Place to Place

The American writer William H. Gass once described autobiography as the “vulgar copulation” of history and fiction. Whether he overstated his case or not, there is little doubt that the genre sometimes gets things wrong. Witness Alice Sebold’s Lucky, which sent an innocent man to prison for sixteen years after its publication in 1999, and James Frey’s cancellation over his treatment of “the facts” in A Million Little Pieces, from 2003. Even Frank McCourt, whose 1996 tell‑all, Angela’s Ashes, rocked the publishing world, came under scrutiny when some, including his mother, Angela, called him out for exaggerating his family’s poverty.

Now the memoir market is said to be saturated, and what was once a tsunami of titles is slowing to a trickle. Data from Publishers Marketplace, which covers the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, shows that while book deals for fiction in the year leading up to November 2024 stood at 1,828, deals for...