What's Needed In Memoir: A Commoner's Touch

Dear Lit Loves,
I stopped by my local Barnes & Noble yesterday and it was eerily quiet in the store.  Granted, a lot of folks around my city are on vacation due to it being the week of/after Easter so I tried not to panic.  The manager of the store, who knows I'm actively attempting to get published, asked me about the latest in publishing.  I told her I haven't been buying anything in my own preferred genre (memoir) lately because I'm not seeing any enticing subject matter.  Seriously, I am not looking for trendy memoir such as how my family and I lived without bread for a year.  Honest to God, sometimes I pick up a book and say aloud, in the store, "How in the HELL did this get published?!"  And no, I'm not likely to read someone's travel memoir about how he/she is phenomenally wealthy and uprooted the entire family for a year to go live in Bulgaria.  WHO does this kind of thing?!  And even though I like mental health memoirs because I have an insanely complex extended family and the Tea Party truly leaves me speechless, I haven't been buying those type of memoirs because many are too similar to Girl, Interrupted.  And God help me if I see one more memoir about some girl/woman who decides she is done with the city and is going to live the simple life on a farm.  Pleaasssee!  Why do the authors of those memoirs often insult the very people with whom they share a community?!  I was reading one memoir, very much like this, and I became so mad at how insulting the author was toward southerners that I literally burned the damn book.  Sorry, guess it was a bit of an emotional reaction.  As we say in the south, "HEY!  INTERSTATE 85 RUNS BOTH WAYS, TURN FREAKIN' NORTH!"  You know what's needed in memoir right now folks?  A commoner's touch.  That's why memoir became popular.  It was due to average joes/janes with seriously compelling stories like The Glass Castle and Liar's Club. 

The Barnes & Noble store manager thought I had some legitimate points.  And then she asked me about the query process.  Oh. Lord. Please.  I recently went to lunch with a group of tech folks that my husband knows.  One marketing rep tells me he is writing a crime saga.  I'm describing the process of how to get an agent and he drops this bomb, "Currently, the manuscript is over five hundred pages."  I almost choked on my sweet tea.  I just wanted to tell him not to even bother with an agent.  Just go directly to self-publishing because I don't know of any literary agent who is willing to take on a new author whose first novel is over 500 pages.  Now, if the guy had been Stephen King- no problem.  My experience with agents has just about sent me over the edge a time or five hundred.  On Querytracker.net the writers often have already formed an opinion of an agent just based on the type of rejections he/she sends or lack of rejections.  It's never encouraging to not receive a response from an agent.  You think, "Well, damn, I wasn't even worth a response."   I know who those agents are and avoid them like the plague.  Then we have the writers who no longer post the actual rejection from the agent.  They just write, "Received the dreaded four words."   And we all know what this means.  It means the usual rejection the agent sends all writers which encompasses the following, "Sorry, not for us."  I stopped sending queries to those agents eons ago. 

Recently, a literary agent wrote on his blog that he feels incredible sadness when he goes to literary conferences and authors pitch memoirs to him.  He said he feels bad that he hurt the author's feelings with his rejection.  And I immediately thought, "Oh, Who The Hell Are You Kidding?!"  You aren't worried about the writer's feelings!  I know, I received a rejection from the same agent to the tune of the following, "I'm sorry, you are not famous; therefore, no one knows who you are.  And since no one knows who you are, I can't represent you."  Does this sound like a person who regrets sending me a rejection?  I THINK NOT!!  Through the agent's writing I finally realized the man truly does not get the memoir genre.  He doesn't even like the memoir genre; therefore, he won't represent the memoir genre.  And He Has Never, Ever Sold A Memoir Manuscript!  Oh for the love of Mother Mary, just stop lising memoir as a genre that you represent.  Easy peasy, dude.

Finally, I tell the Barnes and Noble store manager about my experience with the editors of one particular publishing house.  It was God Awful.  I finally sent an email to the head of the publishing house asking essentially, what gives?  I hadn't received a response from one of his editors in well over five months and another editor had a manuscript of mine for two months and sent a two line rejection.  Yes, this all happened.  TEN MINUTES LATER, I RECEIVE A RESPONSE TO MY QUERY FROM FIVE MONTHS AGO.   Wonder how that happened?!.  It was quite rude and to beat it all, the response did not even address the correct manuscript.   So, no, I'm no longer buying any books from that publishing house.  Nada.  Zip.  No freakin' way.  Take a course on tact and manners  would be my advice, but I won't be buying or endorsing any books from said publishing house. 

Let's hope the news gets better soon because I'm beginning to completely understand why writers are turning to self-publishing and why Amazon is scaring the bejeesus out of the publishing community.

Grace