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.
