Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production in the United States? If so, what is causing it? Are memoirs all written by narcissistic hacks for an unthinking public, or do they indicate a growing need to understand world events through personal experiences? This study seeks to answer these questions by examining memoir as an industrial product like other products, something that publishers and booksellers help to create.
These popular texts become part of mass culture, where they are connected to public events. The genre of memoir, and even genre itself, ceases to be an empty classification category and becomes part of social action and consumer culture at the same time. From James Frey’s controversial A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, computer hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way American readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences. The memoir boom is one of the ways that citizenship as a category of belonging between private and public spheres is now articulated.
Introduction
Identifying the Memoir Industry - Julie Rak
This chapter introduces the memoir boom as an effect of the publishing and bookselling industries, and creates a theory of genre to explain how popular non-fiction reading has become. It argues for taking serioulsy the production, consumption, and reception of popular texts, and it explains why the backlash against memoir has become so virulent.
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“More books!” Publishing, Nonfiction, and the Memoir Boom - Julie Rak
If we are to take popular memoir seriously, then we should take seriously the conditions of cultural and material production that have made memoir and other forms of nonfiction into important commodities that are produced, bought, and consumed in the United States and worldwide. In this chapter, the history of mainstream publishing in the United States from the 1980s to the present shows how the changing nature of publishing and its connection to other cultural industries helped to bring about the memoir boom in the 1990s.
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Book Stores, Genre, and Everyday Practices - Julie Rak
This chapter is about an often-overlooked aspect of the memoir boom and the circulation of books: the role that genre plays in the everyday working lives of the employees at independent bookstores and at Chapters Indigo, a major retail chain. Interviews with bookstore employees across Canada show that genre is often understood as a spatial practice that organizes where books are sold and how consumers understand memoir, and how independent stores use store culture to organize books and get them to readers.
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Going Public: Selected Memoirs Produced by Random House Inc. and HarperCollins - Julie Rak
Since memoirs for mass audiences are most often produced by large publishing houses, the author has provided some back-story about the history of two of the largest English-language publishers in the world—Random House and HarperCollins—to see how the development of these companies affects how they understand memoir as a category of writing. The author then turns her attention to some aspects of the sample of memoirs published or reprinted on or around the year 2003 to see how those books bring together individual experiences and public events in what, after Lauren Berlant, Rak calls citizenship as a category of affective belonging.
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Exceptionally Public: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I: The Story of a Childhood and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - Julie Rak
This chapter studies the reception of two “exceptional” texts (Marjane Satrapi’s first volume of Persepolis and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) during the mid-2000s, when the invasion of Iraq caused some Americans to be curious about the treatment of women in the Middle East, and when the controversy about whether the Weapons of Mass Destruction were really in Iraq. The publishing history of Persepolis in the United States shows that changes to the introduction of the book meant that many Americans saw the memoir as a story of childhood rather than as a radical political text. The moral panic about James Frey indicates how expectations about memoir as a truth-telling genre are directly related to the problem of truth-telling in public life.
Conclusion
Citizen Selves and the Current State of the Memoir Boom - Julie Rak
One of the terms of recognition that has clearly become important for American readers is citizenship as a way to describe a state of belonging, and a way of belonging within a state that is not always subject to the liberal requirements that the state may place upon its citizens. The memoir boom is connected to this idea of citizenship. As Americans continue to read and think about politics in their lives, memoir's uneasy position as a commodity and as a practice of going public remains a way for many people to access the life and experiences of another, in an expression of citizenship as a feeling of connectedness to others in a nation.
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