Memoirs dead in the wake of Frey? Think again

The Observer’s Choire Sicha looks at what might be a surprising trend considering that A MILLION LITTLE PIECES crashed and burned so spectacularly. Yes, the confessional memoir doesn’t just have legs, it’s propagating further. There’s Tom Sykes (little brother of Plum & Lucy, at left) writing about his boozing days in WHAT DID I DO LAST NIGHT? A DRUNKARD’S TALE; William Cope Myers, a former journalist and the son of Bill Moyers, will publish his own recovery memoir Sept. 25. Earlier this year, another journalist, Jason Leopold, published his own tale of cocaine abuse and Alcoholics Anonymous.

And David Carr’s getting ready to write his own addiction memoir, working the public records on his past – resulting in 100 pages of documents, and conducted 15 interviews, many of which he has also videotaped for his own purposes. “I decided to do this for two reasons,” Carr said of his decision to write the memoir. “One, I have twins going to college and I needed money, and it’s a book I could do while still keeping my job, which I like a lot-that I could report on the margins of my job. And two is that, as I went through everything that I have done-and I’m pretty much kind of a white-boy misdemeanant-and as I went through that and imagined talking about it, there was nothing in that story that I haven’t at some point admitted to someone. But who knows-maybe I’ll come across something that’s too, too either shameful or stupid to own up to. And at that point, the whole conceit of the book is threatened.”

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