More women telling their own stories
U of A prof sees memoir gender gap closing
No longer waiting for someone to tell their stories, women are instead putting pen to paper to share them.
So finds a novel Canadian study of memoir, in which autobiographies by non-celebrity female authors were found to outnumber biographies about non-celebrity females by a whopping nine to one.
By contrast, the ratio of autobiographies versus biographies of men’s lives was about equal — a reflection, researchers say, of the genre’s historical focus on the male experience.
“Women are finally seeing their own stories — they’re seeing themselves — on book shelves, and that may explain why some of the memoir boom has happened,” said Julie Rak, the University of Alberta professor who led the study.
“Overwhelmingly, stories in the public realm have been about men and men’s lives … And when there were women, they were absolutely unusual and everyone had to point it out.”
She notes, for instance, that Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, was largely an anomaly upon its 1993 release. The memoir’s success, and ultimate film adaptation, helped demonstrate to the world the power of a provocative female narrative.
“If you put a novelist on TV, you’re left with, ‘Wow, what a great book, how about that plot!’ whereas with memoir, you can ask questions about their lives and experience,” said Rak, who credits Kaysen with helping spark the autobiography craze of the 2000s.
Rak’s study plumbs every book classified as memoir, biography or autobiography over a one-year period (2003, around the start of memoir mania) by top publishing houses. The resulting 168-title sample provided the foundation for her own book, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market.
The paperback, which hit shelves on April 24, is an impassioned defence of the muchmaligned genre, which over the past decade has come to include entries from everyone and her dog (literally: even Paris Hilton’s deceased Chihuahua has one).
“The word narcissism gets thrown around a lot with memoir,” said Rak, who teaches in the Department of English and film studies.
“But in a sense, novels and their focus on individual experience do exactly the same thing. So why is it that creative stories are thought of as being about the world, but stories that are real are not? There’s something more complicated going on than navel-gazing and writing a story to make money.”
Rak instead sees the genre as scaffolding for appreciating human experience — what she dubs an “engine of belonging.”
“It creates a condition for understanding the lives of others, and your own life,” said Rak. “Memoirs provide a connection that’s greater than just you and your situation.”
One of the biggest titles of 2012 was penned by a noncelebrity female author whose tale of self-discovery was so gutting as to inspire Oprah to revive her book club. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild has sold more than half a million copies since its release, and has been optioned for film by actress Reese Witherspoon.
The bad news for aspiring writers — particularly those without high-profile backing — is that U.S. sales data suggest the genre’s golden age is in our rear view.
Although personal memoirs soared by 400 per cent between 2004 and 2008, a spokesperson for Nielsen reports that autobiographies, biographies and memoirs declined 6.2 per cent in 2011 over 2010, and plummeted another 25.9 per cent in 2012. The category last year accounted for just 3.4 per cent of all books sold, at 20.3 million copies.
But Rak, whose grandmother was an avid reader of memoir (she passed away reading Page 4 of a biography of Queen Victoria), is confident there will always be room for poignant personal stories. They’ll just have to fight for shelf space with Kardashian Konfidential.