This is yet another case of me pulling a book off the shelf at the library and thinking it is a good idea. Honestly, I don’t know why I read this yuppie tripe, I should know better. The very quotes on the cover warn me that this will be a stupid book, and yet I read it anyway. Perhaps I just like to torture myself?

Anyway, what I learned in the process of reading this book is that I really prefer memoirs/biographies about people who actually, you know, did things. I don’t want to read a stupid self indulgent pile of crap about “oh, my terrible childhood, my mother was a bitch,” I want to read a book about walking on the moon, developing new surgical techniques, discovering a new color. I don’t want to read about a life that is ultimately average, dribbled out in bits and pieces like thin, watery vomit.

This was just vain, self indulgent, and ultimately pointless. And yet, this kind of crap gets turned out by the millions every year, and people eat it up. People love to read books about nothing, apparently. I find that both fascinating and horrifying. I don’t understand why this whole “tortured life memoir” genre is so very trendy. Is it that people with even more boring, average lives want to read books like this and secretly imagine themselves with a mysterious tortured past? Or do people want to be smug about their own boring, average childhoods? This also seems to be a style from a very specific generation; people born in the 1950s and 1960s seem to think that they are entitled to write stupid memoirs about their stupid lives, and that their stupid memoirs will sell.

The disgusting thing is that they do.

Demographics:

Her Last Death, by Susanna Sonnenberg. Published 2008, 273 pages. Memoir.