Publishers pressured even literary theorists to write personal memoirs

Evidence

The 1990s that Amis was observing starred numerous blockbuster memoirs, including those penned by first-time and unknown authors (“nobody memoirs”). Alongside Angela’s Ashes, The Liar’s Club, and Tuesdays with Morrie came Running with Scissors, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Eat, Pray, Love. Celebrities, public figures, and nobodies vehiculating via memoir into public stature all found success in the form, as did so many established novelists that the New York Times complemented its assessment of the genre’s dominance with appraisal of its heights, calling the late 1990s and early 2000s “the age of the literary memoir.” 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. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 158

Categorization

• XREF: The memoir imperative and ‘nobody memoirs’ connects to the reader’s ongoing mapping of immediacy’s features; the named memoirists are concrete touchstones for identifying the style in real works. — connects to: Movement memoirs are pressure-cooked into personal sagas by global-North publishers and genre expectations — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 401