REAL-LIFE MISERY. READ ALL ABOUT IT!

By Paul Gray

Unlikely as it may seem, some 700 people paid $10 each last week to get into a Manhattan auditorium and sit--or stand--through a panel discussion on "The Memoir Explosion: Novel of the '90s or Just Another Brand of Therapy?" Most attention went to two of the panelists: Frank McCourt, whose best-selling memoir, Angela's Ashes, had just the day before won a Pulitzer Prize for biography, and Kathryn Harrison, whose memoir The Kiss, also a best seller, tells of an incestuous affair between her and her father that began when she was 20. A year ago, hardly anyone in the audience had ever heard of McCourt and Harrison. Now both authors are superstars in U.S. publishing's hottest current enterprise.

Readers have always been interested in behind-the-scene books by the prominent; St. Augustine was on to a good thing when he wrote his Confessions back in A.D. 401. But the success of unhappy stories by the largely or completely unknown is a new and, to many, puzzling phenomenon. Publishers aren't worrying much about why such stuff sells so well; they're too busy trying to acquire and peddle more of it. A ferocious bidding war erupted over the manuscript of a 98-year-old Kansas grandmother that tells of her harsh life with an alcoholic husband; the eventual winning bid topped $1 million.

What is going on here? Are memoirs becoming the substitute for novels, or does their popularity simply indicate a culture sinking ever further into gossip, trivia and terminal narcissism? Last week's panelists in Manhattan addressed these questions, as panelists are prone to do, without answering them. McCourt told the crowd that he considered telling the story of his harsh Irish childhood, the subject of Angela's Ashes, in fictional form. "I attempted it, and it was awful. I am not a novelist."

Harrison, who is a novelist, said she disguised her relationship with her father in her first book, Thicker Than Water. But she disliked the result because "in fictionalizing what really happened, I had been dishonest in a way that became increasingly painful."

This comment suggests that Aristotle was wrong when he assigned a greater worth to imaginative literature than to recitations of real events: "Poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars." Authors have largely sided with Aristotle. When James Joyce decided to write about his harsh Irish childhood, he reinvented himself as Stephen Dedalus and created the imagined worlds of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

The contemporary fascination with real stories raises a question: Just how real are they? McCourt, Harrison and all the wannabes may be telling the truth about their past, but they are also, as Harrison puts it, fictionalizing what really happened. Did McCourt's grandmother really say to him, when he was a small boy, "If 'tis a thing I ever find out you were telling jokes to Jesuits, I'll tear the bloody kidneys outa you"? Did Harrison's grandmother really tell her, once she began crossing her eyes as a child, "They'll get stuck like that if you don't stop"? For those who have trouble remembering what was said to them at breakfast, such long-ago quotations sound like footfalls in the house of fiction.

Will readers tire of this fad after thumbing through the 11th book on anorexia and the seventh expose of transsexual aunts? Publishers, for the moment, are betting on a continuing bull market. There are some 267 million stories in the naked U.S., all of them yearning to be told and sold.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York