Boom! : manufacturing memoir for the popular market / Julie Rak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rak, Julie, 1966- author.

Series:

Life writing series.

Life writing series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Autobiography.

Publishers and publishing--United States.

Publishers and publishing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (258 p.)

Distribution:

Beaconsfield, Quebec : Canadian Electronic Library, 2013.

Other Title:

Boom!

Place of Publication:

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, [2013]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: Identifying the Memoir Industry

CHAPTER 1 "More Books!": Publishing, Non-fiction, and the Memoir Boom

CHAPTER 2 Bookstores, Genre, and Everyday Practices

CHAPTER 3 Going Public: Selected Memoirs Produced by Random House and HarperCollins

CHAPTER 4 Exceptionally Public: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I: The Story of a Childhood and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

CONCLUSION Citizen Selves and the State of the Memoir Boom.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781554589418

155458941X

9781554589401

1554589401

OCLC:

865475102