Prince Harry, Ruby Tui, Noelle McCarthy, Hayley Holt: The rise and rise of memoirs

Memoir writers, clockwise from top left: Shayne Carter, Noelle McCarthy, Mohamed Hassan, Prince Harry, Emma Espiner, Charlotte Grimshaw, Hayley Holt, Ruby Tui. Photos / Ebony Lamb, Dean Purcell, Apple TV, Jenna Todd, Jane Ussher, Michael Craig

The memoir is hot. A celebrity “tell-all” can deliver stratospheric sales – like Prince Harry’s Spare, which sold more than three million copies in its first week alone. In New Zealand, where our celebrities play sports other than polo, memoirs like Ruby Tui’s Straight Up and Hayley Holt’s Second Chances dominate the non-fiction chart.

Mary Karr, author of the acclaimed memoirs The Liars’ Club (1995) and Lit (2010), as well as the bestselling The Art of Memoir, believes that “memoir as a genre has entered its heyday”, but for centuries “it was an outsider’s art – the province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars.” By the 90s memoirs started selling big in the United States, fuelled by the internet and what New Yorker writer Daniel Mendelson calls the “greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet”. Publishers began trawling blogs to find writers with no filters and a ready-made audience.

While Karr likes the “anybody-who’s-lived-can-write-one aspect” of memoirs, the late William Gass disagreed. In a 1994 rant in Harper’s Magazine, he decried what he saw as a narcissistic craze. There is “nothing more difficult”, he wrote, “than knowing who you are and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world”.

But catastrophe, as publishers discovered, sells a lot of books. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling Prozac Nation, published in 1994 when the author was 27, opened the floodgates for addiction and trauma memoirs – drugs, alcohol, sexual assault – and within the decade James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was published, selling almost four million copies, famously endorsed and then denounced by Oprah when parts of the book were revealed as fraudulent.

Like short story collections and novels, essay collections are a harder sell than memoirs. Twenty years ago, “essays were considered box office poison” in the US, Philip Lopate writes in his introduction to The Contemporary American Essay: they were often disguised as “theme-driven memoirs”. These days, he argues, that isn’t the case, though in a much smaller market like New Zealand, an essay collection by a non-celebrity may struggle. The Best American Essays series has appeared every year since 1986. Our equivalent, the lively Tell You What anthologies, edited by Susanna Andrew and Jolisa Gracewood, lasted just three years.

Recent essay collections by New Zealanders include Mohamed Hassan’s How to be a Bad Muslim and The Girl from Revolution Road by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, as well as the recent debut by Emma Espiner, There’s a Cure For This. But memoirs retain their siren call. The must-read for book clubs in 2021 was Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir The Mirror Book, a ruthless dissection of her literary family; the must-read book of 2022 was Grand by broadcaster Noelle McCarthy, about her relationship with an alcoholic mother, and with alcohol itself.

McCarthy won the E.H. McCormick Best First Book General Non-Fiction for Grand in this year’s Ockham NZ Book Awards. Shayne Carter’s Dead People I Have Known, Diana Wichtel’s Driving to Treblinka, and Māori Boy by Witi Ihimaera are all memoirs that have won the non-fiction category in the past.

“Much of the point of memoir writing is to make the private public,” says Adam Dudding, a best-first-book Ockhams winner for My Father’s Island, the story of the “complicated personality” of his literary-editor father and the “resulting family dramas”. Dudding gave his mother right of veto over “all the private stuff”. She requested no changes, but he still felt anxious when the book was published.

Like Dudding, McCarthy was acutely aware of what she was revealing in Grand about other people’s lives, and of differences in memory and point of view. At the end of Grand, she notes that the children in her family “all have different Mammys; whereas I had for most of my life an antagonist, my siblings had a staunch advocate, a late-night confidante, and an irrepressible partner in crime”.

Espiner also experienced the tensions around interpretation. “I had complete control over what was written,” she says, but family members and colleagues did not. “Not everyone will be happy with the way I’ve told this story, and I have to live with that.” This suggests the high stakes of this particular game. “In some ways,” writes Mary Karr, “writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”

McCarthy’s memoir paints a bigger picture, of “what was happening in Ireland at the time, socially and politically”, and the way her mother’s life was shaped by “a state that took a particular attitude to women’s bodies and women’s sexuality for pretty much most of the twentieth century.”

In a similar way, Espiner’s personal essays investigate the flaws of our straining healthcare system, and Guyon Espiner’s The Drinking Game, published earlier this year, draws on his own experiences to examine the way our culture enables, promotes and revolves around alcohol.

Still, the heart of the memoir remains personal. McCarthy notes how hard it is “to get past that sense of washing dirty laundry publicly. There’s a reflexive shame that comes with that.” But she’s also experienced the power of memoir, to confront that very feeling of shame. Readers talk to her about “their mothers, their grandmothers, the secret adoptions, or alcoholism, or trauma in their families”, she says. “Grand is a jumping-off point for a conversation about these things that can be really hard to talk about, even within – or especially within – families.”