The Celebrity of Memoirs

I have just breezed through 3 books and am now onto the 4th in two weeks. After opening this most recent one, I realized how they're all connected: the "me" ideology. I'm quite certain I'm not the first to notice this, but seriously, but the biggest book deals, box-office sellers, and blog followings are all linked by the idea that someone ("me") thinks some part of their life is compelling for other people in the world. (And yes, I realize that by having a blog, I am in that category of people.) Just to give a few examples, these are the titles that immediately come to mind:

• Julia & Julia: Girl meets cookbook. Girl thinks cooking every recipe in a cookbook and blogging about it will be exciting and helpful to others.
• The $64 Tomato: Man v. garden. Not a new story, but he writes about it anyway.
• Plenty: Couple embarks on an epicurean journey to eat foods grown within $100 miles, and other people are right to be fascinated by their struggles.
• The Unlikely Disciple: College liberal acts as a mole in one of the most fundamentalist and conservative universities in the nation and lives to tell the tale.
• Girl Meets God: A light examination of a young Jewish woman's story of conversion to the Christian faith.
• Under the Tuscan Sun: A woman buys property in a foreign country and writes about her cultural immersion.
• The Year of Living Biblically: One not-so-Jewish man decides to follow the Bible's rules and teachings as literally as possible, partially for the learning process and partially so he can write a book about it!

Clearly, I am fascinated by these "me-ideology" memoirs. By definition, memoirs are a class of autobiography that center on a small piece of a person's life or views, rather than a lifespan, like typical autobiographies. But still, it seems to me like the current trend is first decide to write a book and then decide what to write about. The cultural value lies in having written the memoir, not the context or subject matter of the writing, almost as if there is some celebrity that comes with being published. There may be less forethought than historically speaking, but I am still sucked into it anyway.

Now, back to my book...