NYT: Don't Speak, Memory
How's your memoir coming along? What? You're not writing a memoir? You must be living an extraordinarily boring life then. And besides, even if your life is about as exciting as the average blog or online coffee maker cam, you should still have a memoir. It's your god-given right, didn't you know?
According to The New York Times' William Grimes, memoirs are huge. Huger than huge! Hugungous!
The memoir has been on the march for more than a decade now. Readers have long since gotten used to the idea that you do not have to be a statesman or a military commander - or, like Saint-Simon or Chateaubriand, a witness to great events - to commit your life to print. But the genre has become so inclusive that it's almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material.
Grimes sets for himself the difficult task of creating a "memoir taxonomy," organized as follows:
Important categories include the retired-statesman (or more likely, bureaucrat) memoir, the traumatic-childhood memoir, the substance-abuse memoir, the spiritual-journey memoir, the showbiz memoir, the spirit-of-place or vanished-era memoir, the illness memoir and the sexual-exploit memoir.
We'd add: "the we're not gonna read any of these memoir," "the remaindered at Barnes & Noble memoir," and "the wasted advance by clueless publishers memoir."
See also: Me, Myself, and I, by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, October 1997.
