Autobiography: General Essay
Autobiography: General Essay
- Susan BaléeSusan BaléeIndependent scholar
Extract
We are living in an autobiographical era, as readers all over America can readily attest. Jay Parini, in his introduction to the Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999), deduces that “the immense interest in this form of writing owes something to a moment when our culture as a whole has turned introspective, interested in (some might say obsessed by) self-definition” (p. 19). According to Paul Gray, writing in an April 1997 issue of Time, memoirs have now replaced novels as the major American publishing product, with hundreds published every year, many by first-time writers. These recent memoirs deal with topics once reserved for fiction—child abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, incest—and some critics wish that fiction is where such “taboo” subjects would stay. Those who deplore the upsurge in self-writing note its emphasis on narcissism and self-pity: one such critic even titled his review of the new memoirs “Read about Why I Love Me and How Much I've Suffered.”
Subjects
- North American Literatures