Genre memoirs stink. I don’t mean the books themselves. Plenty of them do stink, surely, just like any other kind of book. But some of them are great. The past decade has seen successful memoirs mined from war, Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead; celebrity: Keith Richard’s Life; addiction: Mary Karr’s Lit; and cancer: Joshua Cody’s [Sic]—to name a few. My gripe is more general: The fact that memoirs are so often written and edited and marketed with the idea of fitting into a genre does a disservice to readers, writers, and writing.
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