Table of Contents for
Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market, by Julie Rak

Gratitude

Introduction: Identifying the Memoir Industry

Chapter 1: "More Books!": Publishing, Non-fiction, and the Memoir Boom

Chapter 2: Bookstores, Genre, and Everyday Practices

Chapter 3: Going Public: Selected Memoirs Produced by Random House and HarperCollins

Chapter 4: Exceptionally Public: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I: The Story of a Childhood and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

Conclusion: Citizen Selves and the State of the Memoir Boom

Notes

References

Index

From James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences.

Julie Rak is a professor in the Department of English and
Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author
of Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical
Discourse (2004), the editor of Auto/biography in
Canada (WLU Press, 2005), and co-editor, with Anna Poletti, of
Identity Technologies: Producing Online Selves. Her website can be found at https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home