Go to the biography section of your local library or bookstore and you will see shelves overflowing with memoirs by people you have never heard of and people you never wanted to hear of. These "authors" have published their own diaries.
There is a reason that diaries about wacky Uncle Henry and your mean mom who made you eat peas were once consigned to vanity presses: No one gives a damn about your relatives, your memories and the injustices you endured except maybe cousin Kate.
Then self-publishing debuted. And social media. And victim culture. And Covid. Suddenly people had a lot of time on their hands to cogitate on their victimhood--and the resources to make it into a tome. (Did everyone write a memoir during Covid or did it just seem that way?)
The memoir-publishing revolution created a cottage industry of self-publishing experts and writing coaches but not a lot of readers. They were writing their own memoirs.
Roots Of Literary Self-Worship
The roots of such paeans-to-self were apparent way back in1968 when singer Joan Baez published her journal Daybreak with its catchy "My Life Is a Crystal Teardrop" subhead. "An extraordinary daughter here tells about her extraordinary parents and talks about war, protest, pacifism, and human frailty," emoted the reviews.
In the 1970's, Tom ("The Right Stuff") Wolfe aptly termed the growing self-enraptured movement the Me Decade. "It is summed up in the notion: 'Let's talk about Me,'" he wrote in New York magazine. "The most fascinating subject on earth."
Nor did Wolfe give women a pass. "The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status--woman, housewife--to the level of drama. One's very existence as a woman--as Me--becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora--or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr."
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