[Joseph Tracy]

I do not read memoirs but I think the appetite for memoirs is closer to the appetite that creates People magazine than any reaction to fabulist fiction. I don’t accept that the bulk of fiction has followed the examples she offers either. On the other hand I and many on the list who have this interest in Pynchon, Marquez, Delillo etc. do feel a need to balance their reading with heavy doses of  non-fiction. I also need poetry which is as close as I get to memoir.  For me at least there is a tonic relation between the various genres so I’m inclined to think there is something to the general idea in the broadest sense, but I truly doubt that M Karr is putting her finger on a meaningful phenomenon.  

There are probably some very good memoirs somewhere. Ya think?  I liked Merton’s Seven Story Mountain.  I think that is the only memoirish book I have read all the way through.   
> On Mar 10, 2016, at 7:08 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I suppose you could argue that Breaking Bad and Gilmore Girls and
> Bojack Horseman are directly responsible for a thirst for
> Kardashian-related television, too.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Karr's is the kind of airy generalization that makes me want to go all
>> quant. Have those fabulist etc. categories actually increased as a share of
>> novels published? Is there some per-reader sales tracking data to show that
>> readers who tried those categories are now reading more memoirs? Is there
>> any reason to think this argument -- ostensibly about the public world of
>> books and readers -- is more than  a projection of Karr's preferences?
>> 
>> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> "Changes in  the novel have helped to jack up memoir's audience as fiction
>>> grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyper intellectual under the sway of Joyce
>>> and Woolf and Garcia Marquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty for
>>> reality began imbibing memoir."   ---Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir 2105
>>> 
>>> Well, maybe, Mary, partly......
>>> 
>>> But I, who along with readers and critics' 'lengthy assaults' on memoir,
>>> such as by Wm Gass, Jonathon Yardley and James Wolcott will just add,
>>> 
>>> Knausgaard and Ferrante have been hugely read as novelists bringing us
>>> back to 'reality'. And the rediscovery of Stoner and more and more.
>> 
>> 
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