A year in the life
Lauren Beckham Falcone has an interesting piece on the Boston Herald site on what she calls Gimmick Lit, a popular new subgenre in the memoir category. Falcone writes: “Gimmick Lit - as in dating everyone who asks you out in the course of a year; trying every one of Julia Child’s recipes for 365 days; dressing up as a man for 18 months — will get you a book deal faster than finding a long-lost Hemingway manuscript.” Though the trend is not exactly new — John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a black man to write his 1959 bestseller, Black Like Me — these “participatory memoirs” have become staples on the U.S. bestseller charts in the last couple of years.
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Read the Boston Herald article
