He hired a ghostwriter.
The lure of memoir, whether in text or scrapbook form, remains mighty as ever. And now it has a twist.
Now we're outsourcing.
For a fee, professional craftspeople and writers will take the ephemera of your life and turn them into an archival keepsake that's a cut above that old-fashioned scrapbook you've been meaning to make. Listings for such services abound, from postings on the Internet to ads in the New Yorker.
"There is a tremendous interest in memoir," says Foster Winans, who founded the nonprofit Writers Room of Bucks County. "The family is scattered, and the tradition of oral history is gone," he says.
Not everyone is happy about the alternative.
"I think it's the most curious phenomena in the world," says author Richard Wertime, whose book, Citadel on the Mountain, won the first James Michener prize for memoir in 2000.
It was his own life story, and he wrote it himself.
Outsourcing one's memoirs, Wertime says, sounds "self-defeating and demonstrates a lack of patience and self-esteem."
Wertime, who directs graduate school programs at Arcadia University in Glenside, will teach a (write-your-own) memoir class at the Penn Writers Conference on Sunday.
An outsourced memoir?
"To me," he says, "it's an oxymoron."
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It's not as if ghostwriters were a novelty. Witness the raft of celebrity tell-alls, such as the recently released Tommyland, by Tommy Lee, Pamela Anderson's ex, and written with the aid of Anthony Bozza.
But it wasn't until memoirs by not-so-famous writers, whose experiences resonated with universal themes, began to top the literary charts that lots of other regular folks got the idea that they might have a memoir inside themselves, too.
Such surprise hits as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes inspired legions of nobodies.
