Memoir Gender Wars

Author Jennifer Weiner has an intriguing piece on her blog about whether memoirs by “dirty white boys” get more favorable treatment than memoirs by women. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’re a dude and you write about, say, smoking pot with your prepubescent son, scoring coke with your daughters asleep in your car, or spewing uncontrollable diabetes-related diarrhea all over your son’s back seat, well then you, sir, have written ‘a bruising survival story,’ or a ‘brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.’

“If you’re a chick who sleeps around and lives to tell (and sell) the tale, you’re greedy, vain and charmless. If you’re a guy who spends nights on end looking at Internet porn and days investing in drug companies that overcharge cancer patients for their cures, then you’re ‘formidably smart.’”

Read the whole piece here. And let us know what you think: Do guys get more favorable treatment than girls when it comes to memoirs?

Good News: Fiction Reading is UP!

This just in from the New York Times and the National Endowment for the Arts: “Fiction Reading Increases for Adults”!

“After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.” See the full story here.

Hurrah!

Announcing the “Building a Book” Program Series

The Writers’ League of Texas opens the book on a new year with “Building a Book,” a yearlong series of monthly programs in which authors and publishing professionals explore how a book evolves.