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.
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