We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?

NY Times Critic's Notebook: "In 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, desperate for money and terminally ill with cancer, did what countless statesmen and military leaders had done before him: he sat down to write his memoirs. Racing against the clock, he turned out two substantial volumes on his early life and his military experiences in the Mexican and Civil Wars. By any measure, he had a lot to write about and a lot to tell. He produced a classic memoir, as the genre was then understood: important events related by a great man who shaped them. But that was then. Today, Grant's memoirs fall into the same sprawling category as 'Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure,' 'Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age With the New York Yankees' and 'Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy,' to pluck just three titles from the memoir mountain looming in the next month or two. Actually, it's more a plain than a mountain, a level playing field crowded with absolutely equal voices, each asserting its democratic claim on the reader's attention. Everyone has a life, and therefore a story that should be told and, if possible, published. The memoir has been on the march for more than a decade now. Readers have long since gotten used to the idea that you do not have to be a statesman or a military commander - or, like Saint-Simon or Chateaubriand, a witness to great events - to commit your life to print. But the genre has become so inclusive that it's almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material."