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    Women and the Great American Memoir

    Posted Wednesday, March 04, 2009 11:13 AM | By Kerry Howley
    As Meghan points out, until recently “most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers.” But what about that “recently?” Allow me to suggest one minor culprit from my perch at Iowa: the rise of literary memoir. At the moment when it became plausible for a woman to write about major social issues in the context of a novel, writing mostly about one’s own history became massively marketable. We saw a convergence of gender norms and literary fashion; women had long been told that they could write competently about the domestic sphere, and suddenly literature that took family life as central was exactly what publishers wanted. American women could do what the culture assumed they were best suited for (and let’s not forget that our first national best-seller was a woman-authored memoir) while collecting a six-figure advance.
        
    I don’t mean to denigrate literary memoirs or suggest that there is something small about taking a single life as a subject. But I do see the women around me devoting a tremendous amount of talent and creative energy to the crafting of memoir, and I wonder where that energy would go if we did not live in the age of Mary Karr.

    I agree that we’re defining the ambitious novel in a suspect and narrow way—sprawling, thick—but I do not like the idea that male authors dominate the genre we are so defining. Major publishers don’t sell books; they sell “packages.” If a publishing house believes that it cannot market a woman writer as a credible author of an "ambitious" book, it won’t buy the book. This seems to me a case in which the implicit biases of the audience shape the market in a potentially ugly manner.
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