Rise of the "Nobody" Memoir

This spring there are more memoirs than last spring by, for want of a better term, "nobodies," those who are neither generals, statesmen, celebrities nor their kin. So many have appeared as to elicit a parody of the genre -- Daniel Harris's A Memoir Of No One in Particular: In Which Our Author Indulges in Naive Indiscretions, A Self-Aggrandizing Solipsism, and An Off-Putting Infatuation with His Own Bodily Functions.

It has been called a bonanza, a movement, a spate, a tide. "This is the age of memoir. Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from the American soil as in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it," announced William Zinsser, the granddaddy of writing guides, in Inventing the Truth, The Art and Craft of Memoir.

The epoch's heroic figure is Frank McCourt, who, at 65, wrote a memoir of his mean Irish childhood, Angela's Ashes, that sold millions and won the Pulitzer. Its boy wonder is Dave Eggers, whose Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a pony-wide micron-deep curl of a pseudo-Joycean memoir about the death of his parents (almost at the same time!) and his raising (at the age of 21!) his brother (only 7!) Its grits-and-gas-pump diva is Mary Karr, who took a year-long ride on The New York Times bestseller list at 42 with The Liar's Club (Texas kidhood with crazy ma). Its seductive wacko is Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose Prozac Nation delineated depression and whose newest More, Now, Again recreates Ritalin addiction. Perhaps the genre's most infamous embarrassment is Michael Ryan's A Secret Life, in which the sex-addicted former Princeton University creative writing professor describes carnal relations with the family dog, Topsy.

It is fashionable, a bid for superiority, to denigrate memoir and explain its causes in derogatory terms. The reasons have calcified. Memoir is Jerry Springer. Memoir is narcissistic. Memoir is easy. Memoir is made-up. Memoir is ubiquitous. Memoir is self-help disguised. The counter-argument also has hardened. Memoir is a genre -- some practitioners are good, some not. Memoir is not new -- vide Augustine. Fiction is exhausted, memoir is vital.

Both sides have stated their cases over and over. The questions remain -- why memoirs by nobodies? And why now?

Here are two plausible, but partial, explanations: "I think it's a matter of Frank McCourt and Mary Karr being these breakout books," says Villard publicist Brian McLendon. "And publishers say, oh, look at that. Kind of like we now have all these adventure books after Into Thin Air. I think those two, McCourt and Karr, are the two that are responsible for the spate of memoirs we're having now." On the more comprehensive side: "Day by day we are hearing more about psychological Darwinism, DNA markers, genetic profiling, and we feel less and less self-determined," says Basic Books publisher John Donatich. "The news from science is even our moods are chemical. Memoir insists on the life story. It's therapeutic but also existential. It asserts, 'I'm here to tell it. I exist.'"

The hard-nosed suspect that economics are to blame. Like reality television, nobody memoirs, in one sense, are cheap to produce. The nobody gets a lower advance, obviously, than Jack Welch's $7.1 million or Bill Clinton's estimated $12 million. But editors and publicists point out that the business of nobody memoirs is really not all that different from that of the first-time novel, with one important marketing distinction: You can sometimes book a first-time nobody memoirist on NPR, Morning Edition, Dateline and the like, while you can't book a first-time novelist. As one editor said to me, "What would they talk about? Character development?"

I have read more than a dozen of the spring memoirs in the last month. Most can be consumed in a night. They are tasty. I pick them up, overheated with scorn, and cool into fascination. Because the nobody memoir allows prurience under the banner of Alfred A. Knopf or Random House, guilt is diluted. Maybe the nobody memoir is merely methadone to keep us from the smack of Sally Jesse Raphael.