Major novelists were pressured by publishers to write memoirs, the more abject the better.

Evidence

Primarily designating memoirs written by literary figures (rather than a stylization or literary elevation of memoir), this growth entails publishing companies’ pursuit of memoirs from both novelists and poets, both aspiring and successful—and the more abject the better. Jesmyn Ward, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, Roxane Gay, Haruki Murakami, Dave Eggers, Amy Tan, Jonathan Franzen, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, J. G. Ballard, and Jeanette Winterson are all major novelists who’ve penned memoirs in the twenty-first century. Alexander Chee’s is even called How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. The critically beloved Rachel Cusk, Ann Patchett, and Tobias Wolff have each written two. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 158

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘more abject the better’ premium links memoir demand to authenticity/abjection themes in the reader’s immediacy framework.