Throughout history, people have loved reading novels. Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and J.K. Rowling wrote what are considered some of the best fictional works. In recent years, though, the memoir has taken its relatable emotional backgrounds and forged ahead of the novel.
I’m currently in an honors course that deals strictly with memoirs. The first book we read was called “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls. After reading the first few chapters, the class agreed that each event that took place in Walls’ life was more heart-wrenching because we all knew it had actually taken place.
With novels, I’ve been able to connect with the characters on a deeper level, and even feel like I’ve understood them better than some of the people around me. But the memoirs I’ve read just instill that “mutual” understanding within me at an even higher level.
I remember reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 10th grade and talking about how Harper Lee had based a large portion of the novel off her personal experiences, though the book ended up being published as a novel. My intrigue at the thought of someone seeing all of the events described firsthand went up tenfold.
Aside from “The Hunger Games,” I see many of my friends reading works by David Sedaris, Ellen DeGeneres, Tina Fey and even Hollywood “celebrities” like Paris Hilton or Snooki of “Jersey Shore.”
What seems to be the driving force in memoirs’ recent popularity is the fact that Americans, and the population in general, are intensely curious about other people. (And partially that our lives are so boring that we need to read the juicy parts of other people’s mess-ups.)
When all anyone does is watch shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” read magazines devoted to Brad and Angelina’s love life and devote all of their precious Thursday evenings to “Jersdays,” why wouldn’t book lovers follow suit?
The New York Times book review called Tina Fey’s book, “Bossypants,” a “spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation.”
Fey’s collection of personal stories has sold 1 million copies since its release last April and currently sits comfortably on The New York Times Best Seller list at No. 6.
And while books such as Jodi Picoult’s recent “Sing You Home” continue to appear at the very top of New York Times and USA Today book lists, memoirs seem to have grabbed America’s short attention span and held it, at least for now.
Maybe what Americans really want is to be involved in someone else’s life so that they don’t have to worry about how mundane their own lives can be. Anyone can “write” a memoir —even Ms. Hilton.
This just gives us everyday people something more to focus on — whether it’s the stupidity of many celebrities or the brilliance and wit of others. Real people are tangible. And in a society obsessed with objects, that’s what we crave.
