October 2017—Memoir continues as a hot seller for the main body of book buyers in America: women. For the first six months of 2017, BookScan reported sales growth in the category Biography/Autobiography/Memoir—up 8% over sales figures for the same period in 2016. This is good news for writers; interest in personal narratives remains strong.

However, as a simple search of “memoir” on Amazon will show, the field also remains flooded—nearly 150,000 titles as of this writing. Consequently, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish yourself and your story. The five big publishers in America continue to lean toward celebrity status for memoir. Some of the biggest deals to date came just this year. Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, and James B. Comey are just three.

Most memoir writers must then focus their attention on smaller publishing houses, or embrace self-publishing, both of which are excellent options. But no matter what route you choose to publication, you still must find ways to make your story stand out.

Here’s one idea about how to do that: Consider linking your experience to current events—for example, scientific or environmental issues. If you can tell the story of both the larger issue, and your experience, then your memoir becomes about more than just you, and it will draw a larger audience.

Consider this posting about memoir and science writing published on NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog that looks at three memoirs published in 2017, which combine science related issues—”fat, cancer and gender,” as the author Barbara J. King says—and a parallel personal story.

Or, check out these recently published titles that are as much about the environment and the natural world, as they are about the writer—Fire in the Heart: A Memoir of Friendship, Loss, and Wildfire; or Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone.

What a careful look at your life experience can reveal, about the conundrum of publishing, is that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or . . . publish your memoir!

Can you find links to larger cultural issues for your memoir? Let me hear about them.

The memoir writing lesson of 2017 leaps out at us from Annie Proulx’s acceptance speech given last week (mid-November) at the National Book Awards ceremony. Proulx (Brokeback Mountain, The Shipping News, and Barkskins, among other books) was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

While Proulx’s words were obviously aimed at a larger message about America and about American life, I encourage writers of memoir to hear the craft imperative embedded in her words: readers of stories today, perhaps more than ever, want an ending that brings satisfaction, or completion, shall we say, a place to rest and take solace, find peace, a spark of happiness, or at least bittersweet understanding.

No matter how at odds that may be with the raging truth of the world you are creating on the page, memoirists who crave readership need to grasp the zeitgeist thrumming through the land, and in this “Kafkaesque time, as Proulx named it, readers need one true thing: an ending that gives hope.

You can read Proulx’s words below. (Note: The final lines are Proulx quoting from the poem “Consolation” by poet Wisława Szymborska.)

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“Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…     I thank the National Book Award Foundation, the committees, and the judges for this medal. I was surprised when I learned of it and I’m grateful and honored to receive it and to be here tonight, and I thank my editor Nan Graham, for it is her medal too.

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response “likes” or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.

To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil. The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with landscapes, with shore erosions, with water situations.

Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.

The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it “consolation.”

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
but only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If he happened on something like that,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’s had enough with dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggle to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction,
with its micro-scales.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurried to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
ride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow tossed into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly in the last.

Thank you.”