memoir

Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes.

Sebastian Horsley, whose memoir, published last week, details a past life of drug abuse and encounters with prostitutes, was refused entry to the US Tuesday for reasons of moral turpitude. He was traveling to attend a book party. “God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” Horsley said. The author, it bears saying, is no longer an addict.

Well, prostitution is the oldest profession, they say, and it’s probably one of the more interesting ones. Here are ten top non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes, compiled in honor of the Spitzer scandal.

The really good stories are often true ones, stories of real people that somehow touch us enough to change our lives in some way, or at least make us think deeply about our individual worlds. Here are five memoirs that inspired Marie Arana. Which life stories, if any, have offered you food for thought?

Ever wonder whatever happened to Peggy Sue of Buddy Holly fame? Right now she’s at loggerheads with Mrs. Buddy Holly over the publication of her memoir. Maria Elena Holly claims that the book will tarnish her late husband’s name and harm her own reputation. Peggy Sue Gerron feels she has every right to write her own story. The lines have been drawn.

Because everybody has a story to tell, because everyone has a voyeuristic streak and because misery loves the company of someone more miserable. These are the reasons why memoir is now outselling debut novels and makes up 12.5% of non-fiction deals signed. If they’re good, says one publisher, there can never be too many.

Questions have arisen concerning the factual accuracy in Ishmael Beah’s bestselling novel A Long Way Gone. At issue is the age at which the author says he went to war and the length of time he claims to have been in the Sierra Leone army. His writing instructor says not to worry about such errors because the story is a memoir (!).

The memoir and policy book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West by former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, will be published February 12 by HarperCollins, six days before Pakistan’s postponed parliamentary elections are to take place.

I thought this a great title for a book that “is a savagely funny act of revenge for years spent servicing the travel fantasies of gullible readers.” The author, Chuck Thompson, long-time travel journalist, relates the “dirty little detours” that await real travelers in the real world and demolishes the sugar-coated, dream-fantasy world of travel writing, or travel-porn, as he calls it.

More literary laundry. Former magazine editor Annick Geille has caused a stir in Paris by publishing an account of her ménage-a-trois with Francoise Sagan and the French novelist's boyfriend. Un Amour de Sagan sounds an interesting read—as a representation of the French cultural mythology, if nothing else—but the story has a sad ending for all but its author.