Forum / Is the novel...?

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  David Ackley

  Dec 07, 03:38pm

  being shunted aside by memoir, now? If so, why? Why now?

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  Gary Hardaway

  Dec 07, 03:48pm

  The Cult of Celebrity is strong in this paparazzi
  twilight.

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  Adam Sifre

  Dec 07, 04:32pm

  i write good.

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  David Ackley

  Dec 07, 05:20pm

  There might be something in what you say, Gary, a best selling memoir being a faster track to personal celebrity than a novel. I wonder if people are more drawn to confessional modes than to those where the writer is hidden behind( or within) the personae of fictional characters. There also seems to be a more deliberate blurring of the lines between the fictional and the autobiographical, (ala Knaussgaard who calls his works novels) with fictional protagonists bearing all of the identifying characteristics, name, history, place of the author. And I wonder about this too? The why of it; why not just call it a memoir?

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  J.A. Pak

  Dec 07, 06:22pm

  David, an explanation I've read is that the readers of today want writing based on "reality", "fact". Why non fiction in general outsells fiction and why so many programs on TV are "reality" shows (though most are highly scripted and manipulated).

  As to the blurring of lines: it offers more creative flexibility. And too, many memoirs are really "fiction". Sometimes unintentionally (as the family of Madeleine L’Engle will tell you: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/12/the-storyteller-2), sometimes intentionally (more than one memoir in the last few years have been outed as containing lies).

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  Mathew Paust

  Dec 07, 08:23pm

  Most if not all of Saul Bellows's work was thinly disguised/fictionalized autobiography, thought to be one of the reasons he lost the first four of his five wives.

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  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 08, 01:04am

  No.

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