Why do people write memoirs when they aren't all that old?
Megyn Kelly (age 45) is releasing her memoir book this week. Joe Buck, the sportscaster, recently published his own memoir.
These are people that have a lot of life still to live.
My feeling about memoirs is that they should be written by people who are looking back at a full life, not people who are half way through and still have a lot to do and accomplish.
Is memoir-writing for younger people simply a naked money grab? Is this a big ego thing? Why are younger people writing their memoirs when they haven’t done all that much?
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13 Answers
Yes, it is about ego and money.
Frankly, I could not fill a single page, because I can barely remember anything.
Alternatively, a memoir written after one has gone through a stage in one’s life get’s it all down while it is still fresh in the mind.
Maybe they’re just Volume I.
But I’m guessing that it’s because the publishers (marketers) see that there’s a market and they want to catch it while it’s hot.
Well, it’s good to write things down periodically over your lifetime. So many things I would have forgotten had I not written them down. When I die, if anyone cares too, they’ll have to piece my memoirs together from about 50 different sources and 1000 different formats! But it’s all there, if they look hard enough.
Now, if a person has had a very interesting life by the age of 45, and people might be interested in reading about it, then write away.
Perhaps at least some of them believe that irrespective of age their experiences are worth sharing.
Anna Kendrick (actor) just wrote one as well. When I heard this, I thought, “Isn’t she like 12?”
I saw an interview with Anna Kendrick (she’s 31) about her book and thought it was embarrassing.
No offense, Anna, we should still hang out. Call me!
I don’t think they really think about it…
@Jeruba nailed it. It’s about marketing, plain and simple. The idea is pimped to the “star” by his or her publicist, and the project is turned over to some hack “collaborator(s)” to do the actual “writing”. The resulting drivel usually amounts to little more than extended examples of the tiresome nonsense between the covers of those mags and rags littering supermarket checkstands.
Memoirs do not have to be about a whole life. Many of them are written about smaller periods of time within someone’s life. Maybe they had a particularly interesting adolescence. Maybe they had a unique perspective on an interesting moment in history. Memoirs aren’t always written by celebrities, either. Mary Karr, for instance, is a professional writer who has written three popular memoirs about different phases of her life.
I’ve got about 10 of Cecil Beaton’s memoirs/diaries. Each one reflects a different, interesting, time in his life. I enjoy them more than I do some – this is my entire life – books. The detail makes them interesting. I don’t really want the looking-back-life lessons – I want the details.
I am reading a terrific memoir by J.D. Vance called “Hillbilly Elegy”. He’s only in his early 30s and even he says at the beginning of the book that he has no business writing a memoir. But he had something to say, and it’s a wonderful book.
If a young person writing a memoir offends you, then don’t buy it.
Because you never can count that you can remember to tie your shoes after a certain age, much less remember little details.
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