My two favourite sections of the bookstore are Humour and Biography, although both are riddled with literary landmines. If you can call a "bathroom reader" literary, that is. I will admit to some embarrassment standing in front of a shelf that includes 'Porn for Mommies' – a book filled with glossy photos of men changing diapers and smiling.
The Biography section is no less cringe-worthy. Beween the Winston Churchill epics and the rock star rehab sagas, are hundreds and hundreds of triumph over tragedy memoirs. Your choices in this section are: beating cancer, conquering addiction and/or abuse or escaping the Taliban/Hutus/Polygamists.
As a person who writes personal narrative, I used to get down about the fact that I wasn't adopted by wolves or gang raped by nuns like all the other memoirists. Seriously: trauma sells. I mean, my lowest point wasn't selling crack out of my living room; it was grad school.
While I was writing my book, I considered taking up gas huffing to make myself (and my memoir) a little more interesting. I scoured the want ads for polygamists and distributed my resume to several local pimps. And even though I came close, I didn't even actually get cancer. Damn it.
So I wrote my story the way it was: unique in my own non-traumatic, non-carcinogenic way. And in the process, I learned to accept myself just a little bit more.
Now when I browse the My-Life-Without-Legs stories, I don't envy the poor saps who write them. If anything, I'm a bit bored. That kind of story is becoming cliche. We're an ambulance-chasing culture, only we've seen so many splatterific seven car pileups we're desensitized.
It's time for a new kind of story methinks. One that breaks through our obsession with catastrophe and destruction and looks at personal narrative in a new, surprising way. That is less about what happened to us and more about who we've become. And acknowledges that telling the truth is a creative act...which may or may not involve midgets.
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