Why Reading Literature Beats Reading Memoirs

Some of the world's best writers wrote literature. Name one (or five or ten) best known for memoirs.

Snob appeal—it's high art.

It's a form better suited for dealing with ideals: love, beauty, fear, hatred, self-sacrifice, loyalty, loneliness, or anything.

Because it can deal with the most fundamental aspects of human nature, it can—if we allow it—move us more deeply.

Just because it's fiction doesn't make it less real. If it's plausible, if it could have happened, if it reflects real people, in a sense it is real—at least in our minds.

Literature, perhaps better than other art forms, can create whole new worlds to explore, wonder at, and learn from.

The deep involvement certain people experience while reading it sometimes creates hyper-aware states, heightened senses of reality, the knowledge that something is more real than real. (I thought I was the only one that felt this until I read otherwise.)

It can be a perfect escape from reality into a better (or worse) world that makes sense (or doesn't) and is predictable (or not) and that you can still control (to the extent that you can stop reading at any point), unlike memoir, which is supposedly real world, like it or not (that can't be escaped).

Literature is a type of surrender to the author whom you must trust and/or respect to get the most out of. I've heard it described as, “allowing someone to get in your head and mess around with your thoughts.” This can be a good thing, opening our minds to new possibilities, loosening our restrictive, tight grip on our everyday humdrum lives, shaking us into doing the right thing or changing our attitudes or beliefs.

Because it's art and fiction, anything can happen. This creates a built-in tension and excitement as to what comes next and how it all will play out. For the vast majority of memoirs you already know the ending (the author's bio is on the jacket, famous guy everyone knows, etc.)

Literature can be memoir in disguise—names changed only, events rearranged for clarity, characters who are composites of several people, etc. This can make a good story better.

It can make history come alive in ways impossible in memoir because, duh, we weren't around back then. Some of the world's best literature deal with events, personalities, eras, etc. poorly depicted in history, which tends to be overly obsessed with men, wars, politics, and dates.

Has way more latitude to experiment and push the bounds of what is considered literary. Encompasses far more varieties of stories and styles than memoir, which are nearly always first-person past tense narratives.

Writing quality on average is superior because writers write literature, usually after many years (or decades) of practice. Anyone famous enough can get a memoir published, although truth be told, many if not most have ghost writers doing 90+% of the writing. Although ghost writers can be excellent story tellers, their writing tends to be predictable, formulaic, and uncreative—for the obvious reason that they're working for money, not art. And their clients (famous people) want to look good, sympathetic, reformed, etc. and as if they wrote the whole thing. And the publisher, who paid a huge advance, wants to recoup and make tons of money. When's the last time you read a bleak, despairing memoir? Or a difficult-to-read one that you had to struggle through but that contained powerful hidden truths? Literature are full of such reads.

Memoirs nearly always focus on the individual as opposed to a country, home town, war, or higher principle or topic such as racism, genocide, colonialism, etc., which literature handily addresses.

Memoirists are the ultimate exhibitionists—talk about show-all (figuratively) and tell-all! They must have healthy egos to want to share the gory details to avoid coming across as charismatic cult leaders out for your money and souls.

All too often, memoirists skewer enemies in “I'm just describing the truth” details while powder-puffing their own faults and roles as sweet innocent victims who eventually overcome through heroism, determination, and grace. Or, they show their poor choices and resultant downward slide to the sewers and how they eventually crawl out after some pivotal moment that changes their lives forever. (i.e., Dumb-ass finally does well, the profound lesson being: Don't be dumb!)

The memoir genre have too many missing gaps: the average Mary or Joe (or Keane or Ashley) student who doesn't die tragically of cancer, the diligent accountant who saves the state a few thousand dollars by going paperless, the unremarkable teacher who goes largely unnoticed despite the best of intentions, the imperfect yet good-enough mother who saves money by conserving water, the unrepentant jerk loser-asshole boss, philanderer, drunk, gambler, shyster, slacker, hypocrite, lazy bum, etc. Namely, people you see every day. I suppose, reasonably enough, that people don't want to read such uninspiring or downer material so don't expect a publisher to pick one up anytime soon—unless yet another Big Name A-hole Star decides looking even worse is worth the extra $$$s 'cause he or she wants to switch to a more expensive recreational drug.