memoirs are SO HOT RN 📚🔥

A look at the state of non-fiction writing, how our love of social media (and gossip) fuel the industry, and other thoughts in an interview with writer Sarah LaBrie.

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Ask me on two different days, at two different hours, and I will likely give you two different answers to the question of if people are reading. Book sales are down! Gen Z and younger can’t read! Book sales are steady! Gen Z and Millennials are obsessed with reading! The idea of reading itself is becoming more varied, given the myriad formats and that the “idea” of reading is sometimes watching just TikTok. This is why it’s hard to say what the reality is of reading: I can write this on a site like this, which sees continued growth as this little newsletter sees similar gains, all as an ecosystem of The Cut semi-rage-bait essays pop up every month, stopping time so we can all get together at our internet lockers to bitch about whoever the dumb-bitch-of-the-day is. And they’re almost always a writer!

This is to say again: the state of writing is complicated, which I think any writer who isn’t Stephen King or Sally Rooney will tell you. Actually, scratch that: fiction writing is complicated — because everything in the aforementioned is based in nonfiction, memoir, the real. Like me, the success (i.e., public’s opinion) of fiction or nonfiction depends on the year: at this exact moment, fiction (with fantasy and thrillers leading sales) edges out nonfiction (with memoirs and self-help leading sales). “Romantasy” fiction and “narrative memoir” are unsurprisingly en vogue, which is probably why the top book of the moment by almost 15K units is the Ina Garten memoir. Again: it’s all mixed, everything up and down, in and out. Such are trends! Such is life “in these times.”

And yet, if I had to bet on a winning product in the book world, I wouldn’t put my money on fiction: I’d put it on non-fiction. Outside of Gillian Flynn and the long tale of a masterpiece (SUE ME.) like Gone Girl — and discluding the Colleen Hoover sphere and fantasy scrapple like House of 50 Shades of a Court of Midnight Thrones Chronicles — it’s the non-fiction books that go on to really infiltrate culture, shaping the discourse in ways that speak to our lived realities. See the careers of writers like Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle, and so many more (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jenny Odell, Samantha Irby), who moved beyond “writers” to everything from media empires to intellectual powerhouses. Fiction writers can and do continue to shape culture but it’s nonfiction writers, with their continued drip of essays and articles via myriad publications and entertainment entities, that keep them present and able to continue conversations that go beyond books.

This is also to say: to me, the memoir is perhaps the format of the 2020s in that it’s simultaneously confessional, tmi, and gossipy while also being therapy, self-help, and communal experiences. Like a neverending Instagram caption, the reason why memoirs feel so “now” is because they put so much of what we read online between two hard covers: it is the current zeitgeist personified. This is something that I started thinking about earlier in the year and, after getting an email from friend and writer Sarah LaBrie that she had a memoir coming out later in the year, I emailed back with an idea: what if we had a chat about this world and the “state” of memoirs? What is it like to put yourself out there in such a personal way? Why do we think people are so attracted to these books? Are memoirs indeed the format du jour? Or is that just my theory?

Over a few weeks, Sarah and I volleyed questions and answers back and forth in a Google doc to talk about these subjects, specifically through the lens of her own work, No One Gets to Fall Apart (out Oct 22), a vulnerable exploration of her relationship with her mother and her mother’s mental illness — and how this relationship can open a window into exploring your own mental health along with the mental health of all in your family and in your community. It’s a book that I had trouble taking myself out of as Sarah does such an excellent good job of looking at the unsightly without flinching, written in such an effortless and approachable way that made me want to start writing nonfiction more seriously. Like the book, our conversation spans many subjects — and ideally can help elucidate the state of bookish things (along with things like trendy items like ketamine therapy, #Booktok, and navigating life as a writer).

KRF: We first started chatting about chatting back in April, as I was curious about how the memoir — as a form — somehow feels both very timeless yet hyper-modern, becoming a go-to as far as legitimizing stories, of making experiences more real for oneself and the world (versus, say, cramming bits of life into Instagram captions). Given that you are so accomplished in so many different writing forms — Fiction! Short stories! Screenplays! Libretto! — I’m curious about your “take” on this form. What drew you to it? How did this form win out over, say, a fictionalized version?

