It feels like there’s almost a genre unto itself of how the writer (a twenty-thirty something female) is a victim of something. Usually it seems to be eating disorders but there are ones about rape and drug abuse. What’s up with the phenomenon? Is it just easier to write nonfiction books about that since most young people haven’t had enough experiences to write memoirs about actually doing things? Or because there’s a huge market? (I do have to admit, in a perverse way, really being addicted to the whole eating disorder one, despite the fact that most of them follow the same kind of whiny navel-gazing tone.)
I guess the poster child for this kind of book is Elizabeth Wurtzel whose book I couldn’t even get through, it was so bad. Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher was okay, but again, featured yet another full of herself young writer. I know a lot of people adored Alice Sebold’s Lucky but I just found the author way too, “I’m an awesome artist, why does no one understand me?” for words.
The confessional memoir is hardly a new genre, and the proliferation of confessional interviews on TV certainly has been popular for years now. Recognition of substance abuse and sexual/physical abuse is dramatically different than it was in previous generations, where they were Dirty Secrets to shove in a closet and Just Get Over. So, maybe there are more of them than there used to be, but … I don’t see it as anything startlingly new.
My theory is that they write them to provide material for high school speech team competitors to perform in the prose category. Well, not really. But seriously, I’d estimate that in my two years of the weirdness that was high school speech team, fully 75% of the prose speeches performed by females were about eating disorders, rape, and/or incest. There may have even been a story about a girl who’s anorexic because her dad raped her. Terribly depressing.
I don’t have a good real guess about why there are so many of these books. Partly the whole “get it off your chest” thing, partly because they think it will help other young women get through similar situations. And partly - or largely - a desire to make money.
Well, there’s also the Augusten Burroughs school of My Parents Really Sucked the Big One Now I’m Going to Profit On It genre. Glass Castle, that latest one by Susan whatsername etc. etc. Then there’s the Post-American Beauty lit focusing on dysfunctional suburbia etc.
Is it any wonder I like my authors dead, Russian or English, and in the public domain?
I’m not particularly interested in memoirs unless they are by someone who’s led an unusually interesting life, but as far as I can tell these kinds of “victim” memoirs (“how I overcame my personal problem” memoirs might be more fair) are hardly limited to female writers. That women would be writing most of the eating disorder memoirs is unsurprising, as the vast majority of people with eating disorders are women. But when it comes to “I was abused” or “I was an addict” memoirs, there have been a fair number written by men.
The first big “listen to the horrible things that happened to me” memoir I remember hearing about was Dave Pelzer’s 1995 A Child Called It. There’s also Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. That Frey embellished/lied about his problems with drugs and the law certainly suggests he felt there was a significant market for “victim” memoirs, and it looks like he was right.