![]() ![]() If you look at the recovery memoirs of today, they come out of seventeenth-century spiritual conversion narratives. ![]() Why did you spend so much time on religious books? There wasn’t a bookstore with a novel section and a memoir section. ![]() Robinson Crusoe and other Defoe novels were in the form of autobiographies, but no one knew what they were. There are a number of cases back through the early nineteenth century, and in the twenties there was a series of scandals. Human nature is such that sometimes people will lie to get the result they want. Well, it certainly doesn’t seem so shocking after reading your book. Geoff Kloske had the notion, while he was observing reactions to James Frey - and I agreed with him - that something was missing in the equation, that it’s more complicated than just “why can’t it be fact-checked and it’s terrible.” Of course you deal with Frey (unsparingly) in the book. We couldn’t help but notice your editor also published James Frey’s second memoir. Yagoda explained to us the extent to which we’ve been there and done that. And nearly every mortal sin that’s afflicted the genre - lies, oversharing, score-settling, pandering - has been condemned as a sign of the apocalypse ever since the days of St. As documented in Ben Yagoda’s perceptive, thorough, and amusing Memoir: A History, memoir-writing is very nearly the world’s oldest profession (way older than fiction). Sarah Palin’s crash-memoir, Going Rogue, which arrived in stores today, may be the least mavericky thing she’s ever done. ![]()
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