 2005.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Love | James Frey | A Million Little Pieces | Eat | Pray | Running With Scissors | Table | Elizabeth Gilbert | Jeannette Walls | Dry | Glass Castle | Publishers Lunch | Amy Williams | Michael Cader

Citing two recent best sellers, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a post-divorce travelogue, and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, about her bizarre parents, literary agent Amy Williams says memoirs share reality TV's voyeuristic appeal.

Memoirs can "make us feel better about ourselves because whether we're honest about it or not, we all like feeling as if someone has it worse than we do, or behaved in a way we never would have," Williams says.

Agony sells, especially when touted as a true story. Of course, memoirs can be exaggerated or falsified. After acknowledging inaccuracies in his best-selling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey is now writing a novel.

"Frey gave all of us a black eye," says Janice Erlbaum, whose second memoir, Have You Found Her, is about volunteering at a homeless shelter where she once lived. In her first draft, "I went overboard trying to prove the story was true. I didn't want to leave anything out. In the end, I knew I was dealing with something stranger than fiction."

One memoir often leads to another … and another.

Walls is writing another book about her family. Augusten Burroughs is following two best sellers, Running With Scissors (dysfunctional childhood) and Dry (alcoholism), with A Wolf at the Table, about his father, out April 29. Marya Hornbacher, who wrote Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia in 1998, has a new memoir, Madness: A Bipolar Life, out April 9.

Is there a memoir glut? Eat, Pray, Love has 4.8 million copies in print, but most memoirs sell modestly with first printings between 10,000 and 30,000.

"There can never be too many if one is great," Scribner's Nan Graham says. "I've vowed never to do another memoir, then someone like Jeannette Walls comes along." Memoirs resonate when they're "empowering and liberating. You can read about someone who has survived poverty or addiction or worse. It's a way to neutralize shame and stigma. And in the end, the stories are often hopeful and inspiring."