SLB: I was trying really hard to write a different novel called The Anatomy Book before I started writing No One Gets to Fall Apart and in retrospect, writing that novel was slowly killing me. When No One Gets to Fall Apart started to come together, the feeling of writing it vs. the novel was just night and day. Like, the novel was the wrong thing and the memoir was the right thing. And it kept feeling like that. Some days I hated the novel and some days I thought it was good, but I never thought the memoir wouldn’t be good eventually, even at the beginning when it was still very rough. I just decided to follow that feeling. 

KRF: I love that. I feel like so much of what writing is is indeed “following that feeling,” which is what many a writer and professor may mention but is rarely what we actually do. We all have that novel! That thing that kills us of our own making! Our novels drive us mad but we still wake up and do them, despite it not being natural or easy or fun. Inevitably, waiting in the wings is another form or expression that’s easier (“easier”) and, in ways, more automatic for you. This is also to say: I don’t think enough creatives play with their talent, entering different forms and mediums, trying something new to see what works with them but also what might resonate more with others. Zooming out a little, do you think this is maybe why non-fiction culture seems to be booming? It’s not just personal social media posts but the personal essay economy, as perfected by The Cut, which is multiplied by TikTok’s storytimes like “Who TF Did I Marry?” all the way to monologuing podcasts like that of Emma Chamberlain and Brittany Broski and even the world of documentary. Is this form more relatable? Aspirational? Or is it the medium of the moment because we’re just supremely nosy and love drama?

SLB: It’s easy and fun to read a personal essay with a zippy headline that you can text your friends or post about. Reading Cut essays or watching Netflix documentaries is inherently social. They’re written to be consumed and processed online. Reading fiction requires patience and the kind of isolated attention phones make it impossible to sustain. So I guess that’s one answer. 

Also, though, life in general feels scary and the stakes of reality feel high. It can be hard to tune anxiety out for long enough to get invested in fiction. But I also feel like not reading novels because I’m too anxious and distracted is making me a worse person, so I don’t know. Sorry - I know you didn’t mean this as a referendum on fiction vs. nonfiction but it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. 

KRF: No, I get that! I feel like, with books in general (and the culture of books), that there are these expectations that one HAS to read fiction to be accepted as a reader, that literary fiction is akin to health food and reading other things is just not-that. At least that’s always my feeling, which is maybe more a criticism of The Book Industry™ itself and the literary world at large. That said, zooming in a lil further, how do you think No One Gets to Fall Apart will fit into this economy of people seeking out “real human stories,” whether out of relatability or nosiness?

SLB: On the relatability tip, I think a lot of people have dealt with abuse at the hands of loved ones and don’t know how to think about it. It’s confusing because my mom hurt me a lot but she also loved me. I thought that love meant I wasn’t allowed to think about the bad things she did. Conversely, the fact that I have a good life now sometimes made me think, “well, maybe what she did—beating me, throwing away all my stuff, punishing me all the time for no reason, saying truly terrible things to me in endless rants, getting rid of our family pets— wasn’t that bad.” But the thing is, it was that bad. Fighting against my home life as a kid is why I have the life I have today. I hope other people in that situation find No One Gets to Fall Apart. I hope it makes them feel seen. 

I also want anybody who wants to write about depression to know they can tell any kind of story about it. “Trauma” doesn’t have to be this untouchable, tragic thing. You can use it to build whatever you want, including a narrative that feels hopeful and optimistic or funny. 

But more generally, I think most people are feeling pretty lonely right now, and I want to do anything and everything I can to push back against that loneliness. In this instance, that was writing a book about myself, but that can also look like many other things. 

KRF: Now that is exactly a sort of bullseye on culture: we all have our own traumas, big and small, which seem to be colliding (or we’re post collision) with ideas of entertainment and capitalism, that we have to sort of rank them, judge them, make them ingestible — which is ultimately dehumanizing and creates a sort of infrastructure for loneliness, for being in your little Better Help pod to figure it out with your digital avatar therapist. (Speaking from my own experience navigating these things, obviously.) Another thing that I think is in the room, to your point, is that everyone is dealing with something and, for many creatives, it can feel like “trauma” is untouchable, or that it itself is a genre. Your book does such an excellent job of offering this duality, or even a daughter’s dilemma of holding the love a parent had with the things they did that were just not-good. It’s difficult to square and, in so many ways, really points to the very adult realization that your parents are people too — and they’re far from perfect, just like us. This is less about your specific book but I think so many memoir breakouts are reflections on relationships with parents, on childhoods that were formed by these imperfect persons who offered love and its opposite. I’m thinking of things like Tara Westover’s Educated, Jenette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, Martha McPhee’s Omega Farm, Laura Trujillo’s Stepping Back From The Ledge, and many more. Maybe we all need to do collective therapy on our (Boomer-ish) parents but what do you think that “this” being a category says about readers? About (Millennial) culture? Is this a contemporary gesture or simply life continuing to be documented, as it always has been?

