‘Each Life Can Teach Us’: Bestselling Author Steven Gaines on Memoir Writing
Why are so many people writing memoirs? Expiation? Ego? Money? Revenge? One reason is that access to social media has given the average citizen the misimpression that people care what they had for lunch. Andy Warhol was wrong when he said in the future everybody was going to be famous for 15 minutes. The future is here, and everybody is famous for 15 seconds, the length of time it takes to write a 140 character Tweet, or to post a vacation photo on Instagram, or catalog moods, movie reviews, and bad affairs on Facebook. The ease of publishing Print on Demand books, and ebooks, has given all of us a shot at being Proust. A while ago I rang…