Australian sales of memoirs have more than doubled in 20 years. What’s behind our insatiable appetite for them?
Addicted to heroin? Raised in a cult? Lost your entire family in a freak accident? Don’t worry, there’s a book for that., the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his ghastly Irish childhood. With help from Dave Pelzer’s, a tale every bit as grim as the title suggests, McCourt’s book ushered in the era of the so-called “misery memoir”. Child abuse – emotional, physical and sexual – was the central theme.
“What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity,” Freud told his nephew. Memoirists fudge facts for all sorts of reasons. To make stories more dramatic. To settle scores or protect people’s feelings. To fill the gaps where memory fails them. Literary agent Tom Gilliatt says readers readily accept that no one has perfect recall: “We’re willing to suspend our disbelief if somebody quotes word for word a conversation they had 20 years ago. It’s a reconstruction.
Tom Gilliatt believes publishing companies want to do the right thing. The problem is, they’re perennially short-staffed. “There aren’t the spare bodies to do significant fact-checking,” Gilliatt says. In July, allegations of lies and inaccuracies led to the withdrawal from sale of Christophe Glasl’s memoir
Prince Harry didn’t actually write the thing, of course. By his own admission, he’s “not really big on books”.Guinness World Records The consequences of ghostwriting are rarely as catastrophic as that, but it makes a nice change to come across a memoir – such as New Zealand actor Sam Neill’s recent– that is genuinely the work of the person whose familiar face is on the cover. “Sales of Sam Neill’s memoir will tell you that people are very interested in reading about movie stars,” says Allen & Unwin publisher Jane Palfreyman. “Famous people telling stories about their lives will always be popular.
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