SLB: In 2016 I was a fellow at Yaddo. One of the other fellows was a legendary performance artist who taught at, I think, Columbia. We were all out at dinner and he was saying something about how his students always want to create work about their mothers. He was adamant in telling them not to do that. A different Fellow, a young Russian novelist whose work I really loved, said she did the opposite. That she encourages her students to write about her mothers. That opened up a door for me. I felt pulled to write about my mother, but I was also afraid to, because it didn’t feel like real writing to me. It felt sentimental. Unprofessional. But if this writer, who basically had the career I wanted, was openly writing about her mother and telling her students to do the same, I could do that too. 

And when you think about it, it’s so obvious. Everyone has a mother. Even if you don’t know your mother, you were definitely born. And we all have feelings about that. It’s possible that publishing was resistant to this universality in the past. Maybe because it seems too easy. But it seems like, thanks to the books you mention, plus Crying in H Mart, a wall has come down. My guess is, yes, it’s always been documented privately. But now maybe readers and writers are slightly less afraid of sentimentality and messy emotion than we used to be and we’re more willing to share this work, because it’s becoming clear that other people want and need to read it. (Also it’s obvious that so many celebrated literary fiction novels are actually 100% memoir, but people aren’t ready for that conversation.)

KRF: Crying in H Mart! Duh!! Obviously!!! I do think that we are deep in the throes of a very 2020s culture of “I love mess,” thanks to our being chronically online and over-sharing and generally being constant snoops in each other’s lives. When writers (or any artist, really) actually go there, allowing people to be the voyeurs that they know themselves to be, to essentially indulge in what could be called “gossip” but is actually a dialoguing with larger culture and, in ways, captures a very of-the-now thinking and gesturing that is manifesting in books. It’s really interesting! What your book does so well is something that is another big subject of our times: you explore your relationship with your mother, her personal mental health issues and how they impact your life — but also your own journey with mental health issues. There are times where you discuss worries that your mother’s depression and schizophrenia may manifest in your own life, that these might be the things that you inherit, that you take with you into your life. This was what really jumped out at me about your work because, as the “I love mess” culture suggests, people are interested in these items because they too have concerns that they have or are these relatives that are written about, that this is a form of exposure therapy. How did you navigate writing in your own mental health journey? I know for many people sharing problems with a therapist is enough — but sharing your family’s struggles? And your own? That has to be an experience. How did you “protect your peace,” as people say?

SLB: For some reason this question was incredibly hard for me to answer! I think it’s because I don’t think about my emotions at all while I’m writing, because it’s almost like the writing replaces the self. A long time ago I heard the poet Eileen Myles say “find what you love and let it kill you” and I took it literally. I would have written that first failed novel, The Anatomy Book, into the ground and let it bury me if external forces hadn’t interceded. I don’t care about how I’m feeling when I’m writing, because I come second to the work. Like, the manuscript replaces me. Finishing things is what brings me peace. I also meditate and do therapy and exercise, which helps, but reaching goals is what makes me feel better.

Oh, also, since this is a trend newsletter, I did ketamine therapy! Very trendy. Very helpful. Very expensive. It created a space in my brain between emotional stimulus and response, so instead of reacting immediately, I was able to think. That was wonderful, but it didn’t last. 

KRF: Wait. I need to hear more about ketamine therapy!!! How did you discover this? What was the process like? And why didn’t it last? That’s wild!!

SLB: I’d been on fluoxetine for a few years (since my mom’s diagnosis) and I was afraid of the long term physical effects,  so I just quit, cold turkey. That turned out to be a very bad idea. I remembered a friend’s husband had gone to a Ketamine therapist in Venice and I thought that might be a way to get out of the black hole I was in and  avoid going back on meds. It was the first thing I spent real money on after I started working in TV. The process is unsettling because you’re literally tripping during therapy and all the subconscious stuff you’re working through burbles up to the surface. It can be a lot. Plus, the sessions were three hours long. I had to take Lyfts across town both ways because I couldn’t drive after. You have to really trust your therapist because you’re in an incredibly vulnerable position, and that was hard for me at first because I’ve had a lot of awful therapists. But she was great - her name is Lauren Taus - and what I got out of it was the understanding that everything really is all in my head. I grasped that at a truly visceral and physical level, not an intellectual one. Every emotion I have starts out in my body, not my brain. Ketamine gave me an artificially well-regulated nervous system and that made my life better in every way. The effects wear off, like any drug, and it costs too much to do forever, but remembering what that felt like can be helpful sometimes when I’m spiraling. 

