Everyone seems to be writing a memoir these days, capturing life in the rearview mirror. It’s become a rash of sorts, an open playing field...
Everyone seems to be writing a memoir these days, capturing life in the rearview mirror. It’s become a rash of sorts, an open playing field – from heads of states (Jaswant Singh, Pervez Musharraf) and literary stalwarts (Vikram Seth, Gore Vidal) to porn stars (Jenna Jameson), fame addicts (Paris Hilton) and even those uncertain ‘unauthorised’ ones (Jessica Hines, please raise your hand). This, not counting the several coffee table clunkers dedicated to the Gods of Bollywood! These days, memoirs have been relegated from the dusty back shelves to compete with the newest Harry Potter spouting or chick-lit casualty on the best-seller list. Yes, life suddenly seems hip.
Arising from the Latin ‘memoria’ meaning ‘memory’, memoirs were once picked up mainly for the salacious bits (think: Bill Clinton); today they seem to weigh in with the best of fiction. Maybe the thirst arises from a need for real flesh-and-blood heroes in an increasingly robotic age, or perhaps, the hope of finding the hero within us on reading it. Or maybe Milan Kundera got it all wrong – it’s simply the bearable lightness of being.
“Memoirs are easier to read – they don’t expect a reader to exercise the range of imaginative sympathies that fiction demands for its refulgent enjoyment,” says novelist, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. “In addition, in America, the popularity of therapy and the talk show culture encourages the notion that every individual’s life story is somehow riveting – and this is simply not the case. A lot of people lead extremely boring lives, and what’s worse, they write about their lives with unforgivable dullness,” he states.
“It’s a popular truism that truth is stranger or more fascinating than fiction, but really, fiction is just a way of presenting reality,” explains Rajni George, editor, Random House India. “However, as Suketu Mehta once commented, ‘these days the dramatic value of the real...seems to have overwhelmed our capacity to invent new things’.”
Like Paris Hilton, who duly notes in ‘Confessions of an Heiress’, “The best way for me to tell everyone how to act and feel like an heiress is by doing this book.” Ladies who lunch, time to put those Hermes notebooks to use!
d_farhad@dnaindia.net
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