I spoke to Karen Goldberg Goff of the Washington Times for an article she was writing about all those “stunt memoirs” that have been the rage lately. You know the type—the books where the author does something unusual, often for a set period of time, and then writes a book about the experience. The story ran last week, and I wound up being quoted a few times:
“”Any [fool] can say ‘I am going to live like I am in the Bible’, or ‘I am going to cook everything in this book’… Julie and Julia without Julie Powell wouldn’t have been as interesting.”
D.C. readers were no doubt wondering just what horrible word I must have used that the editors would step in and substitute “fool,” but I think you’ll agree that the sentence reads better when you put the original “schmuck” back in (not to mention that I consistently said “I’m,” not “I am”). I forgot that the word’s actual meaning in Yiddish is somewhat blunter. As for where this trend is going, now that A.J. Jacobs has (with great panache) spent a year following the Bible’s strictures and that other guy is making his family quit using toilet paper? “People are already doing wacky things,” I told Goff. “The key to the books that work, though, is not about the gimmick. It is about the amount of personal reflection and transformation.”