KRF: This is…one of the more elucidating looks into these types of therapies! I’ve heard about these things, but never actually, like, got the logistics — so thanks for going there!! Speaking of, I think a lot of writers (myself included) definitely would agree with what you’re saying about “the manuscript replaces me,” in that we can go to and write about pretty severe things that may have happened in our own life — but it’s the writing, it’s the work, it’s the story. Yes, it may have been literally something that happened to us but the act of writing and, in ways, the writing itself is a sort of channel. You cannot log something if you’re too self-aware of the logging, you know? To get a little meta — especially since you’re starting what will likely be an ongoing conversation about this book, your writing, and yourself given it’s debut very soon — how are you protecting yourself in the roll out of the book? I mean this in the sense that, unlike fiction (in ways), a writer can become a sort of target for other people’s stories, for them to dump their baggage onto in search of answers — and that is a lot to put on another person, particularly a stranger. Are there conversations that are already arising in the rolling out that you’re noticing, a la “trends” as far as how people interact with the work? What has been most surprising thus far?

SLB: Often, when people read drafts of the book during the editing and production process,  they would tell me they also had a mentally ill relative or some other direct experience with psychosis or schizophrenia. I want people to find the language to tell these stories - to me, to other people, to the world. It’s the only way the people we love who are sick will ever get the resources they need. Maybe that’s been the most surprising thing so far. How grateful I am for those moments of real life connection, even if it’s just people reaching out online. There was nothing therapeutic or cathartic for me about writing this book - I mean I wrote it to be a book in the world that other people could read, not as a form of therapy or self-expression. I have an MFA in fiction and I’m a TV writer and I deployed all the techniques I’ve gained over the course of my career to make it smart, readable and something others would want to finish once they started. That was my main focus and the thing I worried about the most. So it’s wild how cathartic I’m finding it now when people understand what I’m talking about and say “Oh wow that happened to me, too. Here’s my story.” I did not expect that and I wasn’t looking for it but it feels so nice to be understood. 

KRF: Now this is refreshing because I feel like, so often, at least in my view, writing like some visual arts and cinema are made without the creators just saying that they meant for it to be made and encountered versus some lofty “It’s art.” item that often drives me crazy. I think this also gets at another trend that I think about a lot: are people reading? This is maybe, say, forever evergreen but every other week some story emerges about how Gen Z aren’t capable of reading books anymore while the industry itself feels like its constantly threatening its own being. Like movies, it seems like “safe bets” are being made, so that only economic powerhouses are pursued. But unlike movies — or perhaps exactly like movies, in the face of social media — reading as an act seems to be corroded by the lure of technology. What do you think about this? Is this something you’re concerned about, as an author or reader? Or do you think things will just become more niche, that readership will always continue in the way that visual art didn’t disappear because of the television? I’m in the latter camp but, like most things in culture, I think it’s going to widen the space between cultures, creating even more intellectual haves and have nots (not that that is bad, but I do think there will be increasingly different categories of speaking, more code switching, etc.).

SLB: Stuff goes where there is already more stuff. It’s physics and it’s also why capitalism works like that - money gets concentrated in places where there is already a lot of money. Attention goes to the handful of books and movies with an immense amount of corporate sponsorship behind them. But then everything gets too top-heavy and shatters and the whole process starts over again. I think we’re at the beginning of a fracturing time right now after a period of consolidation. People are sick of being forced to digest slop or whatever the market tells them is “good” and it’s leading to a huge change in the way we consume media. That change feels chaotic (no one knows where to get honest recs for legitimately good books right now! I subscribe to many streaming services but still somehow never have the right one for what I want to watch!) but eventually it’ll settle into something that makes sense, maybe in a form we can’t yet imagine. 

