Ouch.

Posted on September 6, 2009

Alirght. So I know authors love to play “most tortured.” Memoirists, especially.

But I’ve read a lot of reviews and commentary later that have prompted me to speak up a lil for our beleaguered Dewey Decimal Class. Things like this comment, posted in the Amazon reviews section for Isabel Gillies’ Happens All The Time, a memoir of the breakdown of her marriage:

“Seems like another rich, privileged ’so called author’ getting a book deal she doesn’t deserve.”

Wow. Ouch and double ouch. The rest of the review is pretty scathing, but something about that one sentence makes me thing that the person who wrote it detested the book, the author, and the whole idea of either one of them existing before she even cracked the cover. I could be wrong, but…”book deal she doesn’t deserve?” Deserve? A book deal?

Oh, honey. I hate to bring the downpour upon any would-be writers out there, but book deals aren’t about talent. They are about marketability. There is no ”earn” here, nor is there any “deserve.” And yes, Isabel probably did get the size of deal she did because she was a tv star before she decided to write. (And no, I don’t know what it was nor do I know her; we were seated at different tables at the last underground Everyone Who’s Ever Written a Book Convention that a few readers seem to think I attend.) Does this mean her book has less merit on its own? (Incidentally, I think not, and especially not in this case. I really liked the book. Tough read, but I couldn’t put it down.)

And conversely, what about the nobody who writes a memoir that STILL becomes a success, regardless of the writer’s non-Hollywood pedigree? Must a book like this automatically have more merit than a piece of Glit Lit? (Yeah, I made that one up too. Not sure about it, may change it. If you have a better term, please do comment.)

Ummm…no. Random books come out all the time and happen to snag on some lucky corner of the market. Doesn’t mean they’re “better”, doesn’t even mean they’re good. And you can’t blame the celebrity machine for their success and seeming heaven-sent fortune. You can blame Jesus, and this country that keeps allowing any old nobody to read and comment on anything at will. Unless you’d really like to change that, why all the anger?

Cause there’s a great deal of it out in the memoir aisles, and not all directed at blond, seven-foot-tall actresses. I read comments and reviews on memoir after memoir, bleeding with the treatment of some reader who clearly picked up the book with claws pre-sharpened, blood boiling with a hefty dose of Who-Does-This-Person-Think-She-IS-Writing-A-Book? Why is HER story so important? Why is her LIFE worth pages and money and space on a bookshelf. WHAT MAKES HER SO G-D SPECIAL?!?!?!

If I may so kindly answer, on behalf of all memoirists (everyone else, duck): Because she (or he) has a book out, and you don’t. Not that you couldn’t. It’s a free country and the presses are open. And if a “nobody” with a “boring” or even “idiotic” life was marketable to some publisher, somewhere, then surely you are, too. But maybe, judging by your comments, you don’t have the patience to work out your story on paper, or the courage to face an audience of people like you.

Because that’s what it takes to be a memoirist. You don’t have to have a Hollywood story. You don’t even have to have a good story, or a well-written story. You can have one that, like Isabel Gillies’, happens every day. But you do have to be tolerant, persistent, and (here’s where the anger thing is a bit of a hairlip), kind.

Yes, you read that correctly. I don’t mean sweet, sappy, fluffy-reviewer kind. I mean you have to see that there is a place in the world, and on the shelf, for all kinds of stories. You have to accept that there’s as much beauty in the ordinary as there’s diamond dust and holographic covers in the Hollywood Hills. And you have to love life and the relentless retelling of it in every stilted, ordinary detail.

That’s how you do it.

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