KRF: I mean this is exactly it: there’s so much slop, the market is simultaneously strapped and tapped, and we’re all just trying to have a good time, both as readers and artists. It’s hard out there! And — to your point and to make matters stranger — there’s somehow so few ways to wade through the tides of this much shit. That’s something I think about a lot and have written about a lot: how are we dealing with this excess culture, as there are fewer reliable places to get recommendations? My Apple Music does a really bad job at suggesting music — and that’s supposedly a “really good” example of the technology promised to us as far as curation. Something I see and, in ways, a newsletter like this plays into is our entering the age of the curator and critic, who are going to rise up in many a new form. I’m thinking less LitHub (which is a great platform, etc. — but I visit it with not-a-lot of frequency) and more TikTok persons and literary journals turning into new media, a la #BookTok. Combined with recs from respected sources that I follow and magazines with solid book sections (I generally like what The Guardian and New York Times are doing.) I’ve created a perfect soup of curating the curators, being my own algorithm. It’s hard to do but I think that is somehow the solution, which gets me out of the PR-driven [insert buzzy book] cycle and into stranger spaces, to books old and new that I wouldn’t have been privy to if I didn’t always have an ear open. While none of these are exactly “niche,” I did find Greta & Valdin and Housemates and The Centre all via social chatter that I qualified against reviews (and Bookmarks, which is honestly my most frequented literary site). Again: none of this is novel (Ha!) but I think it very much reflects these times and the scrappiness that is required to combat capitalism and the too-much-ness of these times. How do you navigate this? I feel like it’s simultaneously easier and harder for writers, which is probably why so many friends are asking me (and likely you too) for recs.

SLB: Whoa, The Centre looks so up my alley. Not sure how I missed that one–which I guess is what we’re talking about. I’m the target reader for that book, and I should know about it! Anyway, a lot of the best critics have migrated to Substack and Patreon. There was a period when I was trying to subscribe to all the ones I loved. But $5 a month for every individual writer I want to read plus every podcast I want to listen turned out to not be sustainable for me. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to navigate this. One thought I have is that people are going to go back to IRL events. Where I live, there’s a monthly gathering called Silver Lake Reading Club. I used to live down the street from a bookstore called Skylight that has a thriving community. I just got a bunch of great recs from my friend, the writer Steph Cha, who reads everything. I’ve slowly been getting to know librarians and booksellers as I prepare for my book roll out, and it’s just been a total delight. I love these people. So maybe it’ll be a sort of mass migration off the web and towards personal relationships. What do you think?

KRF: You know, I think that’s exactly it because — despite publications — it ultimately goes back to the one-on-one, as books are a very intimate experience. I ran a book club for years and years, which was part sharing thoughts on a book, part drinking a lot of wine, and part sharing books recommendations. It’s so obvious sometimes, that we have to go all the way around the world — inventing platforms, subscribing to voices, going to places like bookstores — just to find yourself at the start, with other people. It definitely plays into larger trends of seeking third spaces and the larger loneliness epidemic, which things like book clubs (Or reading clubs! Which I love!) and bookstores solve so well. Writers, whether they admit it or not, seem to have this sewn into them as we work in such a solitary state which, for me at least, has me constantly rearing to meet new people, to spend time not in my book or my writing, to really live in the presence of others, to get a bit of sunshine from them instead of trying to make my own. Also? Living life with others gives us more to talk and write about, more experiences to share. And isn’t that lovely? I’m trying to do more of that as I seem to have fallen into the traps of becoming more divorced from others, which ultimately means being divorced from myself. What’s your advice for anyone trying to get out there, both as a reader and a writer? I feel like having a book released forces you to do that, to get out and talk to people about some really personal stuff, whether you’re in the mood to or not.

SLB: I have a weird genetic defect where four of my baby teeth never fell out and there weren’t any adult teeth behind them. I’m supposed to get them replaced with implants, but I keep putting off the surgery. This morning I was telling my dentist the reason I can’t do it yet is because of the publicity cycle around this book. I’m guesting on a handful of podcasts, which means I have to talk to people all day long. After I said that, he looked at me weird, and kind of paused, and I realized how I sounded - because obviously most people have to talk to people all day long every day for their jobs. But I forgot! I forgot that it’s not normal to just sit in a room by yourself for weeks or months at a time. That was a wake-up call. That the writing life is not normal even though I’m used to it. So I guess my advice to myself to combat that, which anyone can take or leave, is, go out and write in public sometimes. Maybe it’s as simple as writing GET OUT OF THE HOUSE on a post-it note and sticking it on top of your laptop so you see it first thing. 

Find out more about Sarah here and catch her book, No One Gets to Fall Apart, out October 22.

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